and humanity
made it," he said of the philosophy he discovered, "and it made me."

He had begun in boyhood, as we have seen, by realizing that the world
as depicted in fairy tales was saner and more sensible than the world
as seen by the intellectuals of his own day. These men had lost the
sense of life's value. They spoke of the world as a vast place
governed by iron laws of necessity. Chesterton felt in it the
presence of will, while the mere thought of vastness was to him about
as cheerful a conception as that of a jail that should with its cold
empty passages cover half the county. "These expanders of the
universe had nothing to show us except more and more infinite
corridors of space lit by ghastly suns and empty of all that was
divine."

These people professed that the universe was one coherent thing;
but they were not fond of the universe. But I was frightfully fond of
the universe and wanted to address it by a diminutive. I often did
so; and it never seemed to mind. Actually and in truth I did feel
that these dim dogmas of vitality were better expressed by calling
the world small than by calling it large. For about infinity there
was a sort of carelessness which was the reverse of the fierce and
pious care which I felt touching the pricelessness and the peril of
life. They showed only a dreary waste; but I felt a sort of sacred
thrift. For economy is far more romantic than extravagance. To them
stars were an unending income of halfpence; but I felt about the
golden sun and the silver moon as a schoolboy feels if he has one
sovereign and one shilling.

These subconscious convictions are best hit off by the colour and
tone of certain tales. Thus I have said that stories of magic alone
can express my sense that life is not only a pleasure but a kind of
eccentric privilege. I may express this other feeling of cosmic
cosiness by allusion to another book always read in boyhood,
"Robinson Crusoe," which I read about this time, and which owes its
eternal vivacity to the fact that it celebrates the poetry of limits,
nay, even the wild romance of prudence. Crusoe is a man on a small
rock with a few comforts just snatched from the sea: the best thing
in the book is simply the list of things saved from the wreck. The
greatest of poems is an inventory. . .

I really felt (the fancy may seem foolish) as if all the order and
number of things wer