Then I shall roughly synthesise them,
summing up my personal philosophy or natural religion; then I
shall describe my startling discovery that the whole thing had
been discovered before. It had been discovered by Christianity.
But of these profound persuasions which I have to recount in order,
the earliest was concerned with this element of popular tradition.
And without the foregoing explanation touching tradition and
democracy I could hardly make my mental experience clear. As it is,
I do not know whether I can make it clear, but I now propose to try.
My first and last philosophy, that which I believe in with
unbroken certainty, I learnt in the nursery. I generally learnt it
from a nurse; that is, from the solemn and star-appointed priestess
at once of democracy and tradition. The things I believed most then,
the things I believe most now, are the things called fairy tales.
They seem to me to be the entirely reasonable things. They are
not fantasies: compared with them other things are fantastic.
Compared with them religion and rationalism are both abnormal,
though religion is abnormally right and rationalism abnormally wrong.
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