there is a thing called knowledge of the world, which people don’t have until they are middle-aged. its something that can’t be taught to younger people, because its not logical and doesn’t obey laws which are constant. it has no rules. only, in the long years which bring people to the middle of life, a sense of balance develops. you can’t teach a baby to walk by explaining the matter to it logically – they have to learn the strange poise of walking by experience. in some way like that, you can’t teach a young person to have knowledge of the world. they have to be left to the experience of the years. and then, when they’re beginning to hate their used body, they suddenly find that they can do it. they can go on living – not by principle, not by deduction, not by knowledge of good and evil, but simply by a peculiar and shifting sense of balance which defies each of these things often. they no longer hope to live by seeking the truth – if young people ever do hope this – but continue henceforth under the guidance of a seventh sense. Balance was the sixth sense, which they won when they first learned to walk, and now they have the seventh one – knowledge of the world. the slow discovery of the seventh sense, by which both men and women contrive to ride the waves of a world in which there is war, adultery, compromise, fear, stultification and hypocrisy – this discovery is not a matter of triumph. the baby, perhaps, cries out triumphantly: “I have Balance!” but the seventh sense is recognized without a cry. we only carry on with our famous knowledge of the world, riding the queer waves in a habitual, petrifying way, because we have reached a stage of deadlock in which we can think of nothing else to do. and at this stage we begin to forget that there ever was a time when we lacked the seventh sense. we begin to forget, as we go stolidly balancing along, that there could have been a time when we were young bodies flaming with the impetus of life. its hardly consoling to remember such a feeling, and so it deadens in our minds. but there was a time when each of us stood naked before the world, confronting life as a serious problem with which we were intimately and passionately concerned. there was a time when it was of vital interest to us to find out whether there was a God or not. obviously the existence or otherwise of a future life must be of the very first importance to somebody who is going to live their present one, because their manner of living it must hinge on the problem.