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 other half of the problem. You have got to believe in literature against the incredulity of your practical neighbours and against the indifference of the world. You have got to believe in it, furthermore, not as a means of escape from Main Street, not as a refuge from your practical neighbours—not this at all. The task is to frame a defense for it which will decisively remove it from the list of the luxuries and the superfluities of life, and which will give it the unquestioned status of bread and butter, plows, rails, chemicals, and gunpowder. And so I intend as far as possible to abandon the high poetic justification of letters, and to attempt establishing their importance by a plain matter-of-fact consideration of their utility. I shall, however, employ the word utility in a somewhat more fundamental sense than that which is ordinarily attached to it, and I shall touch upon certain elementary philosophical matters. Contrary to the opinions of many editors and publishers, this will not be a deterrent to the Main Street mind. There is nothing at the present time which Main Street so hungrily craves as a philosophy.

So far as I know, the philosophers have never discovered any thoroughly satisfactory final object for human activity, except happiness.