G. K. Chesterton's Blog

tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34226622011-04-21T17:21:05.766-07:00G. K. Chesterton's BlogWhat if G.K. Chesterton had a blog? <br><br> These quotes from his many works lack the pungent relevance they once had when Chesterton engaged the world he knew with great wit and wisdom; but perhaps this is the next best thing. <br><br> Well, actually, I suppose the next best thing would be to engage our own world in like manner, as well as we can, and with all the resources we can muster -- a task G.K. would surely have encouraged.Minute Particularshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01675244716897112864noreply@blogger.comBlogger961100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3422662.post-1088734911837818892004-07-01T19:21:00.000-07:002004-07-01T19:21:51.836-07:00

Whenever you hear much of things being unutterable and indefinable and impalpable and unnamable and subtly indescribable, then elevate your aristocratic nose towards heaven and snuff up the smell of decay. It is perfectly true that there is something in all good things that is beyond all speech or figure of speech. But it is also true that there is in all good things a perpetual desire for

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[A] few people have ventured to imitate Shakespeare's tragedy. But no audacious spirit has dreamed or dared to imitate Shakespeare's comedy. No one has made any real attempt to recover the loves and the laughter of Elizabethan England. The low dark arches, the low strong pillars upon which Shakespeare's temple rests we can all explore and handle. We can all get into his mere tragedy; we can all

Minute Particularshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01675244716897112864noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3422662.post-1078002281102888622004-02-28T13:04:00.000-08:002004-02-28T13:06:46.530-08:00

A man cannot be wise enough to be a great artist without being wise enough to wish to be a great philosopher. A man cannot have the energy to produce good art without having the energy to pass beyond it. A small artist is content with art; a great artist is content with nothing except everything. ~~ Heretics

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Of real sensational journalism, as it exists in France,in Ireland, and in America, we have no trace in this country. When a journalist in Ireland wishes to create a thrill, he creates a thrill worth talking about. He denounces a leading Irish member for corruption, or he charges the whole police system with a wicked and definite conspiracy. When a French journalist desires a frisson there is a

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Here is a statement clearly and philosophically laid down which we can only content ourselves with flatly denying: 'The fifth rule of our Lord is that we should take special pains to cultivate the same kind of regard for people of foreign countries, and for those generally who do not belong to us, or even have antipathy to us, which we already entertain towards our own people, and those who are

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Science is a grand thing when you can get it; in its real sense one of the grandest words in the world. But what do these men mean, nine times out often, when they use it nowadays? When they say detection is a science? When they say criminology is a science? They mean getting outside a man and studying him as if he were a gigantic insect: in what they would call a dry impartial light, in what I

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But what we suffer from to-day is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert

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"... By no stretch of fancy can the human mind connect together snuff and diamonds and wax and loose clockwork." "I think I see the connection," said the priest. "This Glengyle was mad against the French Revolution. He was an enthusiast for the ancien régime, and was trying to re-enact literally the family life of the last Bourbons. He had snuff because it was the eighteenth century luxury; wax

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One of my first journalistic adventures, or misadventures, concerned a comment on Grant Allen, who had written a book about the Evolution of the Idea of God. I happened to remark that it would be much more interesting if God wrote a book about the evolution of the idea of Grant Allen. And I remember that the editor objected to my remark on the ground that it was blasphemous; which naturally

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Every human being has forgotten who he is and where he came from. We are all blasted with one great obliteration of memory. We none of us saw ourselves born; and if we had it would not have cleared up the mystery. Parents are a delight; but they are not an explanation. The one thing that no man, however adventurous, can get behind is his own existence. Lunacy and Letters

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I believe what really happens in history is this: the old man is always wrong; and the young people are always wrong about what is wrong with him. The practical form it takes is this: that, while the old man may stand by some stupid custom, the young man always attacks it with some theory that turns out to be equally stupid. Illustrated London News (via Varenius)

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In one of the most brilliant and amusing of Mr. Sinclair Lewis's recent books there is a passage which I quote from memory, but I think more or less correctly. He said that the Catholic Faith differs from current Puritanism in that it does not ask a man to give up his sense of beauty, or his sense of umour, or his pleasant vices (by which he probably meant smoking and drinking, which are not

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Since the modern world began in the sixteenth century, nobody's system of philosophy has really corresponded to everybody's sense of reality: to what, if left to themselves, common men would call common sense. Each started with a paradox: a peculiar point of view demanding the sacrifice of what they would call a sane point of view. That is the one thing common to Hobbes and Hegel, to Kant and

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A bird is active, because a bird is soft. A stone is helpless, because a stone is hard. A stone must by its own nature go downwards, because hardness is weakness. The bird can of its nature go upwards, because fragility is force. In perfect force there is a kind of frivolity, an airiness that can maintain itself in the air.... Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly. This has always

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Going mad is the slowest and dullest business in the world. I have very nearly done it more than once in my boyhood, and so have nearly all my friends, born under the general doom of mortals, but especially of moderns; I mean the doom that makes a man come almost to the end of thinking before he comes to the first chance of living. But the process of going mad is dull, for the simple reason that

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What the denouncer of dogma really means is not that dogma is bad; but rather that dogma is too good to be true. That is, he means that dogma is too liberal to be likely. Dogma gives man too much freedom when it permits him to fall. Dogma gives even God too much freedom when it permits him to die. That is what the intelligent sceptics ought to say; and it is not in the least my intention to deny

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Very few of us ever see the history of our own time happening. And I think the best service a modern journalist can do to society is to record as plainly as ever he can exactly what impression was produced on his mind by anything he has actually seen and heard on the outskirts of any modern problem or campaign. Though all he saw of a railway strike was a flat meadow in Essex in which a train was

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The question of whether miracles ever occur is a question of common sense and of ordinary historical imagination: not of any final physical experiment. One may here surely dismiss that quite brainless piece of pedantry which talks about the need for "scientific conditions" in connection with alleged spiritual phenomena. If we are asking whether a dead soul can communicate with a living it

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We have all heard people say a hundred times over, for they seem never to tire of saying it, that the Jesus of the New Testament is indeed a most merciful and humane lover of humanity, but that the Church has bidden this human character in repellent dogmas and stiffened it with ecclesiastical terrors till it has taken on an inhuman character. This is, I venture to repeat, very nearly the reverse

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What modern people want to be made to understand is simply that all argument begins with an assumption; that is, with something that you do not doubt. You can, of course, if you like, doubt the assumption at the beginning of your argument, but in that case you are beginning a different argument with another assumption at the beginning of it. Every argument begins with an infallible dogma, and

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A vast amount of nonsense is talked against negative and destructive things. The silliest sort of progressive complains of negative morality, and compares it unfavorably with positive morality. The silliest sort of conservative complains of destructive reform and compares it unfavorably with constructive reform. Both the progressive and the conservative entirely neglect to consider the very

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But I think the main mistake of Mr. Wells's philosophy is a somewhat deeper one, one that he expresses in a very entertaining manner in the introductory part of the new Utopia. His philosophy in some sense amounts to a denial of the possibility of philosophy itself. At least, he maintains that there are no secure and reliable ideas upon which we can rest with a final mental satisfaction. It will

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The House of Christmas There fared a mother driven forth Out of an inn to roam; In the place where she was homeless All men are at home. The crazy stable close at hand, With shaking timber and shifting sand, Grew a stronger thing to abide and stand Than the square stones of Rome. For men are homesick in their homes, And strangers under the sun, And they lay on their heads in a foreign land

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The task of modern idealists indeed is made much too easy for them by the fact that they are always taught that if a thing has been defeated it has been disproved. Logically, the case is quite clearly the other way. The lost causes are exactly those which might have saved the world. If a man says that the Young Pretender would have made England happy, it is hard to answer him. If anyone says

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It might be stated this way. There are certain sequences or developments (cases of one thing following another), which are, in the true sense of the word, reasonable. They are, in the true sense of the word, necessary. Such are mathematical and merely logical sequences. We in fairyland (who are the most reasonable of all creatures) admit that reason and that necessity. For instance, if the Ugly

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In the whole world one thing still threatened Carthage, and that was Carthage. There still remained the inner working of an element strong in all successful commercial states, and the presence of a spirit that we know. There was still the solid sense and shrewdness of the men who manage big enterprises; there was still the advice of the best financial experts; there was still business government;

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My point is that the world did not tire of the church's ideal, but of its reality. Monasteries were impugned not for the chastity of monks, but for the unchastity of monks. Christianity was unpopular not because of the humility, but of the arrogance of Christians. Certainly, if the church failed it was largely through the churchmen. But at the same time hostile elements had certainly begun to

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. . . the principle of democracy, as I mean it, can be stated in two propositions. The first is this: that the things common to all men are more important than the things peculiar to any men. Ordinary things are more valuable than extraordinary things; nay, they are more extraordinary. Man is something more awful than men; something more strange. The sense of the miracle of humanity itself

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There is at the back of all our lives an abyss of light, more blinding and unfathomable than any abyss of darkness; and it is the abyss of actuality, of existence, of the fact that things truly are, and that we ourselves are incredibly and sometimes almost incredulously real. It is the fundamental fact of being, as against not being; it is unthinkable, yet we cannot unthink it, though we may

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But it must be admitted that writers, like other mendicants and mountebanks, frequently do try to attract attention. They set out conspicuously, in a single line in a play, or at the head or tail of a paragraph, remarks of this challenging kind; as when Mr. Bernard Shw wrote: "The Golden Rule is that there is no Golden Rule"; or Oscar Wilde observed: "I can resist everything except temptation";

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There is a popular philosophical joke intended to typify the endless and useless arguments of philosophers; I mean the joke about which came first, the chicken or the egg? I am not sure that properly understood, it is so futile an inquiry after all. I am not concerned here to enter on those deep metaphysical and theological differences of which the chicken and egg debate is a frivolous, but a

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The vast mass of humanity, with their vast mass of idle books and idle words, have never doubted and never will doubt that courage is splendid, that fidelity is noble, that distressed ladies should be rescued, and vanquished enemies spared. The Defendant

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A permanent disadvantage of the study of folk-lore and kindred subjects is that the man of science can hardly be in the nature of things very frequently a man of the world. He is a student of nature; he is scarcely ever a student of human nature. And even where this difficulty is overcome, and he is in some sense a student of human nature, this is only a very faint beginning of the painful

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The last few decades have been marked by a special cultivation of the romance of the future. We seem to have made up our minds to misunderstand what has happened; and we turn, with a sort of relief, to stating what will happen--which is (apparently) much easier. The modern man no longer presents the memoirs of his great grandfather; but is engaged in writing a detailed and authoritative

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But it is one thing to conclude that Catholicism is good and another to conclude that it is right. It is one thing to conclude that it is right and another to conclude that it is always right. I had never believed the tradition that it was diabolical; I had soon come to doubt the idea that it was inhuman, but that would only have left me with the obvious inference that it was human. It is a

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Catholic doctrine and discipline may be walls; but they are the walls of a playground. Christianity is the only frame which has preserved the pleasure of Paganism. We might fancy some children playing on the flat grassy top of some tall island in the sea. So long as there was a wall round the cliff's edge they could fling themselves into every frantic game and make the place the noisiest of

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Like all healthy-minded prophets, sacred and profane, I can only prophesy when I am in a rage and think things look ugly for everybody. And like all healthy-minded prophets, I prophesy in the hope that my prophecy may not come true. For the prediction made by the true soothsayer is like the warning given by a good doctor. And the doctor has really triumphed when the patient he condemned to

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But there is one thing that I have never from my youth up been able to understand. I have never been able to understand where people got the idea that democracy was in some way opposed to tradition. It is obvious that tradition is only democracy extended through time. It is trusting to a consensus of common human voices rather than to some isolated or arbitrary record. The man who quotes some

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I do not know for certain why St. Thomas was called the Angelic Doctor: whether it was that he had an angelic temper, or the intellectuality of an Angel; or whether there was a later legend that he concentrated on Angels--especially on the points of needles. If so, I do not quite understand how this idea arose; history has many examples of an irritating habit of labelling somebody in connection

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I was conscious of some atmosphere, still and yet bracing, that I had met somewhere in literature. There was poetry in it as well as piety; and yet it was not poetry after my particular taste. It was somehow at once solid and airy. Then I remembered that it was the atmosphere in some of Wordsworth's rural poems; which are full of genuine freshness and wonder, and yet are in some incurable way

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The mass of men have been forced to be gay about the little things, but sad about the big ones. Nevertheless (I offer my last dogma defiantly) it is not native to man to be so. Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial. Melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and fugitive frame of mind; praise should be the

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We have all heard people say a hundred times over, for they seem never to tire of saying it, that the Jesus of the New Testament is indeed a most merciful and humane lover of humanity, but that the Church has hidden this human character in repellent dogmas and stiffened it with ecclesiastical terrors till it has taken on an inhuman character. This is, I venture to repeat, very nearly the reverse

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Now it is a terrible business to mark a man out for the vengeance of men. But it is a thing to which a man can grow accustomed, as he can to other terrible things; he can even grow accustomed to the sun. And the horrible thing about all legal officials, even the best, about all judges, magistrates, barristers, detectives, and policemen, is not that they are wicked (some of them are good), not

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Minute Particularshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01675244716897112864noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3422662.post-778798332002-06-17T23:42:00.000-07:002002-06-17T23:42:38.000-07:00

The weak point in the whole of Carlyle's case for aristocracy lies, indeed, in his most celebrated phrase. Carlyle said that men were mostly fools. Christianity, with a surer and more reverent realism, says that they are all fools. This doctrine is sometimes called the doctrine of original sin. It may also be described as the doctrine of the equality of men. But the essential point of it is

Minute Particularshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01675244716897112864noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3422662.post-777101432002-06-13T13:08:00.000-07:002002-06-13T13:08:54.743-07:00

Opening my newspaper the other day, I saw a short but emphatic leaderette entitled `A Relic of Medievalism'. It expressed a profound indignation upon the fact that somewhere or other, in some fairly remote corner of this country, there is a turnpike-gate, with a toll. It insisted that this antiquated tyranny is insupportable, because it is supremely important that our road traffic should go very

Minute Particularshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01675244716897112864noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3422662.post-776547722002-06-12T07:51:00.000-07:002002-06-12T07:51:57.490-07:00

But in the modern world we are primarily confronted with the extraordinary spectacle of people turning to new ideals because they have not tried the old. Men have not got tired of Christianity; they have never found enough Christianity to get tired of. Men have never wearied of political justice; they have wearied of waiting for it. What's Wrong with the World

Minute Particularshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01675244716897112864noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3422662.post-774296662002-06-06T12:29:00.000-07:002002-06-06T12:29:15.190-07:00

The moral is that a certain sort of person does exist, to whose glory [the Fool] this article is dedicated. He is not the ordinary man. He is not the miner, who is sharp enough to ask for the necessities of existence. He is not the mine-owner, who is sharp enough to get a great deal more, by selling his coal at the best possible moment. He is not the aristocratic politician, who has a cynical

Minute Particularshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01675244716897112864noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3422662.post-773310432002-06-04T07:22:00.000-07:002002-06-04T07:22:54.020-07:00

. . . it is enough to say that unless we have some doctrine of a divine man, all abuses may be excused, since evolution may turn them into uses. It will be easy for the scientific plutocrat to maintain that humanity will adapt itself to any conditions which we now consider evil. The old tyrants invoked the past; the new tyrants will invoke the future evolution has produced the snail and the owl

Minute Particularshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01675244716897112864noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3422662.post-772922002002-06-03T09:45:00.000-07:002002-06-03T09:45:27.000-07:00

It is the sacred stubbornness of things, their mystery and their suggestive limits, their shape and special character, which makes all artistic thrift and thought. The Coloured Lands

Minute Particularshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01675244716897112864noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3422662.post-771967782002-05-31T14:06:00.000-07:002002-05-31T14:06:34.966-07:00

There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person. Nothing is more keenly required than a defence of bores. When Byron divided humanity into the bores and bored, he omitted to notice that the higher qualities exist entirely in the bores, the lower qualities in the bored, among whom he counted himself. The bore, by his starry

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The only two things that can satisfy the soul are a person and a story; and even a story must be about a person. There are indeed very voluptuous appetites and enjoyments in mere abstractions like mathematics, logic, or chess. But these mere pleasures of the mind are like mere pleasures of the body. That is, they are mere pleasures, though they may be gigantic pleasures; they can never by a

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The man who makes a vow makes an appointment with himself at some distant time or place. The danger of it is that himself should not keep the appointment. And in modern times this terror of one's self, of the weakness and mutability of one's self, has perilously increased, and is the real basis of the objection to vows of any kind. A modern man refrains from swearing to count the leaves on

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I cannot understand the people who take literature seriously; but I can love them, and I do. Out of my love I warn them to keep clear of this book. It is a collection of crude and shapeless papers upon current or rather flying subjects; and they must be published pretty much as they stand. They were written, as a rule, at the last moment; they were handed in the moment before it was too late,

Minute Particularshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01675244716897112864noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3422662.post-768872682002-05-23T09:31:00.000-07:002002-05-23T09:31:44.020-07:00

But it is best perhaps to take in illustration some daily custom we have all heard despised as vulgar or trite. Take, for the sake of argument, the custom of talking about the weather. Stevenson calls it "the very nadir and scoff of good conversationalists." Now there are very deep reasons for talking about the weather, reasons that are delicate as well as deep; they lie in layer upon layer of

Minute Particularshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01675244716897112864noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3422662.post-768410032002-05-22T07:36:00.000-07:002002-05-22T07:36:43.913-07:00

If a man has flung away bad ideas he has shown his sense, but if he has flung away good ideas he has shown his genius. He has proved that he actually has that over-pressure of pure creativeness which we see in nature itself, "that of a hundred seeds, she often brings but one to bear." Dickens had to be Malthusian about his spiritual children. Critics have called Keats and others who died young "

Minute Particularshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01675244716897112864noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3422662.post-767991952002-05-21T07:42:00.000-07:002002-05-21T08:18:23.000-07:00

As soon as I had clearly in my mind this conception of something solid in the solitary and unique character of the divine story, it struck me that there was exactly the same strange and yet solid character in the human story that had led up to it; because that human story also had a root that was divine. I mean that just as the Church seems to grow more remarkable when it is fairly compared with

Minute Particularshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01675244716897112864noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3422662.post-767581712002-05-20T07:54:00.000-07:002002-05-21T07:05:09.000-07:00

It may be admitted that the man amassing millions is a bit of an idiot; but it may be asked in what sense does he rule the modern world. The answer to this is very important and rather curious. The evil enigma for us here is not the rich, but the Very Rich. The distinction is important; because this special problem is separate from the old general quarrel about rich and poor that runs through the

Minute Particularshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01675244716897112864noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3422662.post-766582422002-05-17T07:09:00.000-07:002002-05-17T07:09:29.873-07:00

The most ancient of human institutions has an authority that may seem as wild as anarchy. Alone among all such institutions it begins with a spontaneous attraction; and may be said strictly and not sentimentally to be founded on love instead of fear. The attempt to compare it with coercive institutions complicating later history has led to infinite illogicality in later times. It is as unique as

Minute Particularshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01675244716897112864noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3422662.post-766231282002-05-16T09:07:00.000-07:002002-05-16T09:07:59.693-07:00

It is customary to complain of the bustle and strenuousness of our epoch. But in truth the chief mark of our epoch is a profound laziness and fatigue; and the fact is that the real laziness is the cause of the apparent bustle. Take one quite external case; the streets are noisy with taxicabs and motorcars; but this is not due to human activity but to human repose. There would be less bustle if

Minute Particularshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01675244716897112864noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3422662.post-765693702002-05-15T00:17:00.000-07:002002-05-15T00:17:02.673-07:00

That peril is that the human intellect is free to destroy itself. Just as one generation could prevent the very existence of the next generation, by all entering a monastery or jumping into the sea, so one set of thinkers can in some degree prevent further thinking by teaching the next generation that there is no validity in any human thought. It is idle to talk always of the alternative of

Minute Particularshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01675244716897112864noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3422662.post-765292642002-05-14T00:59:00.000-07:002002-05-14T00:59:22.076-07:00

Anarchy is that condition of mind or methods in which you cannot stop yourself. It is the loss of that self-control which can return to the normal. It is not anarchy because men are permitted to begin uproar, extravagance, experiment, peril. It is anarchy when people cannot end these things. It is not anarchy in the home if the whole family sits up all night on New Year's Eve. It is anarchy

Minute Particularshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01675244716897112864noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3422662.post-764980352002-05-13T08:33:00.000-07:002002-05-13T08:34:09.000-07:00

I have never managed to lose my old conviction that travel narrows the mind. At least a man must make a double effort of moral humility and imaginative energy to prevent it from narrowing his mind. Indeed there is something touching and even tragic about the thought of the thoughtless tourist, who might have stayed at home loving Laplanders, embracing Chinamen, and clasping Patagonians to his

Minute Particularshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01675244716897112864noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3422662.post-764054912002-05-10T11:51:00.000-07:002002-05-10T11:51:51.950-07:00

The Thomist movement in metaphysics, like the Franciscan movement in morals and manners, was an enlargement and a liberation, it was emphatically a growth of Christian theology from within; it was emphatically not a shrinking of Christian theology under heathen or even human influences. The Franciscan was free to be a friar, instead of being bound to be a monk. But he was more of a Christian,

Minute Particularshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01675244716897112864noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3422662.post-763566212002-05-09T13:30:00.000-07:002002-05-09T13:30:41.146-07:00

There is a shrewd warning to be given to all people who are in revolt. And in the present state of things, I think all men are revolting in that sense; except a few who are evolting in the other sense. But the warning to Socialists and other revolutionaries is this: that as sure as fate, if they use any argument which is atheistic or materialistic, hat argument will always be turned against

Minute Particularshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01675244716897112864noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3422662.post-760801562002-05-02T07:40:00.000-07:002002-05-02T07:40:35.000-07:00

It is admitted, one may hope, that common things are never commonplace. Birth is covered with curtains precisely because it is a staggering and monstrous prodigy. Death and first love, though they happen to everybody, can stop one's heart with the very thought of them. But while this is granted, something further may be claimed. It is not merely true that these universal things are strange; it

Minute Particularshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01675244716897112864noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3422662.post-760020022002-04-30T08:02:00.000-07:002002-04-30T08:02:12.910-07:00

The modern evil, we have said, greatly turns on this: that people do not see that the exception proves the rule. Thus it may or may not be right to kill a murderer; but it can only conceivably be right to kill a murderer because it is wrong to kill a man. If the hangman, having got his hand in, proceeded to hang friends and relatives to his taste and fancy, he would (intellectually) unhang the

Minute Particularshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01675244716897112864noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3422662.post-759644462002-04-29T08:27:00.000-07:002002-04-29T08:28:09.000-07:00

Now before I set about arguing these things, there is a cloud of skirmishers, of harmless and confused modern sceptics, who ought to be cleared off or calmed down before we come to debate with the real doctors of the heresy. If I sum up my statement thus: "Eugenics, as discussed, evidently means the control of some men over the marriage and unmarriage of others; and probably means the control of

Minute Particularshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01675244716897112864noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3422662.post-758624712002-04-26T14:29:00.000-07:002002-04-26T14:29:51.396-07:00

Now, that specialists are valuable for this particular and practical purpose, of predicting the approach of enormous and admitted human calamities, nobody but a fool would deny. But that does not bring us one inch nearer to allowing them the right to define what is a calamity; or to call things calamities which common-sense does not call calamities. We call in the doctor to save us from death;

Minute Particularshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01675244716897112864noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3422662.post-758138422002-04-25T10:00:00.000-07:002002-04-25T10:00:25.280-07:00

As a fact, there is no shred of evidence to show that those who have had sad experiences tend to have a sad philosophy. There are numberless points upon which Dickens is spiritually at one with the poor, that is, with the great mass of mankind. But there is no point in which he is more perfectly at one with them than in showing that there is no kind of connection between a man being unhappy and a

Minute Particularshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01675244716897112864noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3422662.post-757699502002-04-24T08:19:00.000-07:002002-04-24T08:23:35.000-07:00

Exaggeration is the definition of art. That both Dickens and the Moderns understood. Art is, in its inmost nature, fantastic. . . . Dickens overstrains and overstates a mood our period does not understand. The truth he exaggerates is exactly this old Revolution sense of infinite opportunity and boisterous brotherhood. And we resent his undue sense of it, because we ourselves have not even a due

Minute Particularshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01675244716897112864noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3422662.post-757320852002-04-23T09:32:00.000-07:002002-04-23T09:32:51.946-07:00

Much of our modern difficulty, in religion and other things, arises merely from this: that we confuse the word "indefinable" with the word "vague." If some one speaks of a spiritual fact as "indefinable" we promptly picture something misty, a cloud with indeterminate edges. But this is an error even in commonplace logic. The thing that cannot be defined is the first thing; the primary fact. It

Minute Particularshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01675244716897112864noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3422662.post-757042672002-04-22T15:59:00.000-07:002002-04-22T15:59:02.213-07:00

It is not natural to see man as a natural product. It is not common sense to call man a common object of the country or the seashore. It is not seeing straight to see him as an animal. It is not sane. It sins against the light; against that broad daylight of proportion which is the principle of all reality. It is reached by stretching a point, by making out a case, by artificially selecting a

Minute Particularshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01675244716897112864noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3422662.post-756293992002-04-20T14:11:00.000-07:002002-04-20T14:11:20.740-07:00

Minute Particularshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01675244716897112864noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3422662.post-755917082002-04-19T10:47:00.000-07:002002-04-19T10:47:56.000-07:00

. . . it was a very special idea of St. Thomas that Man is to be studied in his whole manhood; that a man is not a man without his body, just as he is not a man without his soul. A corpse is not a man; but also a ghost is not a man. The earlier school of Augustine and even of Anselm had rather neglected this, treating the soul as the only necessary treasure, wrapped for a time in a negligible

Minute Particularshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01675244716897112864noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3422662.post-755578632002-04-18T13:17:00.000-07:002002-04-18T13:28:57.000-07:00

Plato has told you a truth; but Plato is dead. Shakespeare has startled you with an image; but Shakespeare will not startle you with any more. But imagine what it would be to live with such men still living, to know that Plato might break out with an original lecture to-morrow, or that at any moment Shakespeare might shatter everything with a single song. The man who lives in contact with what

Minute Particularshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01675244716897112864noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3422662.post-755119772002-04-17T10:50:00.000-07:002002-04-17T10:51:19.000-07:00

Now we do talk first about the disease in cases of bodily breakdown; and that for an excellent reason. Because, though there may be doubt about the way in which the body broke down, there is no doubt at all about the shape in which it should be built up again. No doctor proposes to produce a new kind of man, with a new arrangement of eyes or limbs. The hospital, by necessity, may send a man

Minute Particularshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01675244716897112864noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3422662.post-754672742002-04-16T09:10:00.000-07:002002-04-16T09:10:47.000-07:00

At least five times, therefore, with the Arian and the Albigensian, with the Humanist sceptic, after Voltaire and after Darwin, the Faith has to all appearance gone to the dogs. In each of these five cases it was the dog that died . . . . To sum up, in so far as it is true that recent centuries have seen an attenuation of Christian doctrine, recent centuries have only seen what the most remote

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Without pretending to span within such limits the essential Thomist idea, I may be allowed to throw out a sort of rough version of the fundamental question, which I think I have known myself, consciously or unconsciously since my childhood. When a child looks out of the nursery window and sees anything, say the green lawn of the garden, what does he actually know; or does he know anything? There

Minute Particularshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01675244716897112864noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3422662.post-753644932002-04-13T11:57:00.000-07:002002-04-13T12:05:34.000-07:00

Minute Particularshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01675244716897112864noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3422662.post-753288162002-04-12T09:09:00.000-07:002002-04-12T09:09:32.993-07:00

One of the deepest and strangest of all human moods, is the mood which will suddenly strike us perhaps in a garden at night, or deep in sloping meadows, the feeling that every flower and leaf has uttered something stupendously direct and important, and that we have by a prodigy of imbecility not heard or understood it. There is a certain poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of

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About the same time I read a solemn flippancy by some free thinker: he said that a suicide was only the same as a martyr. The open fallacy of this helped to clear the question. Obviously a suicide is the opposite of a martyr. A martyr is a man who cares so much for something outside him, that he forgets his own personal life. A suicide is a man who cares so little for anything outside him, that

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A really fine work of folklore, like The Golden Bough, will leave too many readers with the idea, for instance, that this or that story of a giant's or wizard's heart in a casket or a cave only 'means' some stupid and static superstition called 'the external soul.' But we do not know what these things mean, simply because we do not know what we ourselves mean when we are moved by them. Suppose

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Man is always influenced by thought of some kind, his own or somebody else’s; that of somebody he trusts or that of somebody he never heard of, thought at first, second or third hand; thought from exploded legends or unverified rumours; but always something with the shadow of a system of values and a reason for preference. The Common Man

Minute Particularshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01675244716897112864noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3422662.post-751631612002-04-08T07:13:00.000-07:002002-04-08T07:13:43.000-07:00

The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried. What's Wrong with the World

Minute Particularshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01675244716897112864noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3422662.post-751122042002-04-06T13:09:00.000-08:002002-04-06T13:10:24.000-08:00

Now what is needed for these problems of primitive existence is something more like a primitive spirit. In calling up this vision of the first things, I would ask the reader to make with me a sort of experiment in simplicity. And by simplicity I do not mean stupidity, but rather the sort of clarity that sees things like life rather than words like evolution. For this purpose it would really be

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There comes an hour in the afternoon when the child is tired of 'pretending'; when he is weary of being a robber or a Red Indian. It is then that he torments the cat. There comes a time in the routine of an ordered civilisation when the man is tired at playing at mythology and pretending that a tree is a maiden or that the moon made love to a man. The effect of this staleness is the same

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Man must have just enough faith in himself to have adventures, and just enough doubt of himself to enjoy them. Orthodoxy

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Ideas are dangerous, but the man to whom they are least dangerous is the man of ideas. He is acquainted with ideas, and moves among them like a lion-tamer. Ideas are dangerous, but the man to whom they are most dangerous is the man of no ideas. The man of no ideas will find the first idea fly to his head like wine to the head of a teetotaller. Heretics

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Here is the peculiar perfection of tone and truth in the nursery tales. The man of science says, "Cut the stalk, and the apple will fall"; but he says it calmly, as if the one idea really led up to the other. The witch in the fairy tale says, "Blow the horn, and the ogre's castle will fall"; but she does not say it as if it were something in which the effect obviously arose out of the cause.

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. . . the things common to all men are more important than the things peculiar to any men. Orthodoxy

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