Orthodoxy

by G.K. Chesterton

How can this world give us at once the fascination of a queer, cosmic town, with its many-legged citizens, with its monstrous and ancient lamps, and the comfort and honor of being our own town?

I did, like all other solemn little boys, try to be in advance of the age. Like them, I tried to be some ten minutes in advance of the truth. And I found that I was eighteen hundred years behind it.

Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad, but chess players do. Mathematicians and cashiers go mad, but creative artists very seldom.

Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion,

The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.

the madman (like the determinist) generally sees too much cause in everything.

The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.

If a man says, for instance, that men have a conspiracy against him, you cannot dispute it except by saying that all the men deny that they are conspirators, which is exactly what conspirators would do. His explanation covers the facts as much as yours.

Are there no other stories in the world except yours, and are all men busy with your business? Suppose we grant the details. Perhaps when the man in the street did not seem to see you, it was only his cunning. Perhaps when the policeman asked you your name, it was only because he knew it already. But how much happier you would be if you only knew that these people cared nothing about you. How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it—if

The cosmos is about the smallest hole that a man can hide his head in.

There is a skeptic far more terrible than he who believes that everything began in matter. It is possible to meet the skeptic who believes that everything began in himself. He doubts not the existence of angels or devils, but the existence of men and cows. For him, his own friends are a mythology made up by himself. He created his own father and his own mother. This horrible fancy has in it something decidedly attractive to the somewhat mystical egoism of our day. That publisher who thought that men would get on if they believed in themselves, those seekers after the super man who are always looking for him in the looking glass, those writers who talk about impressing their personalities instead of creating life for the world—all these people have really only an inch between them and this awful emptiness. Then when this kindly world all around the man has been blackened out like a lie; when friends fade into ghosts and the foundations of the world fail; when the man, believing in nothing and in no man, is alone in his own nightmare—then the great individualistic motto shall be written over him in avenging irony. The stars will be only dots in the blackness of his own brain. His mother’s face will be only a sketch from his own insane pencil on the walls of his cell. But over his cell shall be written, with dreadful truth, “He believes in himself.”

Detached intellectualism is (in the exact sense of a popular phrase) all moonshine, for it is light without heat, and it is secondary light, reflected from a dead world.

The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus, some scientists care for truth, and their truth is pitiless. Thus, some humanitarians only care for pity, and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.

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—himself.

The meek do inherit the earth; but the modern skeptics are too meek even to claim their inheritance.

Akin to these is the false theory of progress, which maintains that we alter the test instead of trying to pass the test. We often hear it said, for instance, “What is right in one age is wrong in another.” This is quite reasonable if it means that there is a fixed aim, and that certain methods attain at certain times and not at other times. If women, say, desire to be elegant, it may be that they are improved at one time by growing fatter and at another time by growing thinner. But you cannot say that they are improved by ceasing to wish to be elegant and beginning to wish to be oblong. If the standard changes, how can there be improvement, which implies a standard?

Pragmatism is a matter of human needs; and one of the first of human needs is to be something more than a pragmatist. Extreme pragmatism is just as inhuman as the determinism it so powerfully attacks. The determinist (who, to do him justice, does not pretend to be a human being) makes nonsense of the human sense of actual choice. The pragmatist who professes to be especially human makes nonsense of the human sense of actual fact.

It is time we gave up looking for questions and began looking for answers.

But it is impossible to be an artist and not care for laws and limits. Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame. If you draw a giraffe, you must draw him with a long neck. If, in your bold creative way, you hold yourself free to draw a giraffe with a short neck, you will really find that you are not free to draw a giraffe.

Nietzsche had some natural talent for sarcasm: he could sneer, though he could not laugh.

Thinking in isolation and with pride ends in being an idiot. Every man who will not have softening of the heart must at last have softening of the brain.

But the Nietzscheite’s will is quite equally frozen by his view that all special actions are good; for if all special actions are good, none of them are special.

Well, Joan of Arc had all that, and again with this difference: she did not praise fighting but fought.

When the business man rebukes the idealism of his office boy, it is commonly in some such speech as this: “Ah, yes, when one is young, one has these ideals in the abstract and these castles in the air; but in middle age, they all break up like clouds, and one comes down to a belief in practical politics, to using the machinery one has and getting on with the world as it is.”

I am still as much concerned as ever about the Battle of Armageddon; but I am not so much concerned about the General Election.

I am concerned with a certain way of looking at life, which was created in me by the fairy tales, but has since been meekly ratified by the mere facts.

We believe that a beanstalk climbed up to heaven; but that does not at all confuse our convictions on the philosophical question of how many beans make five.

When we are asked why eggs turn to birds or fruits fall in autumn, we must answer exactly as the fairy godmother would answer if Cinderella asked her why mice turned to horses or her clothes fell from her at twelve o’clock. We must answer that it is magic. It is not a “law,”

In the fairy tale, an incomprehensible happiness rests upon an incomprehensible condition. A box is opened, and all evils fly out. A word is forgotten, and cities perish. A lamp is lit, and love flies away. A flower is plucked, and human lives are forfeited. An apple is eaten, and the hope of God is gone.

Remember, however, that to be breakable is not the same as to be perishable. Strike a glass, and it will not endure an instant; simply do not strike it, and it will endure a thousand years. Such, it seemed, was the joy of man, either in elfland or on earth; the happiness depended on not doing something which you could at any moment do and which, very often, it was not obvious why you should not do. Now, the point here is that to me this did not seem unjust. If the miller’s third son said to the fairy, “Explain why I must not stand on my head in the fairy palace,” the other might fairly reply, “Well, if it comes to that, explain the fairy palace.” If Cinderella says, “How is it that I must leave the ball at twelve?” her godmother might answer, “How is it that you are going there till twelve?”

Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde.

Well, I left the fairy tales lying on the floor of the nursery, and I have not found any books so sensible since. I left the nurse guardian of tradition and democracy, and I have not found any modern type so sanely radical or so sanely conservative. But the matter for important comment was here: that when I first went out into the mental atmosphere of the modern world, I found that the modern world was positively opposed on two points to my nurse and to the nursery tales.

I had always believed that the world involved magic; now I thought that perhaps it involved a magician.

It is quite futile to argue that man is small compared to the cosmos; for man was always small compared to the nearest tree.

The cosmos went on forever, but not in its wildest constellation could there be anything really interesting; anything, for instance, such as forgiveness or free will.

It is a good exercise, in empty or ugly hours of the day, to look at anything—the coalscuttle or the bookcase—and think how happy one could be to have brought it out of the sinking ship on to the solitary island. But it is a better exercise still to remember how all things have had this hairbreadth escape: everything has been saved from a wreck.

Men spoke much in my boyhood of restricted or ruined men of genius, and it was common to say that many a man was a Great Might-Have-Been. To me, it is a more solid and startling fact that any man in the street is a Great Might-Not-Have-Been.

I came to the conclusion that the optimist thought everything good except the pessimist, and that the pessimist thought everything bad except himself.

My acceptance of the universe is not optimism, it is more like patriotism. It is a matter of primary loyalty. The world is not a lodging house at Brighton, which we are to leave because it is miserable. It is the fortress of our family, with the flag flying on the turret; and the more miserable it is, the less we should leave it. The point is not that this world is too sad to love or too glad not to love; the point is that when you do love a thing, its gladness is a reason for loving it and its sadness a reason for loving it more. All optimistic thoughts about England and all pessimistic thoughts about her are alike reasons for the English patriot. Similarly, optimism and pessimism are alike arguments for the cosmic patriot.

Let us suppose we are confronted with a desperate thing—say, Pimlico. If we think what is really best for Pimlico, we shall find the thread of thought leads to the throne of the mystic and the arbitrary. It is not enough for a man to disapprove of Pimlico; in that case, he will merely cut his throat or move to Chelsea. Nor, certainly, is it enough for a man to approve of Pimlico; for then it will remain Pimlico, which would be awful. The only way out of it seems to be for somebody to love Pimlico—to love it with a transcendental tie and without any earthly reason.

Morality did not begin by one man saying to another, “I will not hit you if you do not hit me”; there is no trace of such a transaction. There is a trace of both men having said, “We must not hit each other in the holy place.” They gained their morality by guarding their religion. They did not cultivate courage. They fought for the shrine and found they had become courageous. They did not cultivate cleanliness. They purified themselves for the altar, and found that they were clean.

We say there must be a primal loyalty to life: the only question is, shall it be a natural or a supernatural loyalty? If you like to put it so, shall it be a reasonable or an unreasonable loyalty? Now, the extraordinary thing is that the bad optimism (the whitewashing, the weak defense of everything) comes in with the reasonable optimism. Rational optimism leads to stagnation: it is irrational optimism that leads to reform.

If we love England for being an empire, we may overrate the success with which we rule the Hindus. But if we love it only for being a nation, we can face all events, for it would be a nation even if the Hindus ruled us.

We have to feel the universe at once as an ogre’s castle, to be stormed, and yet as our own cottage, to which we can return at evening.

Not only is suicide a sin, it is the sin. It is the ultimate and absolute evil, the refusal to take an interest in existence, the refusal to take the oath of loyalty to life. The man who kills a man, kills a man. The man who kills himself, kills all men; as far as he is concerned, he wipes out the world. His act is worse (symbolically considered) than any rape or dynamite outrage. For it destroys all buildings. It insults all women. The thief is satisfied with diamonds, but the suicide is not—that is his crime. He cannot be bribed, even by the blazing stones of the Celestial City. The thief compliments the things he steals, if not the owner of them. But the suicide insults everything on earth by not stealing it. He defiles every flower by refusing to live for its sake. There is not a tiny creature in the cosmos at which his death is not a sneer. When a man hangs himself on a tree, the leaves might fall off in anger and the birds fly away in fury; for each has received a personal affront.

Marcus Aurelius is the most intolerable of human types. He is an unselfish egoist. An unselfish egoist is a man who has pride without the excuse of passion.

When once these two parts of the two machines had come together, one after another, all the other parts fit and fell in with an eerie exactitude. I could hear bolt after bolt over all the machinery falling into its place with a kind of click of relief. Having got one part right, all the other parts were repeating that rectitude, as clock after clock strikes noon. Instinct after instinct was answered by doctrine after doctrine.

An apple or an orange is round enough to get itself called round and yet is not round after all.

for I thought (and still think) sincere pessimism the unpardonable sin.

I had got thoroughly angry with the Christian, because he never was angry.