Orthodoxy

by G.K. Chesterton

outstripping his mercies with his own newly invented needs.

His very power of enjoyment destroyed half his joys.

Even the haughty visions, the tall cities, and the toppling pinnacles are the creations of humility.

tread down forests

towers are not tall unless we look up at them; and giants are not giants unless they are larger than we.

what we suffer from to-day is humility in the wrong place.

Huxley preached a humility content to learn from Nature.

the new sceptic is so humble that he doubts if he can even learn.

Thus we should be wrong if we had said hastily that there is no humilit...

For the old humility made a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder. But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make him stop working altogether.

Of course his view must be the right one, or it is not his view.

We are on the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table.

in danger of seeing philosophers who doubt the law of gravity as being a m...

It was not meant to attack the authority of reason; rather it is the ultimate purpose to defend it.

not only as if there were no reason in it, but as if there had never been any reason for it.

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.

If you are merely a sceptic, you must sooner or later ask yourself the question, "Why should ANYTHING go right; even observation and deduction? Why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic?

There is a thought that stops thought. That is the only thought that ought to be stopped.

H.G.Wells has raised its ruinous banner; he has written a delicate piece of scepticism called "Doubts of the Instrument." In this he questions the brain itself, and endeavours to remove all reality from all his own assertions, past, present, and to come.

In so far as religion is gone, reason is going. For they are both of the same primary and authoritative kind.

They are both methods of proof which cannot themselves be proved. And in the act of destroying the idea of Divine authority we have largely destroyed the idea of that human authority by which we do a long-division sum.

if the mind is mechanical, thought cannot be very exciting, and if the cosmos is unreal, there is nothing to think about.

Evolution is a good example of that modern intelligence which, if it destroys anything, destroys itself.

it is an attack upon thought itself. If evolution destroys anything, it does not destroy religion but rationalism.

If evolution simply means that a positive thing called an ape turned very slowly into a positive thing called a man, then it is stingless for the most orthodox; for a personal God might just as well do things slowly as quickly, especially if, like the Christian God, he were outside time.

You cannot think if you are not separate from the subject of thought.

The philosophic evolutionist reverses and negatives the epigram. He says, "I am not; therefore I cannot think."

H.G.Wells when he insists that every separate thing is "unique," and there ar...

Thinking means connecting things, and stops if they ca...

If all chairs were quite different, you could not call them "all chairs."

false theory of progress, which maintains that we alter the test instead of trying to pass the test.

If the standard changes, how can there be improvement, which implies a standard?

Progress itself cannot progress.

He thought of change itself as an unchangeable groove; and so it is.

this idea of a fundamental alteration in the standard is one of the things that make thought about the past or future simply impossible.

though I have here used and should everywhere defend the pragmatist method as a preliminary guide to truth,

But I say that one of those necessities precisely is a belief in objective truth.

The pragmatist tells a man to think what he must think and never mind the Absolute.

Pragmatism is a matter of human needs; and one of the first of human needs is to be something more than a pragmatist.

a touch of suicidal mania.

It is vain for bishops and pious bigwigs to discuss what dreadful things will happen if wild scepticism runs its course. It has run its course.

It is vain for eloquent atheists to talk of the great truths that will be revealed if once we see free thought begin. We have seen it end. It has no more questions to ask; it has questioned itself.

or by the absurd pretence that modern England is Christian.

Militant atheists are still unjustly persecuted; but rather because they are an old minority than because they are a new one.

We have found all the questions that can be found.

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

They see that reason destroys; but Will, they say, creates. The ultimate authority, they say, is in will, not in reason.

The supreme point is not why a man demands a thing, but the fact that he does demand it.

Nietzsche denied egoism simply by preaching it. To preach anything is to give it away.

To preach egoism is to practise altruism.