Orthodoxy

by G.K. Chesterton

since then I have grown up and have discovered that these philanthropic old men were telling lies. What has really happened is exactly the opposite of what they said would happen.

What I have lost is my old childlike faith in practical politics.

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

The vision is always a fact. It is the reality that is often a fraud.

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 mere man on two legs, as such, should be felt as something more heartbreaking than any music and more startling than any caricature.

This is the first principle of democracy: that the essential things in men are the things they hold in common, not the things they hold separately.

Falling in love is more poetical than dropping into poetry.

the most terribly important things must be left to ordinary men themselves--the mating of the sexes, the rearing of the young, the laws of the state.

I have never been able to understand where people got the idea that democracy was in some way opposed to tradition.

It is quite easy to see why a legend is treated, and ought to be treated, more respectfully than a book of history. The legend is generally made by the majority of people in the village, who are sane.

The book is generally written by the one man in the village who is mad.

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.

I have always been more inclined to believe the ruck of hard-working people than to believe that special and troublesome literary class to which I belong.

I prefer even the fancies and prejudices of the people who see life from the inside to the clearest demonstrations of the people who see life from the outside.

The things I believed most then, the things I believe most now, are the things called fairy tales.

Compared with them religion and rationalism are both abnormal, though religion is abnormally right and rationalism abnormally wrong. Fairyland is nothing but the sunny country of common sense.

it was not earth that criticised elfland, but elfland that criticised the earth.

Old nurses do not tell children about the grass, but about the fairies that dance on the grass; and the old Greeks could not see the trees for the dryads.

It is a manly mutiny against pride as such.

For the rebel is older than all the kingdoms,

the great lesson of "Beauty and the Beast"; that a thing must be loved BEFORE it is loveable.

that is true rationalism, and fairyland is full of it.

I observed that learned men in spectacles were talking of the actual things that happened-- dawn and death and so on--as if THEY were rational and inevitable.

They talked as if the fact that trees bear fruit were just as NECESSARY as the fact that two and one trees make three. But it is not.

You cannot IMAGINE two and one not making three. But you can easily imagine trees not growing fruit; you can imagine them growing golden candlesticks or tigers hanging on by the tail.

But they could not be got to see the distinction between a true law, a law of reason, and the mere fact of apples falling.

and the science of physical facts, in which there are no laws, but only weird repetitions.

We believe in bodily miracles, but not in mental impossibilities.

We believe that a Bean-stalk climbed up to Heaven; but that does not at all confuse our convictions on the philosophical qu...

They do talk as if the connection of two strange things physically connected them philosophically. They feel that because one incomprehensible thing constantly follows another incomprehensible thing the two together somehow make up a comprehensible thing.

But Grimm's Law is far less intellectual than Grimm's Fairy Tales. The tales are, at any rate, certainly tales; while the law is not a law.

not merely that we have noticed some of the effects.

But we cannot say why an egg can turn into a chicken any more than we can say why a bear could turn into a fairy prince.

We must answer that it is MAGIC. It is not a "law," for we do not understand its general formula.

It is not a necessity, for though we can count on it happening practically, we have no right to say that it must always happen.

It is no argument for unalterable law (as ...

We do not count on it; we...

"charm," "spell," "enchantment." They express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery. A tree grows fruit because it is a MAGIC tree.

this fairy-tale language about things is simply rational and agnostic.

It is the man who talks about "a law" that he has never seen who is the mystic.

he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.

He has so often seen birds fly and lay eggs that he feels as if there must be some dreamy, tender connection between the two ideas, whereas there is none.

A forlorn lover might be unable to dissociate the moon from lost love; so the materialist is unable to dissociate the moon from the tide. In both cases there is no conne...

But the cool rationalist from fairyland does not see why, in the abstract, the apple tree should not grow crimson tulips; it sometimes does in his country.

Just as we all like love tales because there is an instinct of sex, we all like astonishing tales because they touch the nerve of the ancient instinct of astonishment.

when we are very young children we do not need fairy tales: we only need tales. Mere life is interesting enough.

These tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.

on this point I am all for the higher agnosticism; its better name is Ignorance.