Orthodoxy

by G.K. Chesterton

“Heretics” because it merely criticised current philosophies without offering any alternative philosophy. This book is an attempt to answer the challenge.

The only possible excuse for this book is that it is an answer to a challenge.

“I will begin to worry about my philosophy,” said Mr. Street, “when Mr. Chesterton has given us his.”

I will not call it my philosophy; for I did not make it. God and humanity made it; and it made me. I have often had a fancy for writing a romance about an English yachtsman who slightly miscalculated his course and discovered England under the impression that it was a new island in the South Seas.

How can we contrive to be at once astonished at the world and yet at home in it?

Thoroughly worldly people never understand even the world; they rely altogether on a few cynical maxims which are not true.

He said mildly that there were a good many men after all who believed in themselves and who were not in lunatic asylums.

If you consulted your business experience instead of your ugly individualistic philosophy, you would know that believing in himself is one of the commonest signs of a rotter.

people need to hear this today. everyon is a rooter

Actors who can’t act believe in themselves; and debtors who won’t pay.

because he believes in himself. Complete self-confidence is not merely a sin; complete self-confidence is a weakness.

complete self confidence is sin and weakness

“Well, if a man is not to believe in himself, in what is he to believe?” After a long pause I replied, “I will go home and write a book in answer to that question.” This is the book that I have written in answer to it.

Certain new theologians dispute original sin, which is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved.

But they essentially deny human sin, which they can see in the street.

The strongest saints and the strongest sceptics alike took positive evil as the starting-point of their argument.

He must either deny the existence of God, as all atheists do; or he must deny the present union between God and man, as all Christians do. The new theologians seem to think it a highly rationalistic solution to deny the cat.

lol

I mean that as all thoughts and theories were once judged by whether they tended to make a man lose his soul, so for our present purpose all modern thoughts and theories may be judged by whether they tend to make a man lose his wits.

A man who thinks himself a chicken is to himself as ordinary as a chicken.

A man who thinks he is a bit of glass is to himself as dull as a bit of glass.

It is the homogeneity of his mind which makes him dull, and w...

The fairy tale discusses what a sane man will do in a mad world. The sober realistic novel of to-day discusses what an essential lunatic will do in a dull world.

Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason.

Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do.

Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative art...

And he was definitely driven mad by logic, by the ugly and alien logic of predestination. Poetry was not the disease, but the medicine; poetry partly

kept him in health.

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, like the physical exhaustion of Mr. Holbein.

To accept everything is an exercise, to understand ev...

The poet only desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in. The poet only asks to ...

It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is...

for 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.

The new scientific society definitely discourages men from thinking about death;

it is a fact, but it is considered a morbid fact.

In these cases it is not enough that the unhappy man should desire truth; he must desire health.

Nothing can save him but a blind hunger for normality,

A man cannot think himself out of mental evil; for it is actually the organ of thought that has become diseased, ungovern...

Curing a madman is not arguing with a philosopher; it is casting out a devil.

Their attitude is really this: that the man must stop thinking, if he is to go on living.

this is so true. not many people think anymore in this life. they are just entertained

I merely remark here on the fact that both cases have the same kind of completeness and the same kind of incompleteness.

Mr. McCabe thinks me a slave because I am not allowed to believe in determinism. I think Mr. McCabe a slave because he is not allowed to believe in fairies.

The Christian is quite free to believe that there is a considerable amount of settled order and inevitable development in the universe.

just as a sane man knows that he is complex. The sane man knows that he has a touch of the beast, a touch of the devil, a touch of the saint, a touch of the citizen. Nay, the really sane man knows that he has a touch of the madman.

The materialist is sure that history has been simply and solely a chain of causation, just as the interesting person before mentioned is quite sure that he is simply and solely a chicken. Materialists and madmen never have doubts.

materalists and mad men never hve doubts

Spiritual doctrines do not actually limit the mind as do materialistic denials.

In passing from this subject I may note that there is a queer fallacy to the effect that materialistic fatalism is in some way favourable to mercy, to the abolition of cruel punishments or punishments of any kind.

we may say in summary that it is reason used without root, reason in the void.

The man who begins to think without the proper first principles goes mad;

he begins to think at the...

But we may ask in conclusion, if this be what drives men mad, what is it...