 this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information and to find out how you can volunteer please visit LibriVox.org recording by J. A. Carter orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton preface and chapter one preface this book is meant to be a companion to heretics and to put the positive side in addition to the negative many critics complained of the book called heretics because it merely criticized current philosophies without offering any alternative philosophy this book is an attempt to answer the challenge it is unavoidably affirmative and therefore unavoidably autobiographical the writer has been driven back upon somewhat the same difficulty as that which beset Newman in writing his Apologia he has been forced to be egotistical only in order to be sincere while everything else may be different the motive in both cases is the same it is the purpose of the writer to attempt an explanation not of whether the Christian faith can be believed but of how he personally has come to believe it the book is therefore arranged upon the positive principle of a riddle and its answer it deals first with all the writers own solitary and sincere speculations and then with all the startling style in which they were all suddenly satisfied by the Christian theology the writer regards it as amounting to a convincing creed but if it is not that it is at least a repeated and surprising coincidence Gilbert K. Chesterton end of preface chapter one introduction in defense of everything else the only possible excuse for this book is that it is an answer to a challenge even a bad shot is dignified when he accepts a duel when some time ago I published a series of hasty but sincere papers under the name of heretics several critics for whose intellect I have a warm respect I may mention specifically Mr. GS Street said that it was all very well for me to tell everybody to affirm his cosmic theory but that I had carefully avoided supporting my precepts with example I will begin to worry about my philosophy said Mr. Street when Mr. Chesterton has given us his it was perhaps an incautious suggestion to make to a person who is only two ready to write books upon the feeblest provocation but after all though Mr. Street has inspired and created this book he need not read it if he does read it he will find that in its pages I have attempted in a vague and personal way in a set of mental pictures rather than in a series of deductions to state the philosophy in which I have come to believe 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 of 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 I always find however that I am either too busy or too lazy to write this fine work so I may as well give it away for the purposes of philosophical illustration there will probably be a general impression that the man who landed armed to the teeth and talking by signs to plant the British flag on that barbaric temple which turned out to be the pavilion at Brighton felt rather a fool I am not here concerned to deny that he looked a fool but if you imagine that he felt a fool or at any rate that the sense of folly was his soul or his dominant emotion then you have not studied with sufficient delicacy the rich romantic nature of the hero of this tale his mistake was really a most inviolable mistake and he knew it if he is the man I take him for what could be more delightful than to have in the same few minutes all the fascinating terrors of going abroad combined with all the humane security of coming home again what could be better than to have all the fun of discovering South Africa without the disgusting necessity of landing there what could be more glorious than to brace one self up to discover a new South Wales and then realize with a gush of happy tears that it was really old South Wales this at least seems to me the main problem for philosophers and is in a manner the main problem of this book how can we contrive to be at once astonished at the world and yet at home in it how can this queer cosmic town with its many legged citizens with its monstrous and ancient lamps how can this world give us at once the fascination of a strange town and the comfort and honor of being our own town to show that a faith or a philosophy is true from every standpoint would be too big an undertaking even for a much bigger book than this it is necessary to follow one path of argument and this is the path that I here propose to follow I wish to set forth my faith as particularly answering this double spiritual need the need for that mixture of familiar and unfamiliar which Christendom has rightly named romance for the very word romance has in it the mystery and ancient meaning of Rome anyone setting out to dispute anything ought always to begin by saying what he does not dispute beyond stating what he proposes to prove he should always state what he does not propose to prove the thing I do not propose to prove the thing I propose to take as common ground between myself and any average reader is this desirability of an active and imaginative life picturesque and full of a poetical curiosity a life such as western man at any rate always seems to have desired if a man says that extinction is better than existence or blank existence better than variety and adventure then he is not one of the ordinary people to whom I am talking if a man prefers nothing I can give him nothing but nearly all people I have ever met in this western society in which I live would agree to the general proposition that we need this life of practical romance the combination of something that is strange with something that is secure we need so to view the world as to combine an idea of wonder and an idea of welcome we need to be happy in this wonderland without once being merely comfortable it is this achievement of my creed that I shall chiefly pursue in these pages but I have a peculiar reason for mentioning the man in a yacht who discovered England for I am that man in a yacht I discovered England I do not see how this book can avoid being egotistical and I do not quite see to tell the truth how it can avoid being dull dullness will however free me from the charge which I most lament the charge of being flippant mere light sophistry is the thing which I happen to despise most of all and it is perhaps a wholesome fact that this is the thing of which I am generally accused I know nothing so contemptible as a mere paradox a mere ingenious defense of the indefensible if it were true as has been said that Mr. Bernard Shaw lived upon paradox then he ought to be a mere common millionaire for a man of his mental activity could invent a sophistry every six minutes it is as easy as lying because it is lying the truth is of course that Mr. Shaw is cruelly hampered by the fact that he cannot tell any lie unless he thinks it is the truth I find myself under the same intolerable bondage I never in my life said anything merely because I thought it funny though of course I have had ordinary human vain glory and may have thought it funny because I had said it it is one thing to describe an interview with a gorgon or a griffon a creature who does not exist it is another thing to discover that the rhinoceros does exist and then take pleasure in the fact that he looks as if he didn't one searches for truth but it may be that one pursues instinctively the more extraordinary truths and I offer this book with the heartiest sentiments to all the jolly people who hate what I write and regard it very justly for all I know as a piece of poor clowning or a single tiresome joke for if this book is a joke it is a joke against me I am the man who with the utmost daring discovered what had been discovered before if there is an element of farce in what follows the farce is at my own expense for the book explains how I fancied I was the first to set foot in Brighton and then found I was the last it recounts my elephantine adventures in pursuit of the obvious no one can think my case more ludicrous than I think it myself no reader can accuse me of trying to make a fool of him I am the fool of this story and no rebel shall hurl me from my throne I freely confess all the idiotic ambitions of the end of the 19th century I did like all other solemn little boys try to be in advance of the age like them I tried to be some 10 minutes in advance of the truth and I found that I was 1800 years behind it I did strain my voice with a painfully juvenile exaggeration in uttering my truths and I was punished in the fittest and funniest way for I have kept my truths but I have discovered not that they were not truths but simply that they were not mine when I fancied that I stood alone I was really in the ridiculous position of being backed up by all of Christendom it may be heaven forgive me that I did try to be original but I only succeeded in inventing all by myself an inferior copy of the existing traditions of civilized religion the man from the yacht thought he was the first to find England I thought I was the first to find Europe I did try to found a heresy of my own and when I had put the last touches to it I discovered that it was orthodoxy it may be that somebody will be entertained by the account of this happy fiasco it might amuse a friend or an enemy to read how I gradually learnt from the truth of some stray legend or from the falsehood of some dominant philosophy things that I might have learnt from my catechism if I'd ever learnt it there may or may not be some entertainment in reading how I found at last in an anarchist club or a Babylonian temple what I might have found in the nearest parish church if anyone is entertained by learning how the flowers of the field or the phrases in an omnibus the accidents of politics or the pains of youth came together in a certain order to produce a certain conviction of Christian orthodoxy he may possibly read this book but there is in everything a reasonable division of labor I have written the book and nothing on earth would induce me to read it I add one purely pedantic note which comes as a note naturally should at the beginning of the book these essays are concerned only to discuss the actual fact that the central christian theology sufficiently summarized in the apostles creed is the best root of energy and sound ethics they are not intended to discuss the very fascinating but quite different question of what is the present seat of authority for the proclamation of that creed when the word orthodoxy is used here it means the apostles creed as understood by everybody calling himself christian until a very short time ago and the general historic conduct of those who held such a creed I have been forced by mere space to confine myself to what I have got from this creed I do not touch the matter much disputed among modern christians of where we ourselves got it this is not an ecclesiastical treatise but a sort of slovenly autobiography but if anyone wants my opinions about the actual nature of the authority mr g s street has only to throw me another challenge and I will write him another book end of chapter one this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information and to find out how you can volunteer please visit LibriVox.org reading by J. A. Carter orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton chapter two the maniac part one thoroughly worldly people never understand even the world they rely altogether on a few cynical maxims which are not true once I remember walking with a prosperous publisher who made a remark which I had often heard before it is indeed almost a motto of the modern world yet I had heard it once too often and I saw suddenly that there was nothing in it the publisher said of somebody that man will get on he believes in himself and I remember that as I lifted my head to listen my eye caught an omnibus on which was written Hanwell I said to him shall I tell you where the men are who believe most in themselves for I can tell you I know of men who believe in themselves more colossally than Napoleon or Caesar I know where flames the fixed star of certainty and success I can guide you to the thrones of the supermen the men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums he said mildly that there were a good many men after all who believed in themselves and who were not in lunatic asylums yes there are I retorted and you have all men ought to know them that drunken poet from whom you would not take a dreary tragedy he believed in himself that elderly minister with an epic from whom you were hiding in a back room he believed in himself 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 actors who can't act believe in themselves and debtors who won't pay it would be much truer to say that a man will certainly fail because he believes in himself complete self-confidence is not merely a sin complete self-confidence is a weakness believing utterly in oneself is a hysterical and superstitious belief like believing in Joanna Southcoat the man who has it has hand well written on his face as plain as it is written on that omnibus and to all this my friend the publisher made this very deep and effective reply well if a man is not to believe in himself then 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 but I think this book may well start where our argument started in the neighborhood of the mad house modern masters of science are much impressed with the need of beginning all inquiry with a fact the ancient masters of religion were quite equally impressed with that necessity they began with the fact of sin a fact as practical as potatoes whether or no man could be washed in miraculous waters there was no doubt at any rate that he wanted washing but certain religious leaders in london not mere materialists have begun in our day not to deny the highly disputable water but to deny the indisputable dirt certain new theologians dispute original sin which is the only part of christian theology which can really be proved some followers of the reverend rj camel and their almost too fastidious spirituality admit divine sinlessness which they cannot see even in their dreams but they essentially deny human sin which they can see in the street the strongest saints and the strongest skeptics alike took positive evil as the starting point of their argument if it be true as it certainly is the demand can feel exquisite happiness in skinning a cat then the religious philosopher can only draw one of two conclusions 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 at a highly rationalistic solution to deny the cat in this remarkable situation it is plainly not now possible with any hope of universal appeal to start as our fathers did with the fact of sin this very fact which was to them and is to me as plain as a pike staff is the very fact that has been specially deluded or denied but though modern's deny the existence of sin i do not think that they have yet denied the existence of a lunatic asylum we all agree still that there is a collapse of the intellect as unmistakable as a falling house men deny hell but not as yet hanwell for the purpose of our primary argument the one may very well stand where the others stood i mean that is all thoughts and theories were once judged by whether they tended to make a man loses 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 it is true that some speak lightly and loosely of insanity as in itself attractive but a moment's thought will show that if disease is beautiful it is generally someone else's disease a blind man may be picturesque but it requires two eyes to see the picture and similarly even the wildest poetry of insanity can only be enjoyed by the sane to the insane man his insanity is quite prosaic because it is quite true 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 which makes him mad it is only because we see the irony of his idea that we think him even amusing it is only because he does not see the irony of his idea that he is put in Hanwell at all in short oddities only strike ordinary people oddities do not strike odd people this is why ordinary people have a much more exciting time while odd people are always complaining of the dullness of life this is also why the new novels die so quickly and why the old fairy tales endure forever the old fairy tale makes the hero a normal human boy it is his adventures that are startling they startle him because he is normal but in the modern psychological novel the hero is abnormal the center is not central hence the fiercest adventures fail to affect him adequately and the book is monotonous you can make a story out of a hero among dragons but not out of a dragon among dragons the fairy tale discusses what a sane man will do in a mad world the sober realistic novel of today discusses what an essential lunatic will do in a dull world let us begin then with the madhouse from this evil and fantastic end let us set forth on our intellectual journey now if we are to glance at the philosophy of sanity the first thing to do in the matter is to blot out one big and common mistake there is a notion adrift everywhere that imagination especially mystical imagination is dangerous to men's mental balance poets are commonly spoken of as psychologically unreliable and generally there is a vague association between breathing lorals in your hair and sticking straws in it facts and history utterly contradict this view most of the very great poets have been not only sane but extremely business like and if shakespeare ever really held horses it was because he was much the safest man to hold them 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 artists very seldom i'm not as will be seen in any sense attacking logic i only say that this danger does seem to lie in logic and not an imagination artistic paternity is as wholesome as physical paternity moreover it is worthy of remark that when a poet really was morbid it was commonly because he had some weak spot of rationality on his brain po for instance really was morbid not because he was poetical but because he was specially analytical even chess was too poetical for him he disliked chess because it was full of knights and castles like a poem he avowedly preferred the black discs of draughts because they were more like the mere black dots on a diagram perhaps the strongest case of all is this that only one great english poet went mad cowper 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 he could sometimes forget the red and thirsty hell to which his hideous necessitarianism dragged him among the wide waters and the white flat lilies of the ooze he was damned by john calvin he was almost saved by john gilpin everywhere we see that men do not go mad by dreaming critics are much madder than poets Homer is complete and calm enough it is his critics who tear him into extravagant tatters Shakespeare is quite himself it is only some of his critics who have discovered that he was somebody else and though saint john the evangelist saw many strange monsters in his vision he saw no creature so wild as one of his own commentators the general fact is simple 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 everything a strain the poet only desires exaltation and expansion a world to stretch himself in 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 it is a small matter but not irrelevant that this striking mistake is commonly supported by a striking misquotation we have all heard people cite the celebrated line of dryden as great genius is to madness near allied but dryden did not say that great genius was to madness near allied dryden was a great genius himself and knew better it would have been hard to find a man more romantic than he or more sensible what dryden said was this great wits are off to madness near allied and that is true it is the pure promptitude of the intellect that is in peril of a breakdown also people might remember of what sort of man dryden was talking he was not talking of any unworldly visionary like vaughn or george herbert he was talking of a cynical man of the world a skeptic a diplomasist a great practical politician such men are indeed to madness near allied their incessant calculation of their own brains and other people's brains is a dangerous trade it is always perilous to the mind to reckon up the mind a flippant person has asked why we say as mad as a hatter a more flippant person might answer that a hatter is mad because he has to measure the human head and if great reasoners were often maniacal it is equally true that maniacs are commonly great reasoners when i was engaged in a controversy with the clarion on a matter of free will that able writer mr rb souther said that free will was lunacy because it meant causeless actions and the actions of a lunatic would be causeless i do not dwell here upon the disastrous lapse in determinist logic obviously if any actions even a lunatics can be causeless determinism is done for if the chain of causation can be broken for a madman it can be broken for a man but my purpose is to point out something more practical it was natural perhaps that a modern marxian socialist should not know anything about free will but it was certainly remarkable that a modern marxian socialist should not know anything about lunatics mr souther's evidently did not know anything about lunatics the last thing that can be said of a lunatic is that his actions are causeless if any human acts may loosely be called causeless they are the minor acts of a healthy man whistling as he walks slashing the grass with a stick kicking his heels or rubbing his hands it is the happy man who does the useless things the sick man is not strong enough to be idle it is exactly such careless and causeless actions that the madman could never understand for the madman like the determinist generally sees too much cause in everything the madman could read a conspiratorial significance into those empty activities he would think that the lopping of the grass was an attack on private property he would think that the kicking of the heels was a signal to an accomplice if the madman could for an instant become careless he would become sane everyone who has had the misfortune to talk with people in the heart or on the edge of mental disorder knows that their most sinister quality is a horrible clarity of detail a connecting of one thing with another in a map more elaborate than a maze if you argue with a madman it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment he is not hampered by a sense of humor or by charity or by the dumb certainties of experience he is the more logical for losing certain sane affections indeed the common phrase for insanity is in this respect the misleading one the madman is not the man who has lost his reason the madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason the madman's explanation of a thing is always complete and often in a purely rational sense satisfactory or to speak more strictly the insane explanation if not conclusive is at least unanswerable this may be observed especially in the two or three commonest kinds of madness 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 or if a man says that he is the rightful king of england it is no complete answer to say that the existing authorities call him mad for if he were king of england that might be the wisest thing for the existing authorities to do or if a man says that he is jesus christ it is no answer to tell him that the world denies his divinity for the world denied christ nevertheless he is wrong but if we attempt to trace his error in exact terms we shall not find it quite so easy as we had supposed perhaps the nearest we can get to expressing it is to say this that his mind moves in a perfect but narrow circle a small circle is quite as infinite as a large circle but though it is quite as infinite it is not so large in the same way the insane explanation is quite as complete as the same one but it is not so large a bullet is quite as round as the world but it is not the world there is such a thing as a narrow universality there is such a thing as a small and cramped eternity you may see it in many modern religions now speaking quite externally and empirically we may say that the strongest and most unmistakable mark of madness is this combination between a logical completeness and a spiritual contraction the lunatics theory explains a large number of things but it does not explain them in a large way i mean that if you or i were dealing with a mind that was growing morbid we should be chiefly concerned not so much to give it arguments as to give it air to convince that there was something cleaner and cooler outside the suffocation of a single argument suppose for instance it were the first case that i took as typical suppose it were the case of a man who accused everybody of conspiring against him if we could express our deepest feelings of protest and appeal against his obsession i suppose we should say something like this oh i admit that you have your case and have it by heart and that many things do fit into other things as you say i admit that your explanation contains a great deal but what a great deal it leaves out 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 he would be if you only knew that these people cared nothing about you how much larger your life would be if yourself could become smaller in it if you could really look at other men with common curiosity and pleasure if you could see them walking as they are in their sunny selfishness and their virile indifference you would begin to be interested in them because they are not interested in you you would break out of this tiny and tawdry theater in which your own little plot is always being played and you would find yourself under a freer sky in a street full of splendid strangers or suppose it were the second case of madness that of a man who claims the crown your impulse would be to answer all right perhaps you know that you are the king of england but why do you care make one magnificent effort and you will be a human being and look down on all the kings of the earth or it might be the third case of the mad man who calls himself christ if we said what we felt we should say so you are the creator and the redeemer of the world but what a small world it must be what a little heaven you must inhabit with angels no bigger than butterflies how sad it must be to be god and an inadequate god is there really no life fuller and no love more marvelous than yours and is it really in your small and painful pity that all flesh must put its faith how much happier you would be how much more of you there would be if the hammer of a higher god could smash your small cosmos scattering the stars like spangles and leave you in the open free like other men to look up as well as down and it must be remembered that the most purely practical science does take this view of mental evil it does not seek to argue with it like a heresy but simply to snap it like a spell neither modern science nor ancient religion believes in complete free thought theology rebukes certain thoughts by calling them blasphemous science rebukes certain thoughts by calling them morbid for example some religious societies discourage men more or less from thinking about sex the new scientific society definitely discourages men from thinking about death it is a fact but it is considered a morbid fact and in dealing with those whose morbidity has a touch of mania modern science cares far less for pure logic than a dancing dervish 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 like that of a beast a man cannot think himself out of mental evil or it is actually the organ of thought that has become diseased ungovernable and as it were independent he can only be saved by will or faith the moment his mere reason moves it moves in the old circular rut he will go round and round his logical circle just as a man in a third class carriage on the inner circle will go round and round the inner circle until he performs the voluntary vigorous and mystical act of getting out at gower street decision is the whole business here a door must be shut forever every remedy is a desperate remedy every cure is a miraculous cure curing a madman is not arguing with a philosopher it is casting out a devil and however quietly doctors and psychologists may go to work in the matter their attitude is profoundly intolerant as intolerant as bloody merry their attitude is really this that the man must stop thinking if he is to go on living their counsel is one of intellectual amputation if thy head offends thee cut it off for it is better not merely to enter the kingdom of heaven as a child but to enter it as an imbecile rather than with your whole intellect to be cast into hell or into hanwell end of chapter two part one this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information and to find out how you can volunteer please visit LibriVox.org recording by J. A. Carter orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton chapter two the maniac part two such is the madman of experience he is commonly a reasoner frequently a successful reasoner doubtless he could be vanquished in mere reason and the case against input logically but it can be put much more precisely in more general and even aesthetic terms he is in the clean and well-lit prison of one idea he is sharpened to one painful point is without healthy hesitation and healthy complexity now as I explain in the introduction I have determined in these early chapters to give not so much a diagram of a doctrine as some pictures of a point of view and I have described at length my vision of the maniac for this reason that just as I am affected by the maniac so I am affected by most modern thinkers that unmistakable mood or note that I hear from hanwell I hear also from half the chairs of science and seats of learning today and most of the mad doctors are mad doctors in more senses than one they all have exactly that combination we have noted the combination of an expansive and exhaustive reason with a contracted common sense they are universal only in the sense that they take one thin explanation and carry it very far but a pattern can stretch forever and still be a small pattern they see a chessboard white on black and if the universe is paved with it it is still white on black like the lunatic they cannot alter their standpoint they cannot make a mental effort and suddenly see it black on white take first the more obvious case of materialism as an explanation of the world materialism has a sort of insane simplicity it has just the quality of the madman's argument we have it once the sense of it covering everything and the sense of it leaving everything out contemplate some able and sincere materialist as for instance mr mccabe and you will have exactly this unique sensation he understands everything and everything does not seem worth understanding his cosmos may be complete in every rivet and cogwheel but still his cosmos is smaller than our world somehow his scheme like the lucid scheme of the madman seems unconscious of the alien energies and the large indifference of the earth it is not thinking of the real things of the earth of fighting peoples or proud mothers or first love or fear upon the sea the earth is so very large and the cosmos is so very small the cosmos is about the smallest hole that a man can hide his head in it must be understood that i am not now discussing the relation of these creeds to truth but for the present solely their relation to health later in the argument i hope to attack the question of objective verity here i speak only of a phenomenon of psychology i do not for the present attempt to prove to hakel that materialism is untrue any more than i attempted to prove to the man who thought he was christ that he was laboring under an error i merely remark here on the fact that both cases have the same kind of completeness and the same kind of incompleteness you can explain a man's detention at hanwell by an indifferent public by saying that it is the crucifixion of a god of whom the world is not worthy the explanation does explain similarly you may explain the order in the universe by saying that all things even the souls of men are leaves inevitably unfolding on an utterly unconscious tree the blind destiny of matter the explanation does explain though not of course so completely as the madmans but the point here is that the normal human mind not only objects to both but feels to both the same objection its approximate statement is that if the man in hanwell is the real god he's not much of a god and similarly if the cosmos of the materialist is the real cosmos it's not much of a cosmos the thing has shrunk the deity is less divine than many men and according to hakel the whole of life is something much more gray narrow and trivial than many separate aspects of it the parts seem greater than the whole for we must remember that the materialist philosophy whether true or not is certainly much more limiting than any religion in one sense of course all intelligent ideas are narrow they cannot be broader than themselves a christian is only restricted in the same sense that an atheist is restricted he cannot thank christianity false and continue to be a christian and the atheist cannot thank atheism false and continue to be an atheist but as it happens there is a very special sense in which materialism has more restrictions than spiritualism 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 but if we examine the two vetoes we shall see that his is really much more of a pure veto than mine the christian is quite free to believe that there is a considerable amount of settled order and inevitable development in the universe but the materialist is not allowed to admit into his spotless machine the slightest speck of spiritualism or miracle poor mr mccabe is not allowed to retain even the tiniest imp though it might be hiding in a pimpernel the christian admits that the universe is manifold and even miscellaneous 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 but the materialists world is quite simple and solid just as the madman is quite sure he is sane 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 spiritual doctrines do not actually limit the mind as do materialistic denials even if i believe in immortality i need not think about it but if i disbelieve in immortality i must not think about it in the first case the road is open and i can go as far as i like in the second the road is shut but the case is even stronger and the parallel with madness is yet more strange for it was our case against the exhaustive and logical theory of the lunatic that right or wrong it gradually destroyed his humanity now it is the charge against the main deductions of the materialists that right or wrong they gradually destroy his humanity i do not mean only kindness i mean hope courage poetry initiative all that is human for instance when materialism leads men to complete fatalism as it generally does it is quite idle to pretend that it is in any sense a liberating force it is absurd to say that you are especially advancing freedom when you only use free thought to destroy free will the determinists come to bind not to loose they may well call their law the chain of causation it is the worst chain that ever fettered a human being you may use the language of liberty if you like about materialistic teaching but it is obvious that this is just as inapplicable to it as a whole as the same language when applied to a man locked up in a madhouse you may say if you like that the man is free to think himself a poached egg but it is surely a more massive and important fact that if he is a poached egg he is not free to eat drink sleep walk or smoke a cigarette similarly you may say if you like that the bold determinist speculator is free to disbelieve in the reality of the will but it is a much more massive and important fact that he is not free to raise to curse to thank to justify to urge to punish to resist temptations to incite mobs to make new year resolutions to pardon sinners to rebuke tyrants or even to say thank you for the mustard in passing from this subject i may note that there is a queer fallacy to the effect that materialistic fatalism is in some way favorable to mercy to the abolition of cruel punishments or punishments of any kind this is startlingly the reverse of the truth it is quite tenable that the doctrine of necessity makes no difference at all that it leaves the flogger flogging and the kind friend exhorting as before but obviously if it stops either of them it stops the kind exhortation that the sins are inevitable does not prevent punishment if it prevents anything it prevents persuasion determinism is quite as likely to lead to cruelty as it is certain to lead to cowardice determinism is not inconsistent with the cruel treatment of criminals what it is perhaps inconsistent with is the generous treatment of criminals with any appeal to their better feelings or encouragement in their moral nature the determinist does not believe in appealing to the will but he does believe in changing the environment he must not say to the center go and sin no more because the center cannot help it but he can put him in boiling oil for boiling oil is an environment considered as a figure therefore the materialist has the fantastic outline of the figure of the madman both take up a position at once unanswerable and intolerable of course it is not only of the materialist that all this is true the same would apply to the other extreme of speculative logic 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 superman 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 then 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 all that concerns us here however is to note that this pan egoistic extreme of thought exhibits the same paradox as the other extreme of materialism it is equally complete in theory and equally crippling in practice for the sake of simplicity it is easier to state the notion by saying that a man can believe that he is always in a dream now obviously there can be no positive proof given to him that he is not in a dream for the simple reason that no proof can be offered that might not be offered in a dream but if the man began to burn down london and say that his housekeeper would soon call him to breakfast we should take him and put him with other logicians in a place which has often been alluded to in the course of this chapter the man who cannot believe his senses and the man who cannot believe anything else are both insane but their insanity is proved not by any error in their argument but by the manifest mistake of their whole lives they have both locked themselves up in two boxes painted inside with the sun and stars they are both unable to get out the one into the health and happiness of heaven the other even into the health and happiness of the earth their position is quite reasonable nay in a sense it is infinitely reasonable just as a three penny bit is infinitely circular but there is such a thing as a mean infinity a base and slavish eternity it is amusing to notice that many of the moderns whether skeptics or mystics have taken as their sign a certain eastern symbol which is the very symbol of this ultimate nullity when they wish to represent eternity they represent it by a serpent with his tail in his mouth there is a startling sarcasm in the image of that very unsatisfactory meal the eternity of the material fatalists the eternity of the eastern pessimists the eternity of the supercilious theosophists and higher scientists of today is indeed very well presented by a serpent eating his tail a degraded animal who destroys even himself this chapter is purely practical and is concerned with what actually is the chief mark and element of insanity 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 wrong end and for the rest of these pages we have to try and discover what is the right end but we may ask in conclusion if this be what drives men mad what is it that keeps them sane by the end of this book i hope to give a definite some will think far too definite answer but for the moment it is possible in the same solely practical manner to give a general answer touching what in actual human history keeps men sane mysticism keeps men sane as long as you have mystery you have health when you destroy mystery you create morbidity the ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic he has permitted the twilight he always had one foot in earth and the other in fairyland he has always left himself free to doubt his gods but unlike the agnostic of today free also to believe in them he has always cared more for truth than for consistency if he saw two truths that seem to contradict each other he would take the two truths and the contradiction along with them his spiritual sight is stereoscopic like his physical sight he sees two different pictures at once and yet sees all the better for that thus he always believed that there was such a thing as fate but such a thing as free will also thus he believed that children were indeed the kingdom of heaven but nevertheless ought to be obedient to the kingdom of earth he admired youth because it was young and age because it was not it is exactly this balance of apparent contradictions that has been the whole buoyancy of the healthy man the whole secret of mysticism is this that man can understand everything by the help of what he does not understand the morbid logician seeks to make everything lucid and succeeds in making everything mysterious the mystic allows one thing to be mysterious and everything else becomes lucid the determinist makes the theory of causation quite clear and then finds that he cannot say if you please to the housemaid the christian permits free will to remain a sacred mystery but because of this his relations with the housemaid become of a sparkling and crystal clearness he puts the seed of dogma in a central darkness but it branches forth in all directions with a bounding natural health as we have taken the circle as the symbol of reason and madness we may very well take the cross as the symbol at once of mystery and of health buddhism is centripetal but christianity is centrifugal it breaks out for the circle is perfect and infinite in its nature but it is fixed forever in its size it can never be larger or smaller but the cross though it has at its heart a collision and a contradiction can extend its forearms forever without altering its shape because it has a paradox in its center it can grow without changing the circle returns upon itself and is bound the cross opens its arms to the forewinds it is a signpost for free travelers symbols alone are of even a cloudy value in speaking of this deep matter and another symbol from physical nature will express sufficiently well the real place of mysticism before mankind the one created thing which we cannot look at is the one thing and the light of which we look at everything like the sun at noonday mysticism explains everything else by the blaze of its own victorious invisibility detached intellectualism is in the exact sense of a popular phrase all moonshine for it is light without heat it is secondary light reflected from a dead world but the Greeks were right when they made apollo the god both of imagination and of sanity for he was both the patron of poetry and the patron of healing of necessary dogmas and a special creed i shall speak later but that transcendentalism by which all men live has primarily much the position of the sun in the sky we are conscious of it as a kind of splendid confusion it is something both shining and shapeless at once a blaze and a blur but the circle of the moon is as clear and unmistakable as recurrent and inevitable as the circle of eucalypt on a blackboard for the moon is utterly reasonable and the moon is the mother of lunatics and has given to them all her name end of chapter two part two this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information and to find out how you can volunteer please visit LibriVox.org recording by J. A. Carter orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton chapter three the suicide of thought part one the phrases of the street are not only forcible but subtle for a figure of speech can often get into a crack too small for a definition phrases like put out or off color might have been coined by Mr. Henry James in an agony of verbal precision and there is no more subtle truth than that of the everyday phrase about a man having his heart in the right place it involves the idea of normal proportion not only does a certain function exist but it is rightly related to other functions indeed the negation of this phrase would describe with peculiar accuracy the somewhat morbid mercy and perverse tenderness of the most representative moderns if for instance I had to describe with fairness the character of Mr. Bernard Shaw I could not express myself more exactly than by saying that he has a heroically large and generous heart but not a heart in the right place and this is so of the typical society of our time the modern world is not evil in some ways the modern world is far too good it is full of wild and wasted virtues when a religious scheme is shattered as christianity was shattered at the reformation it is not merely the vices that are let loose the vices are indeed let loose and they wander and do damage but the virtues are let loose also and the virtues wander more wildly and the virtues do more terrible damage the modern world is full of the old christian virtues gone mad 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 for example mr. Blatchford attacks christianity because he is mad on one christian virtue the merely mystical and almost irrational virtue of charity he has a strange idea that he will make it easier to forgive sins by saying that there are no sins to forgive mr. Blatchford is not only an early christian he is the only early christian who ought really to have been eaten by lions for in his case the pagan accusation is really true his mercy would mean mere anarchy he really is the enemy of the human race because he is so human as the other extreme we may take the acrid realist who has deliberately killed in himself all human pleasure in happy tales or in the healing of the heart torquemata tortured people physically for the sake of moral truth zola tortured people morally for the sake of physical truth but in torquemata's time there was at least a system that could to some extent make righteousness and peace kiss each other now they do not even bow but a much stronger case than these two of truth and pity can be found in the remarkable case of the dislocation of humility it is only with one aspect of humility that we are here concerned humility was largely meant as a restraint upon the arrogance and infinity of the appetite of man he was always outstripping his mercies with his own newly invented needs his very power of enjoyment destroyed half his joys by asking for pleasure he lost the chief pleasure for the chief pleasure is surprise hence it became evident that if a man would make his world large he must be always making himself small even the haughty visions the tall cities and the toppling pinnacles are the creations of humility giants that tread down forests like grass are the creations of humility towers that vanish upwards above the loneliest star are the creations of humility for towers are not tall unless we look up at them and giants are not giants unless they are larger than we all this giantesque imagination which is perhaps the mightiest of the pleasures of man is at bottom entirely humble it is impossible without humility to enjoy anything even pride but what we suffer from today 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 himself the part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt the divine reason huxley preached a humility content to learn from nature but the new skeptic 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 humility typical of our time the truth is that there is a real humility typical of our time but it so happens that it is practically a more poisonous humility than the wildest prostrations of the ascetic the old humility was a spur that prevented a man from stopping not a nail in his boot that prevented him from going on 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 make him stop working altogether at any street corner we may meet a man who utters the frantic and blasphemous statement that he may be wrong every day one comes across somebody who says that of course his view may not be the right one 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 we're in danger of seeing philosophers who doubt the law of gravity as being a mere fancy of their own scoffers of old time were too proud to be convinced but these are too humble to be convinced the meek do inherit the earth but the modern skeptics are too meek even to claim their inheritance it is exactly this intellectual helplessness which is our second problem the last chapter has been concerned only with the fact of observation that what peril of morbidity there is for man comes rather from his reason than his imagination it was not meant to attack the authority of reason rather it is the ultimate purpose to defend it for it needs defense the whole modern world is at war with reason and the tower already reels the sages it is often said can see no answer to the riddle of religion but the trouble with our sages is not that they cannot see the answer it is that they cannot even see the riddle they are like children so stupid as to notice nothing paradoxical and the playful assertion that a door is not a door the modern latitudinarians speak for instance about authority and religion not only as if there were no reason in it but as if there had never been any reason for it apart from seeing its philosophical basis they cannot even see its historical cause religious authority has often doubtless been oppressive or unreasonable just as every legal system and especially our present one has been callous and full of a cruel apathy it is rational to attack the police nay it is glorious but the modern critics of religious authority are like men who should attack the police without ever having even heard of burglars for there is a great and possible peril to the human mind a peril as practical as burglary against it religious authority was reared rightly or wrongly as a barrier and against it something certainly must be reared as a barrier if our race is to avoid ruin 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 reason and faith reason is itself a matter of faith it is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all if you are merely a skeptic 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 they're both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape the young skeptic says i have a right to think for myself but the old skeptic the complete skeptic says i have no right to think for myself i have no right to think at all there is a thought that stops thought that is the only thought that ought to be stopped that is the ultimate evil against which all religious authority was aimed it only appears at the end of decadent ages like our own and already mr hg wells has raised its ruinous banner he has written a delicate piece of skepticism called doubts of the instrument in this he questions the brain itself and endeavors to remove all reality from all his own assertions past present and to come but it was against this remote ruin that all the military systems in religion were originally ranked and ruled the creeds and the crusades the hierarchies and the horrible persecutions were not organized as is ignorantly said for the suppression of reason they were organized for the difficult defense of reason man by a blind instinct knew that if once things were wildly questioned reason could be questioned first the authority of priests to absolve the authority of popes to define the authority even of inquisitors to terrify these were all only dark defenses erected round one central authority more undemonstrable more supernatural than all the authority of a man to think we know now that this is so we have no excuse for not knowing it but we can hear skepticism crashing through the old ring of authorities and at the same moment we can see reason swaying upon her throne 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 that 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 some with a long and sustained tug we have attempted to pull the mitre off pontifical man and his head has come off with it lest this be called loose assertion it is perhaps desirable though dull to run rapidly through the chief modern fashions of thought which have this effect of stopping thought itself materialism and the view of everything as a personal illusion have some such effect for if the mind is mechanical thought cannot be very exciting and if the cosmos is unreal there is nothing to think about but in these cases the effect is indirect and doubtful in some cases it is direct and clear notably in the case of what is generally called evolution evolution is a good example of that modern intelligence which if it destroys anything destroys itself evolution is either an innocent scientific description of how certain earthly things came about or if it is anything more than this 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 but if it means anything more it means that there is no such thing as an ape to change and no such thing as a man for him to change into it means that there is no such thing as a thing at best there is only one thing and that is a flux of everything and anything this is an attack not upon the faith but upon the mind you cannot think if there are no things to think about you cannot think if you are not separate from the subject of thought dekart said i think therefore i am the philosophic evolutionist reverses and negatives the epigram he says i am not therefore i cannot think then there is the opposite attack on thought that urged by mr hg wells when he insists that every separate thing is unique and there are no categories at all this also is merely destructive thinking means connecting things and stops if they cannot be connected it need hardly be said that this skepticism forbidding thought necessarily forbids speech a man cannot open his mouth without contradicting it thus when mr wells says as he did somewhere all chairs are quite different he utters not merely a misstatement but a contradiction in terms if all chairs were quite different you could not call them all chairs 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 niche started a nonsensical idea that men had once sought as good what we now call evil if it were so we could not talk of surpassing or even falling short of them how can you overtake jones if you walk in the other direction you cannot discuss whether one people has succeeded more in being miserable than another succeeded in being happy it would be like discussing whether milton was more puritanical than a pig is fat it is true that a man a silly man might make change itself his object or ideal but as an ideal change itself becomes unchangeable if the change worshipper wishes to estimate his own progress he must be sternly loyal to the idea of change he must not begin to flirt gaily with the ideal of monotony progress itself cannot progress it is worth remark in passing that when tenison in a wild and rather weak manner welcome the idea of infinite alteration in society he instinctively took a metaphor which suggests an imprisoned tedium he wrote let the great world spin forever down the ringing grooves of change he thought of change itself as an unchangeable groove and so it is change is about the narrowest and hardest groove that a man can get into the main point here however is that this idea of a fundamental alteration in the standard is one of the things that make thought about the past or future simply impossible the theory of a complete change of standards in human history does not merely deprive us of the pleasure of honoring our fathers it deprives us even of the more modern and aristocratic pleasure of despising them this bald summary of the thought destroying forces of our time would not be complete without some reference to pragmatism for though i have here used and should everywhere defend the pragmatist method as a preliminary guide to truth there is an extreme application of it which involves the absence of all truth whatever my meaning can be put shortly thus i agree with the pragmatists that apparent objective truth is not the whole matter that there is an authoritative need to believe the things that are necessary to the human mind 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 but precisely one of the things he must think is the absolute this philosophy indeed is a kind of verbal paradox 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 in human 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 specially human makes nonsense of the human sense of actual fact end of chapter three part one this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to find out how you can volunteer please visit LibriVox.org recording by J. A. Carter orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton chapter three the suicide of thought part two to sum up our contention so far we may say that the most characteristic current philosophies have not only a touch of mania but a touch of suicidal mania the mere questioner has knocked his head against the limits of human thought and cracked it this is what makes so futile the warnings of the orthodox and the boasts of the advanced about the dangerous boyhood of free thought what we are looking at is not the boyhood of free thought it is the old age and ultimate dissolution of free thought it is vain for bishops and pious bigwigs to discuss what dreadful things will happen if wild skepticism 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 you cannot call up any wilder vision than a city in which men ask themselves if they have any selves you cannot fancy a more skeptical world than that in which men doubt if there is a world it might certainly have reached its bankruptcy more quickly and cleanly if it had not been feebly hampered by the application of indefensible laws of blasphemy or by the absurd pretense that modern england is christian but it would have reached the bankruptcy anyhow militant atheists are still unjustly persecuted but rather because they are an old minority than because they are a new one free thought has exhausted its own freedom it is weary of its own success if any eager free thinker now hails philosophic freedom as the dawn he is only like the man in mark twain who came out wrapped in blankets to see the sun rise and was just in time to see it set if any fright and curate still says that it will be awful if the darkness of free thought should spread we can only answer him in the high and powerful words of mr bellach do not i beseech you be troubled about the increase of forces already in dissolution you have mistaken the hour of the night it is already morning we have no more questions to ask we have looked for questions in the darkest corners and on the wildest peaks we have found all the questions that can be found it is time we gave up looking for questions and began looking for answers but one more word must be added at the beginning of this preliminary negative sketch i said that our mental ruin has been wrought by wild reason not by wild imagination a man does not go mad because he makes a statue a mile high but he may go mad by thinking it out in square inches now one school of thinkers has seen this and jumped at it as a way of renewing the pagan health of the world 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 is demanded i have no space to trace or expound this philosophy of will it came i suppose through nishi who preached something that is called egoism that indeed was simple minded enough for nishi denied egoism simply by preaching it to preach anything is to give it away first the egoist calls life a war without mercy and then he takes the greatest possible trouble to drill his enemies in war to preach egoism is to practice altruism but however it began the view is common enough in current literature the main defense of these thinkers is that they are not thinkers they are makers they say that choice is itself the divine thing thus mr. bernard shaw has attacked the old idea that men's acts are to be judged by the standard of the desire of happiness he says that a man does not act for his happiness but from his will he does not say jam will make me happy but i want jam and in all this others follow him with yet greater enthusiasm mr. john davidson a remarkable poet is so passionately excited about it that he is obliged to write prose he publishes a short play with several long prefaces this is natural enough in mr. shaw for all his plays or prefaces mr. shaw is i suspect the only man on earth who has never written any poetry but that mr. davidson who can write excellent poetry should write instead laborious metaphysics in defense of this doctrine of will does show that the doctrine of will has taken hold of men even mr. hg wells has half spoken in its language saying that one should test acts not like a thinker but like an artist saying i feel this curve is right or that line shall go thus they are all excited and well they may be for by this doctrine of the divine authority of will they think they can break out of the doomed fortress of rationalism they think they can escape but they cannot escape this pure praise of volition ends in the same breakup and blank as the mere pursuit of logic exactly as complete free thought involves the doubting of thought itself so the acceptation of mere willing really paralyzes the will mr. bernard shaw has not perceived the real difference between the old utilitarian test of pleasure clumsy of course and easily mistated and that which he propounds the real difference between the test of happiness and the test of will is simply that the test of happiness is a test and the other isn't you can discuss whether a man's act in jumping over a cliff was directed toward happiness you cannot discuss whether it was derived from will of course it was you can praise an action by saying that it is calculated to bring pleasure or pain to discover truth or to save the soul but you cannot praise an action because it shows will for to say that is merely to say that it is an action by this praise of will you cannot really choose one course is better than another and yet choosing one course is better than another is the very definition of the will you are praising the worship of will is the negation of will to admire mere choice is to refuse to choose if mr. bernard shaw comes up to me and says will something that is tantamount to saying i do not mind what you will and that is tantamount to saying i have no will in the matter you cannot admire will in general because the essence of will is that it is particular a brilliant anarchist like mr. john davidson feels an irritation against ordinary morality and therefore he invokes will will to anything he only wants humanity to will something but humanity does want something it wants ordinary morality he rebels against the law and tells us to will something or anything but we have willed something we will the law against which he rebels all the will worshipers from nishi to mr. davidson are really quite empty of volition they cannot will they can hardly wish and if anyone wants a proof of this it can be found quite easily it can be found in this fact that they always talk of will as something that expands and breaks out but it is quite the opposite every act of will is an act of self-limitation to desire action is to desire limitation in that sense every act is an act of self-sacrifice when you choose anything you reject everything else that objection which men of this school used to make to the act of marriage is really an objection to every act every act is an irrevocable selection exclusion just as when you marry one woman you give up all the others so when you take one course of action you give up all the other courses if you become king of england you give up the post of beetle in brompton if you go to rome you sacrifice a rich suggestive life in wimbledon it is the existence of this negative or limiting side of will that makes most of the talk of the anarchic will worshipers little better than nonsense for instance mr. john davidson tells us to have nothing to do with thou shalt not but it is surely obvious that thou shalt not is only one of the necessary corollaries of i will i will go to the lord mayors show and thou shalt not stop me anarchism adures us to be bold creative artists and care for no laws or limits 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 the moment you step into the world of facts you step into a world of limits you can free things from alien or accidental laws but not from the laws of their own nature you may if you like free a tiger from his bars but do not free him from his stripes do not free a camel of the burden of his hump you may be freeing him from being a camel do not go about as a demagogue encouraging triangles to break out of the prison of their three sides if a triangle breaks out of its three sides its life comes to a lamentable end somebody wrote a work called the loves of the triangles i never read it but i'm sure that if triangles ever were loves they were loved for being triangular this is certainly the case with all artistic creation which is in some ways the most decisive example of pure will the artist loves his limitations they constitute the thing he is doing the painter is glad that the canvas is flat the sculptor is glad that the clay is colorless in case the point is not clear an historic example may illustrate it the french revolution was really an heroic and decisive thing because the jacobins willed something definite and limited they desired the freedoms of democracy but also all the vetoes of democracy they wish to have votes and not to have titles republicanism had an ascetic side in franklin or robespierre as well as an expansive side in danton or wilks therefore they have created something with a solid substance in shape the square social equality and peasant wealth of france but since then the revolutionary or speculative mind of europe has been weakened by shrinking from any proposal because of the limits of that proposal liberalism has been degraded into liberality men have tried to turn revolutionized from a transitive to an intransitive verb the jacobin would tell you not only the system he would rebel against but what was more important the system he would not rebel against the system he would trust but the new rebel is a skeptic and he will not entirely trust anything he has no loyalty therefore he can never be really a revolutionist and the fact that he doubts everything really gets in his way when he wants to denounce anything for all denunciation implies a moral doctrine of some kind and the modern revolutionist doubts not only the institution he denounces but the doctrine by which he denounces it thus he writes one book complaining that imperial oppression insults the purity of women and then he writes another book about the sex problem in which he insults it himself he curses the sultan because christian girls lose their virginity and then curses mrs grunty because they kept it as a politician he will cry out that war is a waste of life and then as a philosopher that all life is a waste of time a russian pessimist will denounce a policeman for killing a peasant and then proved by the highest philosophical principles that the peasant ought to have killed himself a man denounces marriage is a lie and then denounces aristocratic profligates for treating it as a lie he calls a flag a bobble and then blames the oppressors of poland or ireland because they take away that bobble the man of this school goes first to a political meeting where he complains that savages are treated as if they were beasts then he takes his hat an umbrella and goes on to a scientific meeting where he proves that they practically are beasts in short the modern revolutionist being an infinite skeptic is always engaged in undermining his own minds in his book on politics he attacks men for trampling on morality in his book on ethics he attacks morality for trampling on men therefore the modern man in revolt has become practically useless for all purposes of revolt by rebelling against everything he has lost his right to rebel against anything it may be added that the same blank and bankruptcy can be observed in all fierce and terrible types of literature especially in satire satire may be mad and anarchic but it presupposes an admitted superiority in certain things over others it presupposes a standard when little boys in the street laugh at the fatness of some distinguished journalist they are unconsciously assuming a standard of greek sculpture they're appealing to the marble apollo and the curious disappearance of satire from our literature is an instance of the fierce things fading for want of any principle to be fierce about nishi had some natural talent for sarcasm he could sneer though he could not laugh but there is always something bodyless and without weight in his satire simply because it has not any mass of common morality behind it he is himself more preposterous than anything he denounces but indeed nishi will stand very well as the type of the whole of this failure of abstract violence the softening of the brain which ultimately overtook him was not a physical accident if nishi had not ended in imbecility nishism would end in imbecility 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 this last attempt to evade intellectualism ends in intellectualism and therefore in death the sortie has failed the wild worship of lawlessness and the materialist worship of law end in the same void nishi scales staggering mountains but he turns up ultimately in Tibet he sits down beside Tolstoy in the land of nothing and nirvana they are both helpless one because he must not grasp anything and the other because he must not let go of anything the Tolstoyans will is frozen by a buddhist instinct that all special actions are evil but the nishiites 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 they stand at the crossroads and one hates all the roads and the other likes all the roads the result is well some things are not hard to calculate they stand at the crossroads here i am thank god the first and dullest business of this book the rough review of recent thought after this i begin to sketch a view of life which may not interest my reader but which at any rate interests me in front of me as i close this page is a pile of modern books that i have been turning over for the purpose a pile of ingenuity a pile of futility by the accident of my present detachment i can see the inevitable smash of the philosophies of Schopenhauer and Tolstoy, Nishi and Shaw as clearly as an inevitable raft way smash could be seen from a balloon they are all on the road to the emptiness of the asylum for madness may be defined as using mental activity so as to reach mental helplessness and they have nearly reached it he who thinks he is made of glass thanks to the destruction of thought for glass cannot think so he who wills to reject nothing wills the destruction of will for will is not only the choice of something but the rejection of almost everything and as i turn and tumble over the clever wonderful tiresome and useless modern books the tide of one of them rivets my eye it is called Jean Dark by Anatole of France i have only glanced at it but a glance was enough to remind me of Renan's V de Jésus it was the same strange method of the reverent sceptic it discredits supernatural stories that have some foundation simply by telling natural stories that have no foundation because we cannot believe in what a saint did we are to pretend that we know exactly what he felt but i do not mention either book in order to criticize it but because the accidental combination of the names called up two startling images of sanity which blasted all the books before me Joan of Arc was not stuck at the crossroads either by rejecting all the paths like Tolstoy or by accepting them all like Nishi she chose a path and went down it like a thunderbolt yet Joan when i came to think of her had in her all that was true either in Tolstoy or Nishi all that was even tolerable in either of them i thought of all that is noble in Tolstoy the pleasure in plain things especially in plain pity the actualities of the earth the reverence for the poor the dignity of the bowed back Joan of Arc had all that and with this great addition that she endured poverty as well as admiring it whereas Tolstoy is only a typical aristocrat trying to find out its secret and then i thought of all that was brave and proud and pathetic in poor Nishi and his mutiny against the emptiness and timidity of our time i thought of his cry for the ecstatic equilibrium of danger his hunger for the rush of great horses his cry to arms well Joan of Arc had all that and again with this difference that she did not praise fighting but fought we know that she was not afraid of an army while Nishi for all we know was afraid of a cow Tolstoy only praised the peasant she was the peasant Nishi only praised the warrior she was the warrior she beat them both at their own antagonistic ideals she was more gentle than the one more violent than the other yet she was a perfectly practical person who did something while they are wild speculators who do nothing it was impossible that the thought should not cross my mind that she and her faith had perhaps some secret of moral unity and utility that has been lost and with that thought came a larger one and the colossal figure of her master had also crossed the theater of my thoughts the same modern difficulty which darkened the subject matter of Anatole France also darkened that of Ernest Renan Renan also divided his hero's pity from his hero's pugnacity Renan even represented the righteous anger at Jerusalem as a mere nervous breakdown after the idyllic expectations of Galilee as if there were any inconsistency between having a love for humanity and having a hatred for inhumanity altruists with thin weak voices denounce Christ as an egoist egoists with even thinner and weaker voices denounce him as an altruist in our present atmosphere such cavals are comprehensible enough the love of a hero is more terrible than the hatred of a tyrant the hatred of a hero is more generous than the love of a philanthropist there is a huge and heroic sanity of which moderns can only collect the fragments there is a giant of whom we see only the lopped arms and legs walking about they have torn the soul of Christ into silly strips labeled egoism and altruism and they're equally puzzled by his insane magnificence and his insane meekness they have parted his garments among them and for his vesture they have cast lots though the coat was without seam woven from the top throughout end of chapter three part two this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information and to find out how you can volunteer please visit LibriVox.org recording by J. A. Carter orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton chapter four the ethics of Elfland part one when the businessman rebukes the idealism of his office boy it is commonly in some such speeches this ah yes when one is young one has these ideals and the abstract and these castles and 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 thus at least venerable and philanthropic old men now in their honored graves used to talk to me when I was a boy but 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 they said that I should lose my ideals and begin to believe in the methods of practical politicians now I have not lost my ideals in the least my faith and fundamentals is exactly what it always was what I have lost is my old child like faith and practical politics I'm still as much concerned as ever about the battle of Armageddon but I am not so much concerned about the general election as a babe I left up on my mother's knee at the mere mention of it no the vision is always solid and reliable the vision is always a fact it is the reality that is often a fraud as much as I ever did more than I ever did I believe in liberalism but there was a rosy time of innocence when I believed in liberals I take this instance of one of the enduring faiths because having now to trace the roots of my personal speculation this may be counted I think as the only positive bias I was brought up a liberal and have always believed in democracy in the elementary liberal doctrine of a self-governing humanity if anyone finds the phrase vague or threadbare I can only pause for a moment to explain that 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 should always be more vivid to us than any marvels of power intellect art or civilization the mere man on two legs as such should be felt as something more heartbreaking than any music and more startling than any caricature death is more tragic even than death by starvation having a nose is more comic even than having a Norman nose this is the first principle of democracy that the essential things in man are the things they hold in common not the things they hold separately and the second principle is merely this that the political instinct or desire is one of these things which they hold in common falling in love is more poetical than dropping into poetry the democratic contention is that government helping to rule the tribe is a thing like falling in love and not a thing like dropping into poetry it is not something analogous to playing the church organ painting on vellum discovering the north pole that insidious habit looping the loop being astronomer royal and so on for these things we do not wish a man to do it all unless he does them well it is on the contrary a thing analogous to writing one's own love letters or blowing one's own nose these things we want a man to do for himself even if he does them badly i'm not here arguing the truth of any of these conceptions i know that some moderns are asking to have their wives chosen by scientists and they may soon be asking for all i know to have their noses blown by nurses i merely say that mankind does recognize these universal human functions and that democracy classes government among them in short the democratic faith is this that 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 this is democracy and in this i have always believed 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 german historian against the tradition of the catholic church for instance is strictly appealing to an aristocracy he is appealing to the superiority of one expert against the awful authority of a mob 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 saying the book is generally written by the one man in the village who is mad those who urge against tradition that men in the past were ignorant may go and urge it at the carlton club along with the statement that voters in the slums are ignorant it will not do for us if we attach great importance to the opinion of ordinary men in great unanimity when we are dealing with daily matters there is no reason why we should disregard it when we are dealing with history or fable tradition may be defined as an extension of the franchise 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 all democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death democracy tells us not to neglect a good man's opinion even if he is our groom tradition asks us not to neglect a good man's opinion even if he is our father i at any rate cannot separate the two ideas of democracy and tradition it seems evident to me that they are the same idea we will have the dead at our councils the ancient greeks voted by stones these shall vote by tombstones it is all quite regular and official for most tombstones like most ballot papers are marked with a cross i have first to say therefore that if i have had a bias it was always a bias in favor of democracy and therefore of tradition before we come to any theoretic or logical beginnings i am content to allow for that personal equation i've always been more inclined to believe the rock of hardworking 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 i would always trust the old wives fables against the old maids facts as long as wit is mother wit it can be as wild as it pleases now i have put together a general position and i pretend to know training in such things i propose to do it therefore by writing down one after another the three or four fundamental ideas which i have found for myself pretty much in the way that i found them then i shall roughly synthesize them summing up my personal philosophy or natural religion then shall describe my startling discovery that the whole thing had been discovered before it had been discovered by christianity but of these profound persuasions which i have to recount in order the earliest was concerned with this element of popular tradition and without the foregoing explanation touching tradition and democracy i could hardly make my mental experience clear as it is i do not know whether i can make it clear but i now propose to try my first and last philosophy that which i believe in with unbroken certainty i learned in the nursery i generally learned it from a nurse that is from the solemn and star-appointed priestess at once of democracy and tradition the things i believed most then the things i believe most now are the things called fairy tales they seem to me to be the entirely reasonable things they're not fantasies compared with them other things are fantastic 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 is not earth that judges heaven but heaven that judges earth so for me at least it was not earth that criticized elfland but elfland that criticized the earth i knew the magic beanstalk before i had tasted beans i was sure of the man in the moon before i was certain of the moon this was at one with all popular tradition modern minor poets are naturalists and talk about the bush or the brook but the singers of the old epics and fables were supernaturalists and talked about the gods of brook and bush that is what the moderns mean when they say that the ancients did not appreciate nature because they said that nature was divine old nurses do not tell children about the grass but about the fairies that dance in the grass and the old greeks could not see the trees for the dry ads but i deal here with what ethic and philosophy come from being fed on fairy tales if i were describing them in detail i could note many noble and healthy principles that arise from them there is the chivalrous lesson of jack the giant killer the giant should be killed because they are gigantic it is a manly mutiny against pride as such for the rebel is older than all the kingdoms and the jacobin has more tradition than the jacobite there is the lesson of cinderella which is the same as that of the magnificat exaltavit humilis there is the great lesson of beauty and the beast that a thing must be loved before it is lovable there is the terrible allegory of the sleeping beauty which tells how the human creature was blessed with all birthday gifts yet cursed with death and how death also may perhaps be softened to asleep but i am not concerned with any of the separate statutes of elfland but with the whole spirit of its law which i learned before i could speak and shall retain when i cannot write 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 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 sisters are older than cinderella it is in an iron and awful sense necessary that cinderella is younger than the ugly sisters there is no getting out of it hakel may talk as much fatalism about that fact as he pleases it really must be if jack is the son of a miller a miller is the father of jack cold reason decrees it from her awful throne and we in fairyland submit if the three brothers all ride horses there are six animals and 18 legs involved that is true rationalism and fairyland is full of it but as i put my head over the hedge of the elves and begin to take notice of the natural world i observed extraordinary thing 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 there is an enormous difference by the test of fairyland which is the test of the imagination 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 these men in spectacles spoke much of a man named newton who was hit by an apple and who discovered a law 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 if the apple hit newton's nose newton's nose hits the apple that is a true necessity because we cannot conceive the one occurring without the other but we can quite well conceive the apple not falling on his nose we can fancy it flying ardently through the air to hit some other nose which it had a more definite dislike we have always in our fairy tales kept this sharp distinction between the science of mental relations in which there really are laws 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 beanstalk climbed up to heaven but that does not at all confuse our convictions on the philosophical question of how many beans make five 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 doubtless she has given the advice to many champions and has seen many castles fall but she does not lose either her wonder or her reason she does not muddle her head until it imagines a necessary mental connection between a horn at a falling tower but the scientific men do muddle their heads until they imagine a necessary mental connection between an apple leaving the tree and an apple reaching the ground they do really talk as if they had found not only a set of marvelous facts but a truth connecting those facts 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 two black riddles make a white answer in fairyland we avoid the word law but in the land of science they are singularly fond of it thus they will call some interesting conjecture about how forgotten folks pronounced the alphabet grim's law but grim's law is far less intellectual than grim's fairy tales the tales are at any rate certainly tales while the law is not a law a law implies that we know the nature of the generalization and enactment not merely that we have noticed some of the effects if there is a law that pickpocket shall go to jail it implies that there is an imaginable mental connection between the idea of prison and the idea of picking pockets and we know what the idea is we can say why we take liberty from a man who takes liberties 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 as ideas the egg and the chicken are farther off from each other than the bear and the prince for no egg in itself suggests a chicken whereas some princes do suggest bears granted them that certain transformations do happen it is essential that we should regard them in the philosophic manner of fairy tales not in the unphilosophic manner of science and the laws of nature 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 turn to horses or her clothes fell from her at 12 o'clock we must answer that it is magic it is not a law but 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 huxley fancied that we count on the ordinary course of things we do not count on it we bet on it we risk the remote possibility of a miracle as we do that of a poisoned pancake or a world destroying comet we leave it out of account not because it is a miracle and therefore an impossibility but because it is a miracle and therefore an exception all the terms used in the science books law necessity order tendency and so on are really unintellectual because they assume an inner synthesis which we do not possess the only words that ever satisfied me as describing nature are the terms used in fairy books charm spell enchantment they express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery a tree grows fruit because it is a magic tree water runs downhill because it is bewitched the sun shines because it is bewitched i deny all together that this is fantastic or even mystical we may have some mysticism later on but this fairy tale language about things is simply rational and agnostic is the only way i can express in words my clear and definite perception that one thing is quite distinct from another that there is no logical connection between flying and laying eggs it is the man who talks about a law that he has never seen who is the mystic nay the ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist he is a sentimentalist in this essential sense that 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 connection except that one has seen them together a sentimentalist might shed tears at the smell of apple blossom because by a dark association of his own it reminded him of his boyhood so the materialist professor though he conceals his tears is yet a sentimentalist because by a dark association of his own apple blossoms remind him of apples 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 this elementary wonder however is not a mere fancy derived from the fairy tales on the contrary all the fire of the fairy tales is derived from this 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 this is proved by the fact that when we are very young children we do not need fairy tales we only need tales mere life is interesting enough a child of seven is excited by being told that tommy opened a door and saw a dragon but a child of three is excited by being told that tommy opened a door boys like romantic tales but babies like realistic tales because they find them romantic in fact a baby is about the only person i should think to whom a modern realistic novel could be read without boring him this proves that even nursery tales only echo an almost prenatal leap of interest and amazement 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 i have said that this is holy reasonable and even agnostic and indeed on this point i am all for the higher agnosticism its better name is ignorance we have all read in scientific books and indeed in all romances the story of the man who has forgotten his name this man walks about the streets and can see and appreciate everything only he cannot remember who he is well every man is that man in the story every man has forgotten who he is one may understand the cosmos but never the ego the self more distant than any star thou shalt love the lord thy god but thou shalt not know thyself we are all under the same mental calamity we have all forgotten our names we have all forgotten what we really are all that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten all that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forget but though like the man without memory in the novel we walk the streets with a sort of half-witted admiration still it is admiration it is admiration in english and not only admiration in latin the wonder has a positive element of praise this is the next milestone to be definitely marked on our road through fairyland i shall speak in the next chapter about optimists and pessimists in their intellectual aspect so far as they have one here i'm only trying to describe the enormous emotions which cannot be described and the strongest emotion was that life was as precious as it was puzzling it was an ecstasy because it was an adventure it was an adventure because it was an opportunity the goodness of the fairy tale was not affected by the fact that there may be more dragons than princesses it was good to be in a fairy the test of all happiness is gratitude and i felt grateful though i hardly knew to whom children are grateful when santa claus puts in their stockings gifts of toys or sweets could i not be grateful to santa claus when he put in my stockings the gift of two miraculous legs we thank people for birthday presents of cigars and slippers can i thank no one for the birthday present of birth there were then these two first feelings indefensible and indisputable the world was a shock but it was not merely shocking existence was a surprise but it was a pleasant surprise in fact all my first views were exactly uttered in a riddle that stuck in my brain from boyhood the question was what did the first frog say and the answer was lord how you made me jump that says succinctly all that i am saying god made the frog jump but the frog prefers jumping but when these things are settled there enters the second great principle of the fairy philosophy anyone can see it who will simply read rims fairy tales or the fine collections of mr andrew lang for the pleasure of pedantry i will call it the doctrine of conditional joy touchstone talked of much virtue in an if according to elfin ethics all virtue is in an if the note of the fairy utterance always is you may live in a palace of gold and sapphire if you do not say the word cow or you may live happily with the king's daughter if you do not show her an onion the vision always hangs upon a veto all the dizzy and colossal things conceded depend upon one small thing withheld all the wild and whirling things that are let loose depend upon one thing that is forbidden mr wb yeats and his exquisite and piercing elfin poetry describes the elves as lawless a plunge in innocent anarchy on the unbridled horses of the air ride on the crest of the disheveled tide and dance upon the mountains like a flame it is a dreadful thing to say that wb yeats does not understand fairy land but i do say it he is an ironical irishman full of intellectual reactions he's not stupid enough to understand fairy land fairies prefer people of the yokel type like myself people who gape and grin and do as they are told mr yeats reads into elf land all the righteous insurrection of his own race but the lawlessness of ireland is a christian lawlessness rounded on reason and justice the finnian is rebelling against something he understands only too well but the true citizen of fairy land is obeying something that he does not understand at all 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 and apple is eaten and the hope of god is gone this is the tone of fairy tales and it is certainly not lawlessness or even liberty though men under a mean modern tyranny may think at liberty by comparison people out of portland gaol might think fleet street free but closer study will prove that both fairies and journalists are the slaves of duty fairy godmothers seem at least as strict as other godmothers cinderella received a coach out of wonderland and a coachman out of nowhere but she received a command which might have come out of brickston that she should be back by 12 also she had a glass slipper and it cannot be a coincidence that glass is so common a substance in folklore this princess lives in a glass castle that princess on a glass hill this one sees all things in a mirror they may all live in glass houses if they will not throw stones for this thin glitter of glass everywhere is the expression of the fact that the happiness is bright but brittle like the substance most easily smashed by a housemaid or a cat and this fairy tale sentiment also sank into me and became my sentiment toward the whole world i felt and feel that life itself is as bright as the diamond but as brittle as the window pane and when the heavens were compared to the terrible crystal i can remember a shutter i was afraid that god would drop the cosmos with a crash end of chapter four part one