Bingo.. Humans do love a good story.. And if nothing, evolution, as presented in its iterations, is a good story..
"It is absurd for the Evolutionist to complain that it is unthinkable for an admittedly unthinkable God to make everything out of nothing, and then pretend that it is more thinkable that nothing should turn itself into everything."-G.K. Chesterton
"Truth, of course, must of necessity be stranger than fiction, for we have made fiction to suit ourselves."-G.K. Chesterton
"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."-G.K. Chesterton
"Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried."-G.K. Chesterton
"I say you cannot really understand any myths till you have found that one of them is not a myth. Forged bank-notes mean nothing if there are no real bank-notes.-G.K. Chesterton
"It's the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense and can't see things as they are."-G.K. Chesterton
"Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference, which is an elegant name for ignorance." - The Speaker, 12/15/00 -G.K. Chesterton
"All the exaggerations are right, if they exaggerate the right thing." -G.K. Chesterton
-and-
"The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected."-G.K. Chesterton
Dear hosepipe, thank you ever so much for these treasures from Chesterton! I especially like the one above.
This “it is his head that splits” business gets me to thinking about a citation by Eric Voegelin [in “The German University and German Society,” The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Vol.12, 1990] of Elias Canetti’s novel Auto da fé. Voegelin writes, “The titles for the three parts of the novel summarize the phases of estrangement: A Head Without a World — Headless Word — The World in One’s Head.”
Well, I don’t read Italian, and the book is out of print. So I haven’t read it. Still I gather the “estrangement” that Voegelin speaks of here is estrangement from Spirit. Which begins with a rejection of reality “as it is.” One then becomes “alienated” from it, you see. And then the fun really starts.
BTW. For whatever interest in our own time this might have for the few, the ancient Greeks had a definite point of view regarding such matters. For instance Heraclitus. (Somehow or other, I think you and he would get along famously, hp, were you ever to meet.) Heraclitus famously declared “the Logos is one and common.” By which I imagine he meant: There is only one Truth, which ultimately governs everything.
Yet he continued the thought (paraphrasing from memory): Though there is only the one Logos, which is thus common to all men — that is, only one truth prevails over all that there is — yet some men act as if they were unaware of this central fact of Reality, and had become like “men asleep,” turning away from the reality external to themselves which encompasses them, into their own “private worlds,” as if dreamers, asleep.
Of such men, Heralitus said: These are no longer public men. Translation: If you want to be a “public man,” you have to lose the private “dream-walking.” Heraclitus’ contemporaries would have understood this stricture as indicating: (1) the “private man” no longer has a right to have a “public voice.” He cannot speak to what is in the common interest of all men. And (2), If the “private man” starts acting like a “public man” — that is, speaks publicly about matters pertaining to the alleged well-being of the public — then the best thing for the “public men” to do is just ignore him.
We hardly ever take Heraclitus’ advice on this. We listen to every nutcase that comes down the pike.
Voegelin’s remarks regarding Canetti take place in the context of an explication of Second Reality, a term coined by Robert Musil (or maybe Heimito von Doderer?) that refers to any systematic mental construction premised on “ending history,” “killing God,” the total rejection of the idea of a unified, lawful, dynamic, and hierarchically ordered cosmos that expresses the form of God – Man – World – Society, and the embrace of the idea that human beings are infinitely perfectible, and that a glorious human future, a perfect Utopia, will issue when all the rest of us embrace the bright ideas of the dreamers of second realities.
What a world we live in! Don’t take any wooden nickels, my friend!
Thanks so much for writing hosepipe!