Orthodoxy

G >> G. K. Chesterton >> Orthodoxy


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.
Torquemada tortured people physically for the sake of moral truth.
Zola tortured people morally for the sake of physical truth.
But in Torquemada'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 gigantesque 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 to-day 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 sceptic is so humble
that he doubts if he can even learn. Thus we should be wrong if we
had said hastily that there is no 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 will 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 are 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 sceptics 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 a 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 defence. 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
in the playful assertion that a door is not a door. The modern
latitudinarians speak, for instance, about authority in 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 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 sceptic, you must sooner or later ask yourself the question,
"Why should ANYTHING go right; even observation and deduction?
Why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic?
They are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape?"
The young sceptic says, "I have a right to think for myself."
But the old sceptic, the complete sceptic, 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. H.G.Wells has raised its
ruinous banner; he has written a delicate piece of scepticism called
"Doubts of the Instrument." In this he questions the brain itself,
and endeavours to remove all reality from all his own assertions,
past, present, and to come. 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
defence 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
defences 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.
For we can hear scepticism 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 which cannot themselves be proved. And in the act of
destroying the idea of Divine authority we have largely destroyed
the idea of that human authority by which we do a long-division sum.
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 should 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.
Descartes 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. H.G.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 scepticism 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? Nietzsche 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 ideal 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 Tennyson, in a wild and rather
weak manner, welcomed the idea of infinite alteration in society,
he instinctively took a metaphor which suggests an imprisoned tedium.
He wrote--

"Let the great world spin for ever 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 honouring 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 that 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 inhuman 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.

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 scepticism runs its course. It has run its course.
It is vain for eloquent atheists to talk of the great truths that
will be revealed if once we see free thought begin. We have seen
it end. It has no more questions to ask; it has questioned itself.
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
sceptical 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 pretence
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 freethinker 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 frightened 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. Belloc,
"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 left 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 demand it.
I have no space to trace or expound this philosophy of Will.
It came, I suppose, through Nietzsche, who preached something
that is called egoism. That, indeed, was simpleminded enough;
for Nietzsche 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 practise altruism.
But however it began, the view is common enough in current literature.
The main defence 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 are 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 defence of this doctrine of will, does show that the doctrine
of will has taken hold of men. Even Mr. H.G.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 break up 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 misstated)
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 towards 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 as better than another. And yet
choosing one course as 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 want
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 have willed the law
against which he rebels.

All the will-worshippers, from Nietzsche to Mr. Davidson,
are really quite empty of volition. They cannot will, they can
hardly wish. And if any one 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 and 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 Beadle 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-worshippers 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 Mayor's Show, and thou shalt
not stop me." Anarchism adjures 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 am sure that if triangles ever were loved,
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 colourless.

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 wished 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 Wilkes. Therefore they
have created something with a solid substance and 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 "revolutionise" from a transitive to an intransitive verb.
The Jacobin could 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 Sceptic,
and 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. Grundy because they keep it.
As a politician, he will cry out that war is a waste of life,
and then, as a philosopher, that all life is waste of time.
A Russian pessimist will denounce a policeman for killing a peasant,
and then prove by the highest philosophical principles that the
peasant ought to have killed himself. A man denounces marriage
as a lie, and then denounces aristocratic profligates for treating
it as a lie. He calls a flag a bauble, and then blames the
oppressors of Poland or Ireland because they take away that bauble.
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 and umbrella and goes on to a scientific meeting,
where he proves that they practically are beasts. In short,
the modern revolutionist, being an infinite sceptic, is always
engaged in undermining his own mines. 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.