[Michael F]

My thanks for the thoughtful responses. I confess I was surprised that no one found much value in any part of the quotation, so it turned out to be provocative in a way other than I had meant. I apologize for that, as it was a misreading on my part.

I should perhaps put the quotation in a larger context: GKC offers it as part of a defense of imagination, and particularly poetic and mystical imagination. It seems I can sniff these sorts out like a truffle pig in a French forest, and that probably accounts for no small part of my attraction. The contrast of finitude and infinity could be straight out of Pascal.

Anyway, his first target is philosophical materialism, his proxy for ‘logic’. I also reject philosophical / scientific materialism to the extent that it claims to be all-inclusive and all-explanatory, for the same, simple reasons Chesterton does: it flies in the face of common sense and experience, and at the limit becomes quite mad. For me, to deny my experience of free will is madness. You may as well tell me that the world is my dream and that day is night. Also, it is no less silly and unbelievable to me to say that there is an infinity of actual, parallel universes born by quantum fluctuations, or that there are half a dozen or more hidden dimensions in the universe that we can’t perceive – because this is what the mathematics demands – than to say the world was created in 6 days by the Old One. I can’t believe either story. (Forgive me if I misstate some of postulations of modern theoretical physics; I know I’m in the ballpark, but it’s been a while since I read it.) I don’t believe there is one ‘system’ of thought that adequately explains all existence -- to do so, for me, is a kind of intellectual imperialism. The world is bigger than that, I feel. I think EF Schumacher is very good on this subject.

I agree with those who said that GKC paints with a broad brush. I also agree that no man can reliably judge another’s inner experience, so neither I, nor GKC, can completely understand the excitement and gratification of scientific discovery, which certainly should have its esteemed place. I think GKC admits this, though not in this snippet.

I follow GKC much more closely in his critical enterprise than in his constructive enterprise (with the possible exception of distributism), and I am well aware of his manifest agenda in defending “The Thing”. There I cannot follow, though I have no hatred for it. I seem always to come back to Whitman and Blake: creeds and schools in abeyance, and not wanting to let another man’s system enslave me. Incidentally, GKC wrote a book on Blake that I must get my hands on.

And I think GKC is quite an entertaining stylist and polemicist.

Finally, Jan – re paradox – I love this quote from Niels Bohr: The opposite of a fact is a falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth.

I'm sorry if this reads like a journal entry. These are thoughts I've been chewing on for a while, like a cow its cud. On three acres.