Chesterton distinguishes between what is logically necessary and what merely happens again and again in the natural world. Apples fall, birds fly, and trees bear fruit—but repetition does not make these things any less mysterious. Through fairy tales, Newton’s apple, and the strange logic of Wonderland, this session asks whether modern knowledge has explained the world or merely taught us to stop being astonished by it.
Read the full text below.
Welcome.
I’m glad you’re here.
This is Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton, using the Project Gutenberg edition—read slowly, aloud, and in company.
These readings aren’t lectures, and they aren’t explanations. They’re an invitation: to listen carefully, to follow an argument that wanders on purpose, and to allow surprise to do some of the work. So, let’s take our time—and see where Chesterton leads us today.
Last time, Chesterton began leading us into the logic of fairyland, where imagination does not overthrow reason but helps us see the world more clearly. He suggested that facts alone cannot exhaust meaning and that wonder, tradition, and common sense may reveal a world that is more gift than machine.
This week, we continue our journey into the land of—using Tolkien’s term—“Faërie,” a realm of human imagination and wonder. Chesterton draws a parallel between the stories he learned in the nursery and the causal relationships we observe in the world. Can we retain our wonder and still walk intelligently through the modern world? Or, perhaps more urgently, dare we walk through the modern world without it?
Let’s turn now to the reading.
Reading thirteen – lines one thousand five hundred fifty-six through one thousand six hundred seventy-four of Chesterton, G. K. Orthodoxy (1908). Project Gutenberg eBook no. 16769.
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. Haeckel 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 eighteen 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 began to take notice of the natural world, I observed an 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 hit 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, of 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 Bean-stalk 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 and 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 marvellous 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, Grimm's Law. But Grimm's Law is far less intellectual than Grimm'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 generalisation and enactment; not merely that we have noticed some of the effects. If there is a law that pick-pockets shall go to prison, 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 further off each other than the bear and the prince; for no egg in itself suggests a chicken, whereas some princes do suggest bears. Granted, then, 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 turned to horses or her clothes fell from her at twelve o'clock. We must answer that it is magic. It is not a "law," for 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 the 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 altogether 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. It 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.
In the newer adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, Alice takes up the White Queen’s practice of believing “six impossible things before breakfast.” Cards may fly through the air. A Three of Hearts may steal a tart or paint the roses red—but it remains the Three of Hearts. If we imagine it as a Two, then it has become a Two in our minds and in the story. That is a logical necessity. We may explore the imaginative world of the physically impossible, but the logically necessary does not change. We can imagine a never-ending tea party, but not one in which one Dormouse is, in precisely the same sense, two Dormice.
Yet Chesterton’s greater point is not simply that fairyland respects logical necessity. Fairyland does so without surrendering its wonder before the mysteries of existence. Cause and effect remain real, but repetition need not make them dull.
Is Chesterton asking us to live in the modern world with both reason and astonishment intact—to recognize that the apple reliably falls while still wondering why there should be apples, gravity, or a world in which either exists? Perhaps wonder does not compete with understanding. Perhaps it begins where our explanations reach their limit.
Next time, Chesterton traces the wonder of fairy tales back to our more basic astonishment at existence itself. He then introduces the “Doctrine of Conditional Joy”: the strange idea that life is an extravagant gift whose happiness may depend upon accepting limits we do not fully understand.
Let’s meet again in two weeks. Until then, God bless and keep well.
Session: 14
Reading: 13
Project: Chesterton Orthodoxy Reading Series
Primary Text: G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (1908)
Edition Used: Project Gutenberg eBook #16769
Reading Lines: 1556 through 1674