The Suicide of the Human Mind

The Suicide of Thought

G. K. Chesterton ran the numbers on how the modern world has sought to dance with numerous partners--all of which have destroyed the dance itself.  There are hypotheses which end up destroying the very possibility of thought and reason.  Here is Chesterton's list of rationalist suicides, destroying the very possibility of thought:


1.  Evolution

. . .  But if [evolution] means anything more, it mean that there is no such thing as an ape to change, and 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.

2.  Skepticism.

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 that there are no categories at all.  . . . Thinking means connecting things, and stops if they cannot be connected. . . . 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". 

3. Relativism

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."  . . . If the standard changes, how can there be any 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. 

4. Pragmatism

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 human needs is to something more than a pragmatist.

Conclusion:

The main point here, however, is that this idea of a fundamental alteration in the standard is one of the things what 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.

[G. K. Chesterton, "The Suicide of Thought,"  Collected Works, Volume I (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), p. 236ff.]