en
an attenuated ghost of himself, let us re-clothe him and present him
decent and as he is. We must imagine this abstracted personage,
ignorant and therefore unbiassed, suddenly introduced to all the
learned jargon of the day. He still retains his simple views about
things out of date, and is called upon to pronounce views upon
entirely new matters--aristocracy and democracy, religion and
scepticism, art and morality, Tolstoy and Nietzsche. A welter of odd
ideas and delirious fanaticisms is suddenly sprung upon his simple
consciousness. He finds all the intellectual circles in England
working themselves into a fury about ideas, factitious ideas, which
positively did not exist for him when he was a happy abstraction.
Naturally, in his brief visit to the unabstracted world he has not
time to study in detail all the philosophies which have been invented
for the purpose of debate. But he goes round from circle to circle,
listens to this argument and to that, notices the effect which the
various philosophies have upon the characters of their exponents, and
himself enters into the fun of debate as if he had never been an
abstraction at all. He accepts the terminology which he finds ready
made, but of course uses it in his own way--he is obviously unable to
take anything for granted like the people who have always been
intellectuals. He continually comes across queer verbal usages, and
feels bound to declare that what we call free-thinking is not what we
call free; that what we call certainties are also what we call
uncertain; that aristocrats are unaristocratic; that doubters are
dogmatists; and that tradition is an "extension of the franchise." And
then the world, having never been out of its own generation, having
never been anything so shocking as an abstraction, dismisses Mr.
Chesterton with the smiling remark that he is, after all, a brilliant
writer of paradoxes.

Let us for a moment put aside our own intellectual prejudices, our
preconceptions, and follow Mr. Chesterton along his path of common
sense. He himself, in his book on _Orthodoxy_, throws over the
intellectuals. It is not that he refutes them--that would be a denial
of his own method; nor that he has completely studied them--that would
be a denial of his own character; but he does show us what havoc their
methods may work upon the mind, what an overthrow of our workaday
notions, our most vivid and keen impressions. If all the things that we
seem to know the