THE ETERNAL REVOLUTION - GK CHESTERTON ORTHODOXY

THE ETERNAL REVOLUTION FROM "ORTHODOXY" BY GKC:<br /><br /><br />vague modern<br />people take refuge in material metaphors; in fact, this is the chief<br />mark of vague modern people. Not daring to define their doctrine<br />of what is good, they use physical figures of speech without stint<br />or shame, and, what is worst of all, seem to think these cheap<br />analogies are exquisitely spiritual and superior to the old morality.<br />Thus they think it intellectual to talk about things being "high."<br />It is at least the reverse of intellectual; it is a mere phrase<br />from a steeple or a weathercock. "Tommy was a good boy" is a pure<br />philosophical statement, worthy of Plato or Aquinas. "Tommy lived<br />the higher life" is a gross metaphor from a ten-foot rule.<br /><br /> This, incidentally, is almost the whole weakness of Nietzsche,<br />whom some are representing as a bold and strong thinker.<br />No one will deny that he was a poetical and suggestive thinker;<br />but he was quite the reverse of strong. He was not at all bold.<br />He never put his own meaning before himself in bald abstract words:<br />as did Aristotle and Calvin, and even Karl Marx, the hard,<br />fearless men of thought. Nietzsche always escaped a question<br />by a physical metaphor, like a cheery minor poet. He said,<br />"beyond good and evil," because he had not the courage to say,<br />"more good than good and evil," or, "more evil than good and evil."<br />Had he faced his thought without metaphors, he would have seen that it<br />was nonsense. So, when he describes his hero, he does not dare to say,<br />"the purer man," or "the happier man," or "the sadder man," for all<br />these are ideas; and ideas are alarming. He says "the upper man,"<br />or "over man," a physical metaphor from acrobats or alpine climbers.<br />Nietzsche is truly a very timid thinker. He does not really know<br />in the least what sort of man he wants evolution to produce.<br />And if he does not know, certainly the ordinary evolution