It is customary to complain of the
bustle and strenuousness of our epoch. But in truth the chief mark of our epoch is a profound laziness and fatigue; and the fact is that the real
laziness is the cause of the apparent bustle. Take one quite external case; the streets are noisy with taxicabs and motorcars; but this is not
due to human activity but to human repose. There would be less bustle if there were more activity, if people were simply walking about. Our world
would be more silent if it were more strenuous. And this which is true of the apparent physical bustle is true also of the apparent bustle of the
intellect. Most of the machinery of modern language is labour-saving machinery; and it saves mental labour very much more than it ought.
Scientific phrases are used like scientific wheels and piston-rods to make swifter and smoother yet the path of the comfortable. Long words go
rattling by us like long railway trains. We know they are carrying thousands who are too tired or too indolent to walk and think for
themselves. It is a good exercise to try for once in a way to express any opinion one holds in words of one
syllable. If you say “The social utility of the indeterminate sentence is recognized by all criminologists as a part of our sociological evolution
towards a more humane and scientific view of punishment,” you can go on talking like that for hours with hardly a movement of the gray matter
inside your skull. But if you begin “I wish Jones to go to gaol and Brown to say when Jones shall come out,” you will discover, with a thrill of
horror, that you are obliged to think. The long words are not the hard words, it is the short words that are hard. There is much more
metaphysical subtlety in the word “damn” than in the word “degeneration.”
But these long comfortable words that save modern people the toil of reasoning have one particular aspect in which they are especially ruinous
and confusing. This difficulty occurs when the same long word is used in different connections to mean quite different things. Thus, to take a
well-known instance, the word “idealist” has one meaning as a piece of philosophy and quite another as a piece of moral rhetoric. In the same way
the scientific materialists have had just reason to complain of people mixing up “materialist” as a term of cosmology with “materialist” as a
moral taunt.
Orthodoxy, first published in 1908, by G. K. Chesterton, is in the public domain, and available from Project Gutenberg. The previous post in this series is here. Thanks for reading! Read Chesterton.
Musings on science, the Bible, and fantastic literature (and sometimes basketball and other stuff).
God speaks to us through the Bible and the findings of science, and we should listen to both types of revelation.
The title is from Psalm 84:11.
The Wikipedia is usually a pretty good reference. I mostly use the World English Bible (WEB), because it is public domain. I am grateful.
License
I have written an e-book, Does the Bible Really Say That?, which is free to anyone. To download that book, in several formats, go here.
The posts in this blog are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. You can copy and use this material, as long as you aren't making money from it. If you give me credit, thanks. If not, OK.
The posts in this blog are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. You can copy and use this material, as long as you aren't making money from it. If you give me credit, thanks. If not, OK.
Sunday, December 06, 2015
Excerpts from Orthodoxy, by G. K. Chesterton, 50
Labels:
bustle,
busyness,
Chesterton,
G. K. Chesterton,
long words,
Orthodoxy,
short words
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