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PART ONE (CHAPTERS I-VI)
PART TWO (CHAPTERS VII-XII)


Excerpt:

PART I


CHAPTER I # THE DICKENS PERIOD


Much of our modern difficulty, in religion and other things, arises merely from this: that we confuse the word "indefinable" with the word "vague." If some one speaks of a spiritual fact as "indefinable" we promptly picture something misty, a cloud with ind... More

PART ONE (CHAPTERS I-VI)
PART TWO (CHAPTERS VII-XII)


Excerpt:

PART I


CHAPTER I # THE DICKENS PERIOD


Much of our modern difficulty, in religion and other things, arises merely from this: that we confuse the word "indefinable" with the word "vague." If some one speaks of a spiritual fact as "indefinable" we promptly picture something misty, a cloud with indeterminate edges. But this is an error even in commonplace logic. The thing that cannot be defined is the first thing; the primary fact. It is our arms and legs, our pots and pans, that are indefinable. The indefinable is the indisputable. The man next door is indefinable, because he is too actual to be defined. And there are some to whom spiritual things have the same fierce and practical proximity; some to whom God is too actual to be defined.

But there is a third class of primary terms. There are popular expressions which every one uses and no one can explain; which the wise man will accept and reverence, as he reverences desire or darkness or any elemental thing. The prigs of the debating club will demand that he should define his terms. And, being a wise man, he will flatly refuse.
This first inexplicable term is the most important term of all. The word that has no definition is the word that has no substitute. If a man falls back again and again on some such word as "vulgar" or "manly," do not suppose that the word means nothing because he cannot say what it means. If he could say what the word means he would say what it means instead of saying the word. When the Game Chicken (that fine thinker) kept on saying to Mr. Toots, "It's mean. That's what it is--it's mean," he was using language in the wisest possible way. For what else could he say? There is no word for mean except mean. A man must be very mean himself before he comes to defining meanness. Precisely because the word is indefinable, the word is indispensable.


More Reading:
Other Books by G K Chesterton by ADB Publishing
(The Original) As I Was Saying
(The Original) Four Faultless Felons
(The Original) Tales of the Long Bow
(The Original) The Club of Queer Trades
(The Original) The Everlasting Man
(The Original) The Man Who Knew Too Much
(The Original) The Man Who Was Thursday
(The Original) The Napoleon of Notting Hill
(The Original) The Paradoxes of Mr Pond
(The Original) The Poet and The Lunatics Episodes in the Life of Gabriel Gale (1929)
(The Original) The Return of Don Quixote
(The Original) The Sword of Wood (1928)
(The Original) The Trees of Pride
BIOGRAPHIES:
(The Original) Charles Dickens (This Book)
(The Original) George Bernard Shaw
(The Original) Leo Tolstoy
(The Original) Lord Kitchener (1917)
(The Original) Milton Man and Poet
(The Original) Robert Browning
(The Original) Robert Louis Stevenson
(The Original) St Francis of Assisi
(The Original) St. Thomas Aquinas
(The Original) William Cobbett

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