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Show Reasonable to Believe in Miracles, Says 6. IL Chesterton I f By G K Chesterton I. the D st ngu shed Engl sh Pub iclst 1EE that Mr Will am Archer has been call ng me the Apostle of Unrea on It seems s, to me a specially interesting e ample of to Rationalism underm nes the reaso ng Wer Mr Archer s an able m n a d a lover o,truth and I am certa n that nothing but Ra onal sm could have made him so irrat onal a3 M For the plain and palpable modern fact exactly the other way There really are some writers very modern and fashionable ftcrs at that who are Apostles of Unreason say hey are Mpr Bergson is an Apostle of Unreason He iea y seems to hold that we may find out what ff want by trying to get it without know ng hat It is The late Professor W 11 am James tmulat ng and sj mpathetic as he w as might Ut unfairly be called an Apostle of Unreason Tjr Bernard Shaw has often been a ser ous and ince e Apostle of Unreason He has ma n til ned that all logic leads to killing oneself "4 of the two t s better to 1 11 logic ietzsche was something like an Apostle or un eason. He sa d We must have chaos w th n that we may g ve birth to a dancing star ine Pragmat sts aro Apostles of Unreason Nearly 1 the Modernists who were condemned n the ppe 3 Encyclical vere condemned for bein Pagmatsts and Apostles of Unreason Anyone who w 11 read the Encycl cal will see fat I state the essential fact. Oscar W lde set e fashion of be ng an Apostle of Unreason a Hen he sa d that brute reason was hitting be-ithe be-ithe Intellect Dr Brandes the i d stin fished Jew and sceptic helped to set the fash ' on of being an Apostle of Unreason when he !51 1 think Who knows t at two and two do fot make fi e in the planet Jup ter? To wh cb Lnser I do Wbe que ton xoptis to be q Ito as senseless fasaj ng Who knows tl at ves s not the san e ?f no i tl e State of Ma no' I have never Fn to the State of Maine thank God but I jS" that ves is not 1 e same as o anjwbere Mr John Davidson that unfortunate man of gen us took up tho trade of Apostle of Unrea son and pra ser of pure force and v 11 and a phlosoihc work recently publ shed by a French Freethinker warns its readers aga nst reason as something that clos and cha ns the sacrtd changes of Evolut on In short, we may reallj say that nearly all the people who con b der themselves spec ally progress ve ad vanced up to date modern st or futur st are a owedly Aiostles of Unreason Practically it comes to th s that the people who are now opposed op-posed to reason are prac cally all tho people w ho are also opposed to rel g on. But to say that I am opposed to reason s si up y not true I ask no better descr pbon of he Pragn a st pos t on wheh denes the au or t of reason than that given by Mr Bent ley s detective n Trent s Last Case that it bal Christian ty and also nfernal non pnse I th nk the modern attempt to get rid of rea on ng altogether s very 1 ke some of the attempts to get rid of fighting altogether I n t s unmanly and unworthy of a man Decadeuts ma like 1 v ng n a dream wh ch hey can alter at any moment to suit them selves n which they can create causes w thout creating consequences n wh ch they can per prt the future or unmake the past. But i thnk a decent working man of any class he her be s working at cul e roots or cabbage roots ought to be glad that, as be sows -o shall he surely reap As these are my i en about reason and unreason and as I have often defended them against Mr Bernard Shaw Mr H G W ells and others It becomes a really in terestlng quest on to ask how so intell gent a n an as Mr Archer has come to cons der me n so oppos te a 1 ght, and where he got his notion that I am an Apostle of Unreason Well I pass over what I cannot help call ng the rather cheap part of the argun ent, which seems to cons st n chaff ng me with the 1 ttle known and carefully concealed fact tl at I can not work m racles Nevertheless as Mr Archer gloom ly notes I sa d at Cambridge it I thought it probablo that some other peo- p C CO Id Well I cannot w ork miracles and I seem to remember somebody who (as I bel e e) could w ork miracles but who was taunted n tho hour of death with not working them and taunted in lan So that n pure reason een the non performance of miracles vould not prove an inab 1 ty to perform them Anjhow I cannot (so far as I know for agnostic sm 13 too eas ly forgotten nowadays) work m racles I cannot, as Mr Archer that demoniac detec t ve has d scovered move the Albert Hall from I ondon to Par s and levita jon In my own case would probably be about as diff cult as n the ase of the parallel structure of the Albert Hall Th s is true and it affects the q estion of whether miracles can happen about as much as the fact that I cannot tame 1 ons affects the quest on of whether they have ever been tamed or the fact that I have never been known to fly upside down affects the question of whether t has ever been done. A miracle i3 bj bjpothes 3 a marvel That is to say it s a very rare and a very unexpected thing If t could be done by anybody at any ni nute it s surely as pla n as a p kestaff that it could not fulfil the funct on true or false wh ch its supporters suppose t to fulfil It is part of Mr Archers argument that miracles seem neffectual for their purpose I can earnestly assure him that they would be much more ineffectual If I were allowed to work them But I cannot think that Mr Archer akes this part of h s argument seriously It is lust h s passion for paradox Speaking as the Apostle of Reason I ow remark re-mark that Mr Archers d fficulty resides in a definable fallacj the confus on between the comprehension of the deduction and the com prehensi eness of the data If he is arguing f om a Monist first pr nc pie that it s neon ceivable to suppose that a Supreme ntelli cence could change its m nd or blasphemous to suppose that t would wish to then h s argu ment s quite fair he s not bound to give p 1 s s mple fa th for tho sake of fragmentary nan festatons whicl nust evpn for the r own purpose be few and far between But fie s arguing from the ev dence o absence of e dence I m t sa rs.nk t it I do 00 h nk ' he knows the cv dence I do not speak n arrogance I d d not know t inj self fro n the ord nary good educat on gi en to an ntell gent Engl shman or Scotch man I d d not know it unt 1 close on m ddla age wl en other moral problems tu ed n y ttu dies in that d roct on U story s 1 orr bly badly taught in England and Scotland for the very natu al reason that some tl ousand year9 of il has to be made out as n uch s 11 er than t v as ha e only space to allude to one ca3e the case of wUchcraft I think a caod d inq rer will come to the conclusion that somo itches were really n league w th invis"ble powers of ev 1, f he bcl eves the documents and most certa nly if he bcl eves the itc s I ta e the cafce of w tchcraft for throe reasons of very varying value One s tl at I do not think jus tice has ever been done e t er to the truth or falsehood of the fine play of The Witch which Mr Granv lie Barker produced Second and more mportant because n th s case one can not be accused of mere optlm st c map believe Nobody wants to think that their fellow crea tures had fallen under the nfl "nee of fiends If any fa rlv good natured person b nks so it must be because he has honestly tried to face real ties I cannot say of course that if Mr rcher had been told the whole truth he would have" drawn the same ded ctions as 1 di Lut 1 can say with co siderable confidence that his pas tors and masters d d not tfll him the wbolo truth I can say it on the princ pie that inspires the cl eerful Cockney sentiment of Same here The plan truth is that lies have been told and have got to be untold And the last md most mportant rpason for nent onlng w tcbes t this that nobody can beg n to n ders and the theoretic lefence of the miraculous wl o does not understand the idea of a posit ve flgl t aga nst pos t ve evil We should be r ght n tl ink ng t silly for be good angels to inter fere f none of s bel eved in bad ongpls A n acle, f vo Ik" proc rns mart al la v n t un ve sp B t not n PTsnnab p for t na b h onlv na o rprnnri ns- r apnn with |
