In my never-ending search for truth and humour, I often consult AMBER with the barest scrap of a word, just to see how many thousand odd things show up in Chesterton's writing. For example, the word "than" appears nearly 18,000 times in the current collection, landing somewhere about 55th place in the most frequently used words. So it seems futile to hunt for a Chesterton quote with just the bare word "than"... but I wanted to find his stunningly odd ratio - you know that X is to Y more than A is to B, or whatever it was.
Yes, I finally found what I wanted. It was this:
You cannot discuss whether one people has succeeded more in being miserable than another succeeded in being happy. It would be like discussing whether Milton was more puritanical than a pig is fat.Yes very nice. But on the journey through the vast variety of "hits" for our desired word, I found another...
[GKC Orthodoxy CW1:239]
Physical science has everything in the world to do with fancy, though not perhaps much in the highest sense to do with imagination. Imagination as we have it in great poetry is concerned with the things that fall naturally into an harmonious picture; but fancy is concerned with things which conceal an intellectual affinity under a total pictorial difference. Imagination celebrates the stars and clouds together, but fancy and physical science alike see that a squib or a pipe-light, or perhaps even a humming-top, are more akin to the stars than a cloud is. The whole fascination of science lies in this disguised fraternity. Nature in this aspect seems made of secret societies in the darkest and most misleading costumes. No elf-land of the human fancy can offer a kingdom so preposterous as that in which a whale is nearer to a bat than a whale to a shark, or a bat to a bird. This general consciousness that the most perfect similarities exist in the most diverse examples is a thing that must have haunted the minds of hundreds of good-working physicians when they saw the same disease attacking an aspidestra in a fernery, and an old gentleman in his arm-chair.Isn't that hilarious? As I said, you cannot have humour without truth. The whale (being a mammal) is indeed closer to the bat (another mammal) than to the shark (which is a fish).
[GKC "Oliver Wendell Holmes" in GKC as MC 13]
This Whale:Bat >> Whale:Shark ratio is, of course, utter anathema to Darwin and his followers. It's even funnier to remember that the clearly and dramatically different chihuahua and St. Bernard are both the same species called Canis familiaris - but Darwin's all-but-identical filthy finches of the Galapagos are "not" the same species because they cannot mate. Wow.
But no doubt you read all that up in Pinckwerts, you fool! Don't you know that "the notion that involution functioned eugenically was exposed long ago by Glumpe"???
Hee hee hee!
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From Barb:
ReplyDeleteI wanted to say thanks for the Whale Bat post. I’m a fan of E.O. Wilson’s and wanted to remember the name of his finch book. I find a cool Website you’ll love, www.uncommondescent.com. An article had a link to a particularly revolting site: www.darwinday.com!
The premise of this site, and when you read the author’s credentials you’ll know what’s wrong with a whole lot of the people who teach in this world, is that Lincoln and Darwin are the Great Emancipators. Darwin? He freed us from the intellectual slavery of religion.
He wants 1,000 word articles on his theme. I propose one on the influence of Social Darwinism on the Eugenics Movement and Hitler’s Holocaust. Think I’ll get an answer? Not after I pointed out the Pope’s interdiction of the Christian by Christian enslavement in 1940 and Margaret Sanger’s chumminess with Nazi eugenicists. Planted a little seed…