The Darwinian movement has made no difference to mankind, except that, instead of talking unphilosophically about philosophy, they now talk unscientifically about science.
Interpretation
This quote critiques the way people approach philosophical and scientific discussions, suggesting that they often do so without proper understanding.
Gilbert K. Chesterton's quote reveals his skepticism about the impact of Darwinian theory on human discourse. He argues that while the conversation has shifted from philosophy to science, it has not necessarily improved in quality or rigor. Instead, he implies that people continue to engage in discussions that lack depth and understanding, whether in philosophical or scientific contexts, leading to a failure to grasp the true complexities of these subjects.
In practice
This quote could be used in a debate about the relevance of Darwinism in contemporary philosophical discussions.
Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago; I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago.
I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
The good Bishop of Assisi expressed a sort of horror at the hard life which the Little Brothers lived at the Portiuncula, without comforts, without possessions, eating anything they could get and sleeping anyhow on the ground. St. Francis answered him with that curious and almost stunning shrewdness which the unworldly can sometimes wield like a club of stone. He said, 'If we had any possessions, we should need weapons and laws to defend them.
The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.
I suppose every one must have reflected how primeval and how poetical are the things that one carries in one's pocket; the pocket-knife, for instance, the type of all human tools, the infant of the sword. Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.
Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.
The most important questions of life are indeed, for the most part, really only problems of probability.
I don't believe in that kind of American John Wayne individualism where people pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Someone changed your diapers. And if that's the case, you ain't self-made.
If people really see that Christ has removed the fear of punishment from them by taking it into Himself, they won't do whatever they want, they'll do whatever He wants.
What use is it to us to hear it said of a man that he has thrown off the yoke that he does not believe there is a God to watch over his actions, that he reckons himself the sole master of his behavior, and that he does not intend to give an account of it to anyone but himself?
Every State has a natural right in cases not within the compact (casus non faederis) to nullify of their own authority all assumptions of power by others within their limits. Without this right, they would be under the dominion, absolute and unlimited, of whosoever might exercise this right of judgment for them.
There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. As well speak of a female liver.
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