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| English writer philosopher Gilbert Chesterton (1874-1936) and his 1925 speculations on the nature of “dead things”. [2] |
“The stone selenite holds the image of the moon even to her very phases. The magnet-stone points to the pole star. These are dead things, says Brutus, do living things likewise draw influences from the sky.”— Jean Fernel (1548), On the Hidden Causes of Things, quoted by Charles Sherrington [1]
“A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.”— Gilbert Chesterton (1925), The Everlasting Man [2]
“Men believe that death is stronger than life, and therefore dead things must be stronger than living things; whether those dead things are gold and iron and machinery or rocks and rivers and forces of nature. It may sound fanciful to say that men we meet at tea tables or talk to at garden-parties are secretly worshippers of Baal or Moloch. But this sort of commercial mind has its own cosmic vision and it is the vision of Carthage. It has in it the brutal blunder that was the ruin of Carthage. The Punic power fell, because there is in this materialism a mad indifference to real thought. By disbelieving in the soul, it comes to disbelieving in the mind.”— Gilbert Chesterton (1925), The Everlasting Man [2]
