This quotation has appeared at the bottom of my outgoing emails for about a month now:
"Materialists and madmen never have doubts."
G.K. Chesterton
Orthodoxy
To unravel the quotation it helps to know that Chesterton is talking about materialists in the theoretical sense. As I understand it, a materialist is someone who believes that matter is all there is, therefore the answer to any question can only be found based on evaluating material evidence. Chesterton says that madmen never have doubts because their madness creates an all-encompassing story that explains any given event. They truly believe "in themselves" because anything that happens within their experience happens to them. The materialist also never has doubts, because if any given phenomenon cannot be explained scientifically that phenomenon either cannot exist or else science simply hasn't found the explanation for it yet.
2 comments:
Dan: Thanks for explaining that. I had no idea what that quote meant. Shelly and I discussed it once or twice, with no further insights. Merely defining one word can clear things up pretty easily.
Yeah, Dan, Shelly and I talked about the quote before Christmas and at the time I said I didn't remember what it actually meant. After thinking about it I didn't even have to look it up because I realized that the quote was tied to a specific definition of materialism.
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