Seeing With Fresh Eyes

I am in a book group that will tomorrow start The Everlasting Man by GK Chesterton. GKC is known for paradox, but paradox is only a tool of his to see things afresh. We do not see the amazing things that surround us, but Chesterton shows them to us. I was worried that because the book begins with seeing man with new eyes, especially early man, that the updating of science would render the examples uncomfortable in their wrongness. There is some of that in the book, but I was pleased to find right at the beginning an example that is even more true now that we know more about our ancestors and the domestication of the horse on the Steppe. It was a lucky chance (if chance you call it), for the horse was good food who fed himself even in winter, but was impossible to ride. One of the very few barely tractable ones - perhaps even the only one in a century - was seen by a reckless herder who had a wild idea. Chesterton's paragraph about it was a bit prescient.

Now, as it is with the monster that is called a horse, so it is with the monster that is called a man. Of course the best condition of all, in my opinion, is always to have regarded man as he is regarded in my philosophy. He who holds the Christian and Catholic view of human nature will feel certain that it is a universal and therefore a sane view, and will be satisfied. But if he has lost the sane vision, he can only get it back by something very like a mad vision; that is, by seeing man as a strange animal and realising how strange an animal he is. But just as seeing the horse as a prehistoric prodigy ultimately led back to, and not away from, an admiration for the mastery of man, so the really detached consideration of the curious career of man will lead back to, and not away from, the ancient faith in the dark designs of God. In other words, it is exactly when we do see how queer the quadruped is that we praise the man who mounts him; and exactly when we do see how queer the biped is that we praise the Providence that made him.