It would not be far wrong to describe Mr. Chesterton's philosophy as a sort of sublimated public opinion _minus_ the opinion of the intellectuals. To get at what I mean I must for the moment ask the reader to think of Mr. Chesterton as an abstraction. Let him conceive an Englishman, unlike any existing Englishman, who has never heard of Darwin or Spencer; who has never been impregnated with the theory of induction or analytical psychology; an Englishman who has never read or heard of Macaulay, Froude, Carlyle, Ruskin, Bagehot, Mill, Seeley, or Mr. Frederic Harrison; who has read none of the poets since Milton; who has never been asked to consider the Reform Bill or the Education Bill, the Oxford Movement or the Æsthetic Movement, Realism or Impressionism, Non-Resistance or the Will to Power, Mr. Bernard Shaw or Mr. Aylmer Maude, the Primrose League or the Labour Party, Mr. Yeats or even Mr. O'Finnigan. Let us imagine that this agreeable abstraction is in the habit of moving about among other abstractions like himself; that he knows a horse when he sees it (even if he cannot ride it); that he is accustomed to hospitable inn-parlours where you may discuss any philosophy so long as it is not a system; that he has a chivalrous admiration for women; that he likes sunshine and adores the moon; that he believes in God, the respectability of wives, ballad poetry, good fellowship, and good wine. And now, having stripped Mr. Chesterton so that he is no longer even an attenuated ghost of himself, let us re-clothe him and present him decent and as he is. We must imagine this abstracted personage, ignorant and therefore unbiassed, suddenly introduced to all the learned jargon of the day. He still retains his simple views about things out of date, and is called upon to pronounce views upon entirely new matters--aristocracy and democracy, religion and scepticism, art and morality, Tolstoy and Nietzsche. A welter of odd ideas and delirious fanaticisms is suddenly sprung upon his simple consciousness. He finds all the intellectual circles in England working themselves into a fury about ideas, factitious ideas, which positively did not exist for him when he was a happy abstraction. Naturally, in his brief visit to the unabstracted world he has not time to study in detail all the philosophies which have been invented for the purpose of debate. But he goes round from circle to circle, listens to this argument and to that, notices the effect which the various philosophies have upon the characters of their exponents, and himself enters into the fun of debate as if he had never been an abstraction at all. He accepts the terminology which he finds ready made, but of course uses it in his own way--he is obviously unable to take anything for granted like the people who have always been intellectuals. He continually comes across queer verbal usages, and feels bound to declare that what we call free-thinking is not what we