ABSTRACT
A great deal of G. K. Chesterton's best writing — a second area where he can be almost impeccable — describes the external world, but not in its primitiveness. He describes things conceptualized — as understood by an innocent man's mind but still by a mind that conceptualizes — and argues that this is the way the world is. Chesterton in fact calls his primitive picture of the horse 'something very like a mad vision', and is inclined to say that 'the traditional grasp of truth' about horses — or about anything — is better. Chesterton envisages instead a change of relation to the external world — centuries of abstinence, then rebirth. Chesterton senses the unreliability of consciousness as much as Eliot: but his remedy was not to investigate the nature of that unreliability, to build his language out of awareness of it, but to draw attention, even with violence, to the external world.
