Chesterton and Science

30:3, Reviews cellaneous filler provided by Dickens and Trollope—Thackeray called the material "tarts" baked to the public's taste, Orel notes (81)—to the overwhelmingly popular, brief, knowing insights of KipUng into Eastem and Western character in India, the poetic evocations of Conrad, and Wells's fantasy. Comments along the way occasionally note extrinsic influences such as Carleton's and Hardy's proximity to oral story telüng, the personal misfortune which may have turned Le Fanu toward fictional study of human corruptibility, the editorial roles which led Dickens and Trollope to "fill," and the wife who urged Stevenson to moraüze and thus caused him to mar his less successful stories. The strength of The Victorian Short Story, however, is in its parts rather than in a comprehensive or recurrent argument. Sometimes an essay puts a well-known point, such as Conrad's concern with point-of-view and Wells's use of the premise "What if?" in an especially lucid way, and some essays strike a provocative chord such as the well sustained (and, I think, correct) discussion of Le Fanu as a student of human corruptibility, despite the presence of inexplicable supernatural phenomena in his fiction, and the analysis of Kipling as a student of "character in the process of change" (148). There is interesting reading here, although the novice may wish to begin with a broader survey and the earnest speciahst may not rest easily until settled deeply into journal articles and the secondary sources cited in Orel's notes. These sources are almost invariably a solid mixture of classic background studies such as Walter Graham's English Literary Periodicals (1930), biographies such as Michael Millgate's ThomasHardy (1982) and monographs such as DeborahThomas'sDic&ens and the Short Story (1982) and Kristin Brady's The Short Stories of Thomas Hardy (1982). Alan Johnson Arizona State University CHESTERTON AND SCIENCE Stanley L. Jaki. Chesterton, a Seer of Science. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1986. $12.50 Stanley L. Jaki wants to set the record straight by arguing that Chesterton has been undervalued generally and defamed in particular concerning his knowledge of science. Jaki makes the valid observation that Chesterton's "The Ethics of Elfland" is too little known, that this work makes clear that Chesterton was less critical of science per se than of the status and the conclusions that people are prone to attribute to science. He was especially antagonistic to the cultural enstatement of science as a pseudo-philosophical scientism, which disguises the limits of science. Science, in Chesterton's view, conveys logical identities and relations, not realities; science is an act of subjectivity that tends to encourage people to emphasize the moment over a more objective, transcendent reality. Properly perceived, however, science and religion are functionally analogous for Chesterton. 366 30:3, Reviews Jaki specifically focuses on Chesterton's response to Darwin's theory of evolution , parts of which Chesterton rejected (according to Jaki) whenever he detected a combination of good science and bad philosophy. Chesterton had no trouble accepting biological gradations and prehistoric times, but he resisted the tendency of the proponents of Darwin's theory to extrapolate from the slowness of the evolutionary process an answer to the question of why life was proceeding at all. Chesterton could not abide any suggestion that the universe was fundamentally inchoate, that life began spontaneously, or that human consciousness evolved automaticaUy from animal origins. Chesterton focused on the Missing Link as a clear indication of a gap between gradual evolutionary progression and a human distinctness, even specialness, characterized both by a unique artistic creativity (like the Creator) and by, as Chesterton said, "the beautiful madness of laughter." As he noted in his study of Charles Dickens, "Evolution does not specially deny the existence of God; what it does deny is the existence of man." Chesterton wanted to preserve a firm sense of human will and challenge. A chief subject of science, the universe, indeed fascinated Chesterton. For him the cosmos was a firm reality that resisted the human proneness, and scientism's proneness, to soUpsism and pessimism. For Chesterton the universe was utterly specific, real, not defined by an origin in infinite...