Two viewpoints give depth, not a licence to contradict
His spiritual sight is stereoscopic, like his physical sight: he sees two different pictures at once and yet sees all the better for that.
The optical point is that difference can add information. In Charles Wheatstone’s 1838 paper on binocular vision, a nearby solid object presents a different perspective to each eye; presenting suitable drawings separately to the eyes reproduces the perception of depth. Chesterton’s ordinary mystic similarly refuses to flatten experience into one explanatory picture. Fate and freedom, childhood and authority, youth and age become different views which a fuller understanding must accommodate. Wheatstone, §§1–2.
The analogy also clarifies the qualification in ‘truths that seemed to contradict’: different perspectives on one object need not assert incompatible things about it. Nor does vision combine any two images successfully. Wheatstone’s §14 describes incompatible letter-images alternating rather than forming one stable picture. Thus the physical example illustrates the value of retaining complementary evidence; it cannot establish that logically contradictory propositions are both true. This is an interpretation of the analogy, not evidence that Chesterton had read Wheatstone. The inspected witness is Stereoscopy.com’s transcription of the paper first published in Philosophical Transactions 128 (1838), pp. 371–394.
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