Humour as part of a complete human intelligence
the combination of an expansive and exhaustive reason with a contracted common sense
The contrast continues a dispute already developed in Heretics (first published 1905; inspected here in Project Gutenberg #470). Chapter XVI, ‘On Mr. McCabe and a Divine Frivolity,’ reproduces McCabe’s objection that Chesterton substitutes dazzling verbal effects for sober inquiry. Chesterton answers that comedy and sincerity are independent qualities: a joke can convey truth, and solemnity can conceal emptiness. His concluding answer is that humour belongs to human nature, so excluding it makes an account of humanity incomplete. Heretics, XVI.
That earlier argument helps explain why ‘common sense’ here includes more than successful inference. An explanation may be internally rigorous while excluding capacities by which people recognize a situation’s proportions. The chessboard’s reversal supplies a miniature exercise in such recognition: it asks the reader to change emphasis without changing the object. This is an interpretive connection, rather than a claim that a sense of humour establishes a theory’s truth or a person’s mental health. The passage turns Chesterton’s earlier defense of his controversial style into a criticism of explanatory narrowness.
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