The glass man before Chesterton
A man who thinks he is a bit of glass is to himself as dull as a bit of glass.
The glass man belongs to an older repertoire of examples of delusion. In the First Meditation, Descartes lists people who believe themselves kings, earthenware-headed, or made of glass. He initially refuses to model his inquiry on them, then moves to dreams, which supply ordinary sleepers with comparably improbable experiences. See Meditation I, the passage beginning ‘And how could I deny’, and the following two paragraphs. The work first appeared in Latin in 1641; this is the Haldane–Ross English translation in The Philosophical Works of Descartes, volume I (1911), whose prefatory note identifies the 1642 Latin second edition as its base.
The resemblance does not establish that Chesterton borrowed from Descartes. It clarifies his alteration of the familiar example: his subject is the difference between experiencing an impossible identity as fact and enjoying it as imaginative incongruity. The glass man supplies that contrast; neither its earlier appearance nor Chesterton’s assertion demonstrates that people experiencing delusions necessarily find their lives dull.
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