Making the tortoise stand on the elephant
The elephant stands on the tortoise, and the tortoise on the elephant.
The joke alters a familiar philosophical illustration. In Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (first published 1689, dated 1690), II.xxiii.2, an interlocutor explains that the world rests on an elephant, the elephant on a tortoise, and the tortoise on an unidentified support. Locke uses the story to expose the obscurity of the supposed substance supporting observable qualities. The inspected online transcription does not identify its underlying printed edition. A separate, page-linked transcription of the 1690 edition, printed p. 80, II.xiii.19–20, supplies the related elephant-and-tortoise example and compares explaining a pillar by its base with explaining the base by the pillar. Locke, II.xxiii.2; 1690 witness, p. 80.djvu/96).
Chesterton closes the chain: each animal supports the other. This is consequently a picture of circular justification, rather than simply an unanswered question about the final support. Evolution is justified by goodness, goodness by evolution, and neither supplies an independent criterion. The parallel explains the joke without establishing that Chesterton borrowed it directly from Locke or that Locke’s anecdote accurately represents an Indian cosmological tradition.
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