The ordinary human being against the Superman
The sense of the miracle of humanity itself should be always more vivid to us than any marvels of power, intellect, art, or civilization.
The comparison is between shared humanity and exceptional accomplishment: democracy begins here as a judgment about what deserves our deepest admiration. An earlier version appears in Heretics (first published 1905), chapter IV, ‘Mr. Bernard Shaw.’ Chesterton objects that measuring actual people against an imagined superior being makes ordinary human capacities look defective. His alternative is astonishment at the human creature’s eyes, thumbs, affections and consciousness; he ends by imagining Shaw amazed at his own feet. Read the passage, in the paragraph beginning ‘For the truth is that Mr. Shaw has never seen things as they really are.’
The two legs here thus belong to an established argument: familiar embodiment can conceal a greater wonder than exceptional achievement. Orthodoxy turns that argument into the first premise of democracy. The closing comparisons apply the same reversal to tragedy and comedy: starvation specifies a manner of dying, and the Norman nose specifies a kind of nose, while mortality and embodiment are already astonishing. This is a priority of attention, not a demonstrated claim that particular suffering requires no remedy. The Heretics witness inspected is Gutenberg’s transcription of the twelfth, 1919 John Lane edition; it is not a collation of the 1905 first edition.
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