A gardener's vision need not come from the wilderness
We cannot, then, get the ideal itself from nature
The distinction is between explaining how moral judgments arose and establishing which judgments deserve allegiance. A natural history of a desire does not, by itself, show that we ought to satisfy it. That is why the paragraph asks for a vision rather than another account of evolution. Its temporary exclusion of God also matters: Chesterton is asking what reform requires before returning to the Christian account of its goal. In this chapter, the vision must first become fixed and composite; Christianity subsequently presents Eden and a divinely composed city as answers. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, first published 1908, chapter VII, especially the paragraphs beginning ‘When I had written this down’ and ‘This, then, is our second requirement’.
T. H. Huxley's Evolution and Ethics—Prolegomena (1894), distinct from his 1893 Romanes Lecture and inspected in the electronic transcription of Collected Essays IX, provides a close comparison. A gardener works toward a mentally held standard and must continually maintain it against surrounding processes. Yet human intelligence remains a product of nature. Thus rejecting nature as a sufficient moral authority need not entail denying a natural origin for the mind that judges it. The agreement does not establish that Chesterton borrowed from Huxley, or that Huxley supplied Chesterton's eventual Christian ideal. Huxley, Prolegomena, sections II–IV, pp. 9–14.
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