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  "id": "CH04.P012",
  "oid": 77,
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  "work_metadata": {
    "title": "Orthodoxy",
    "authors": [
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    "original_publication_year": 1908,
    "alternate_titles": [],
    "subjects": [
      "Christian apologetics",
      "Christianity",
      "Philosophy of religion",
      "Paradox",
      "G. K. Chesterton",
      "English literature, 20th century"
    ],
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    "metadata_updated_at": "2026-11-07T20:29:57Z"
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  "text": "I deny altogether that this is fantastic or even mystical. We may have some mysticism later on; but this fairy-tale language about things is simply rational and agnostic. It is the only way I can express in words my clear and definite perception that one thing is quite distinct from another; that there is no logical connection between flying and laying eggs. It is the man who talks about \"a law\" that he has never seen who is the mystic. Nay, the ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations. He has so often seen birds fly and lay eggs that he feels as if there must be some dreamy, tender connection between the two ideas, whereas there is none. A forlorn lover might be unable to dissociate the moon from lost love; so the materialist is unable to dissociate the moon from the tide. In both cases there is no connection, except that one has seen them together. A sentimentalist might shed tears at the smell of apple-blossom, because, by a dark association of his own, it reminded him of his boyhood. So the materialist professor (though he conceals his tears) is yet a sentimentalist, because, by a dark association of his own, apple-blossoms remind him of apples. But the cool rationalist from fairyland does not see why, in the abstract, the apple tree should not grow crimson tulips; it sometimes does in his country.",
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      "updated_at": "2026-11-07T16:59:22Z",
      "title": "The scientist as sentimentalist: a Humean argument turned against scientific certainty",
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          "exact": "He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.",
          "start": 504,
          "end": 606,
          "prefix": "n is strictly a sentimentalist. ",
          "suffix": " He has so often seen birds fly ",
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            "approach": "Philosophical contextualization: then and since",
            "question": "How does the charge that scientific belief is association compare with Hume's explanation of causal inference, and what does that comparison establish?"
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            "approach": "Interlocutors and historical debates",
            "question": "Does Newton's own account of natural law require the logical necessity that Chesterton attacks?"
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      "title": "A world that might not have been: wonder, gratitude, and the discipline of joy",
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