Chesterton, Heretics and Skeptics

At the end of his book Heretics, Chesterton wrote:  “When [man] drops one doctrine after another in a refined scepticism, when he declines to tie himself to a system, when he says that he has outgrown definitions, when he says that he no longer believes in finality, when, in his own imagination, he sets himself up as God, holding no form or creed but contemplating all, then he is by that very process sinking slowly backwards into the vagueness of the vagrant animals and the unconsciousness of the grass.”  Thus he denounced, with his robust common sense, the era of universal suspicion into which modernity has plunged the human mind.