Heretics

In these essays Chesterton takes on the leading thinkers of his day and cheerfully argues that most of them have their first principles wrong. He calls them heretics not as an insult but as a claim that a person’s philosophy matters more than anything else about them, and he spars by name with George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, and the followers of Nietzsche. Published in 1905, the book defends wonder, tradition, and ordinary human life against fashionable pessimism and cold notions of progress, all in Chesterton’s trademark style of paradox and sudden common sense. It set the stage for his better-known Orthodoxy, written as its sequel. This free PDF and EPUB edition collects the complete essays.