The Philosophical Optimist

            It is a great pity when the editor of a great writer fails to understand that writer, and thus ends up committing the very error the writer is attacking; but, as Shakespeare said, "That 'tis true 'tis pity, and pity 'tis 'tis true."             Recently, I was reading the collection, G.K. Chesterton: Essential Writings , edited and introduced by one Mr. William Griffin.   Mr. Griffin, in this fine volume ("fine" in the double sense of being both excellent and small), has gathered selections from Mr. Chesterton's various writings, both short and long, which contain elements of the author's spiritual wisdom (the book being part of the Modern Spiritual Masters Series).   In addition to headnotes and endnotes to each selection, Mr. Griffin also composed an introduction for the volume, dealing with various aspects of Chesterton, the man and the writer. ...

Everyone knows it to be true that excellence with language and excellence with math are mutually exclusive gifts.   It is an idea as old as Plato, who sided with the mathematicians by—so the legend goes—writing above the entrance to his Academy the ward and warning: “Let none ignorant of mathematics enter here” (It’s much catchier in Greek).   When he got around to imagining his perfect society in his Republic , he went further, having poetry expelled from that imagined realm.   Yes, everyone knows one cannot be good with both letters and numbers.             But what everyone knows—on this point, as on so many others—is wrong.             I begin this meditation with the confession that I am an English professor, with all my degrees in the humanities; and yet, this does not mean that I am a stranger to the ways of numbers.   On the contrary, I balan...