SOURCE: "The Approach to Thomism" in St. Thomas Aquinas, Sheed & Ward, Inc., 1933, pp. 175-95.

In the following excerpt, Chesterton describes Aquinas's philosophy as difficult but founded on common sense and practical, ordinary truisms.

The fact that Thomism is the philosophy of common sense is itself a matter of common sense. Yet it wants a word of explanation, because we have so long taken such matters in a very uncommon sense. For good or evil, Europe since the Reformation, and most especially England since the Reformation, has been in a peculiar sense the home of paradox. I mean in the very peculiar sense that paradox was at home, and that men were at home with it. The most familiar example is the English boasting that they are practical because they are not logical. To an ancient Greek or a Chinaman this would seem exactly like saying that London clerks...