The wind and the trees

Chapter XII of 'Tremendous Trifles' starts with a parable: a boy walks in severe wind and decides that he does not like the wind. He notices the trees moving and asks if the trees couldn't be cut down, so that the wind would stop blowing. Chesterton continues:

Nothing could be more intelligent or natural than this mistake. Any one looking for the first time at the trees might fancy that they were indeed vast and titanic fans, which by their mere waving agitated the air around them for miles. Nothing, I say, could be more human and excusable than the belief that it is the trees which make the wind. Indeed, the belief is so human and excusable that it is, as a matter of fact, the belief of about ninety-nine out of a hundred of the philosophers, reformers, sociologists, and politicians of the great age in which we live.

In this parable, 'the trees stand for all visible things and the wind for the invisible. The wind is the spirit which bloweth where it listeth'. Material things, like cities and civilizations, are actually moved by immaterial things, like philosophy, religion and revolution. 'You cannot see a wind; you can only see that there is a wind'.
This piece ties in nicely with Chesterton's observations in 'Heretics' that a man's beliefs are the most important thing about him: beliefs and philosophies actually cause more visible things to change.