A Voice in the Wilderness In Defense of "Mere Conservatism"

Orthodoxy Revisited: The Maniac

We are proud to present you with the second installment of our "Orthodoxy Revisited" series here at A Voice in the Wilderness.  In this chapter, Chesterton seeks to explain why it is he believes atheism and secularism are not only spiritually bankrupt, but mentally as well.  Enjoy!

Chapter II--The Maniac

Thoroughly "worldly" people never understand even the world; they rely almost entirely on a few cynical maxims which are not actually true.

On a particular day last year I was walking with a friend (who happens to be a prosperous publisher), and he made a remark which I had heard many other people say before - it is, indeed, almost a motto of the modern, secular world.  Yet I had heard it once too often, and I saw suddenly that there was nothing of substance in it.

The publisher said of somebody we were talking about, "That man will get on; he believes in himself."  And I remember that as I lifted my head to listen, my eye caught a sign on a nearby building which read: “Hanwell Asylum."   I said to him, "Shall I tell you where the men are who believe most in themselves?  For I can tell you.  I know of men who believe in themselves more colossally than Napoleon or Caesar.  I know exactly where flames the fixed star of certainty and success.  I can guide you to the thrones of the Super-men.  The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums."

My friend, the publisher, said mildly that there were a good many men after all who believed in themselves and who were not in lunatic asylums.

"Yes, there are," I retorted, "and you of all men ought to know them.  That drunken poet from whom you would not buy the manuscript of his uninteresting tragedy, he believed in himself.  That elderly minister with a boring novel from whom you were hiding in a back room when he came for a meeting, he believed in himself.  If you consulted your business experience instead of your ugly individualistic philosophy, you would know that believing in himself is one of the commonest signs of a crazy and/or delusional person.  Actors who can't act believe in themselves; and gamblers who can’t pay their bills but keep on gambling.  It would be much truer to say that a man will certainly fail because he believes in himself.  Complete self-confidence is not merely a sin; complete self-confidence is a weakness.

Believing utterly in one's self is a hysterical and superstitious belief like believing in Joanna Southcote (pictured right): the man who has this disposition has `Hanwell Asylum' written on his face as plain as it is written on the sign on that building over there."

And to all this my friend made this very deep and effective reply, "Well, if a man is not to believe in himself, in what is he to believe?"

After a long pause I replied, "I will go home and write a book in answer to that question."

This is the book that I have written in answer to it.

But I think this book may well start where our argument started -- in the neighborhood of the mad-house.  Modern masters of Science are much impressed with the need of beginning all inquiry with a fact.  The ancient masters of religion were quite equally impressed with that necessity.  They began with the fact of sin -- a fact as practical as potatoes.

Whether or not one thought that a man could be washed in miraculous waters, there was no doubt at any rate that he wanted washing.  But certain religious leaders in London, not mere materialists, have begun in our day not to deny the highly disputable water, but to deny the indisputable dirt.  Certain new theologians dispute original sin, which is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved.

Some followers of the Reverend R. J. Campbell (pictured left), in their selective spirituality, preach that humans can obtain divine sinlessness here on earth, which they cannot see even in their dreams.  But they essentially deny human sin, which they can easily see in the street.  For much of the past 2,000 years, the strongest saints and the strongest skeptics alike took the existence of evil as the starting-point of their arguments.  If it be true that a man can feel genuine happiness in maliciously skinning a cat, then the religious philosopher can only draw one of two deductions.  He must either deny the existence of God, as all atheists do; or he must deny the present union between God and man (due to man’s fallen state and sin), as all Christians do.

The new theologians seem to think it a highly rationalistic solution to deny the cat.

In this remarkable (and tragic) state in our society it is obviously not possible (with any hope of having everyone on the same page) to start a discussion, as our fathers did, with the fact of sin.  This very fact, which was to them (and is to me) as plain as a telephone pole outside of one’s house, is the very fact that has been specifically diluted or denied.  But though modern intellectuals and prominent members of the media deny the existence of sin, I do not think that they have yet denied the existence of a lunatic asylum.  We should be able to all still agree that a person’s mental state (or intellect) can collapse, and that when this sad event happens, it is as clear to a sane person as it would be if their own house was falling down on top of them.

Men deny hell, but not, as yet, Hanwell.

And for the purposes of my primary argument the one (mental collapse) may very well stand where the other (moral and spiritual collapse) previously stood.  I mean that as all thoughts and theories were once judged by whether they tended to make a man lose his soul, so for our present purpose all modern thoughts and theories may be judged by whether they tend to make a man lose his mind.

It is true that some in our day speak lightly and recklessly of insanity as being in itself attractive.  But a moment's thought will show that if disease is beautiful, it is generally someone else's disease.  If poverty is enviable, it is someone else's poverty.  A blind man may be picturesque to a confused artist; but it requires two eyes to see the picture.  And similarly even the wildest poetry of insanity can only be enjoyed by the sane.  To the insane man his insanity is quite ordinary, because it is quite true.  A man who thinks himself a chicken is to himself as ordinary as a chicken.  A man who thinks he is a bit of glass is to himself as dull as a bit of glass.  It is the homogeneity of his mind which makes him dull, and which makes him mad.  It is only because we see the irony of his wrong idea that we even think him "amusing"; it is only because he does not see the irony of his idea that he is put in Hanwell at all.

In short, oddities only strike ordinary people.  Oddities do not strike odd people.  This is why ordinary people have a much more exciting time; while odd people are always complaining of the dullness of life.  This is also why the new novels die so quickly and why the old fairy tales endure forever.  The old fairy tale makes the hero a normal human boy; it is his adventures that are startling; they startle him because he is normal.  But in the modern psychological novel the hero is abnormal; the center is not central.  Hence the fiercest adventures fail to affect him adequately, and the book is monotonous.

You can make a story out of a hero among dragons; but not out of a dragon among dragons.  The fairy tale discusses what a sane man will do in a mad world.  The sober realistic novel of today discusses what a lunatic will do in a dull world.

Let us begin, then, with the mad-house; from this evil and fantastic inn let us set forth on our intellectual journey.

Now, if we are to consider what I call the “philosophy of sanity,” the first thing to do in the matter is to blot out one big and common mistake.  There is a notion adrift everywhere that imagination, especially mystical imagination, is dangerous to man's mental balance.  Poets are commonly spoken of as psychologically unreliable.  Facts and history utterly contradict this view.

Most of the very great poets have been not only sane, but extremely business-like; and if Shakespeare ever really held horses (note: this is referring to a job Shakespeare allegedly once had), it was because he was the most reliable man people knew to hold them.  Imagination does not breed insanity.  Exactly what does breed insanity is reason.

Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do.  Mathematicians go mad, and accountants; but creative artists very seldom.  I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger of going insane does lie in logic, not in imagination.  Giving birth to artistic creations is just as normal and wholesome as giving birth to physical, human creations.  Moreover, it is worthy of remark that when a poet really was morbid it was commonly because he had some weak spot of rationality on his brain.

Edgar Allen Poe, for instance, really was morbid; not because he was poetical, but because he was especially analytical.  Even chess was too poetical for him; he disliked chess because it was full of knights and castles, like a poem.  He openly preferred the black discs of draughts (checkers), because they were more like the mere black dots on a diagram.

Perhaps the strongest case of all is this: only one great English poet ever went truly mad, William Cowper (pictured right).  And he was definitely driven mad by logic, by the disturbing and alien logic of predestination.  Poetry was not the disease, but the medicine; poetry partly kept him in health.  He could sometimes forget the red and thirsty hell to which his hideous necessitarianism dragged him.  He believed he was damned by John Calvin’s theology; he was almost saved by John Gilpin (a character in one of Cowper's own most famous poems).

Everywhere we see that men do not go mad by dreaming.  Critics are much madder than poets.  Homer is complete and calm enough; it is his critics who tear him into extravagant tatters.  Shakespeare is quite himself; it is only some of his critics who have allegedly discovered that he was somebody else.  And though St. John the Evangelist saw many strange monsters in his vision in the Book of Revelation, he saw no creature so wild as one of his own commentators.  The general fact is simple. Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea in order to make it finite.  The result is mental exhaustion, like the physical exhaustion of Mr. Holbein (who many times has unsuccessfully attempted to swim the English Channel).

To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain.  The poet only desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in.  The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head.  And it is his head that splits.

It is a small matter, but not irrelevant, that this common mistake is commonly supported by a common misquotation.  We have all heard people cite the celebrated line of John Dryden as being "Great genius is to madness near allied."  But Dryden did not say that great genius was to madness near allied.  Dryden was a great genius himself, and knew better.  It would have been hard to find a man more romantic than he, or more sensible.  What Dryden said was this: "Great wits are oft to madness near allied"; and this is very true.  It is the pure promptness of the intellect that is in peril of a breakdown.

Also, people might remember of what sort of man Dryden was talking.  He was not talking of any pious visionary like Henry Vaughan or George Herbert.  He was talking of a cynical man of the world, a skeptic, a corrupt diplomat, a great practical politician.  Such men are indeed to madness near allied.  Their incessant calculation of their own brains and other people's brains is a dangerous trade.  It is always perilous to the mind to try and calculate the mind.  A flippant person has asked why we say, "As mad as a hatter."  A more flippant person might answer that a hatter is mad because he has to measure the human head.

And if great reasoners are often maniacal, it is equally true that maniacs are commonly great reasoners.  When I was engaged in a controversy with the Clarion on the matter of free will, that able writer Mr. R. B. Suthers said that free will was lunacy, because it meant causeless actions, and the actions of a lunatic would be causeless.  I will not dwell here upon his disastrous lapse in his own determinist logic.  Obviously if any actions, even a lunatic's, can be causeless, determinism is done for.  If the chain of causation can be broken for a madman, it can be broken for a sane man.

But my purpose here is to point out something more practical.  It was natural, perhaps, that a modern Marxian Socialist (like Mr. Suthers) should not know anything about free will.  But it was certainly remarkable that a modern Marxian Socialist should not know anything about lunatics.  Mr. Suthers evidently does not know anything about lunatics.

The last thing that can be said of a lunatic is that his actions are causeless. If any human acts may loosely be called causeless, they are the minor acts of a healthy man; whistling as he walks; slashing the grass with a stick; kicking his heels or rubbing his hands.  It is the happy man who does the useless things; the sick man is not strong enough to be idle.  It is exactly such careless and causeless actions that the madman could never understand; for the madman (like the determinist) generally sees too much cause in everything.

The madman would read a conspiratorial significance into those empty activities.  He would think that the lopping of the grass was an attack on his private property.  He would think that the kicking of the heels was a signal to an accomplice waiting to rob him.  If the madman could for an instant become careless, he would become sane.  Everyone who has had the misfortune to talk with people in the heart or on the edge of mental disorder, knows that their most sinister quality is a horrible clarity of detail; a connecting of one thing with another in a map more elaborate than a maze.

If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with clear thinking and sound judgment.  He is not hampered by a sense of humor or by charity, or by the dumb certainties of experience.  He is the more logical for losing certain limitations sane people are aware of.  Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one.  The madman is not the man who has lost his reason.  The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.

The madman's explanation of a thing is always complete, and often, in a purely rational sense, satisfactory.  Or, to be more precise, the insane explanation, if not conclusive, is at least unanswerable; this may be observed specially in the two or three of the most common kinds of madness.

If a man says that other men have a conspiracy against him, you cannot dispute it except by saying that all the men deny that they are conspirators; which is exactly what conspirators would do.  His explanation covers the facts as much as yours.  Or if a man says that he is the rightful King of England, it is no complete answer to say that the existing authorities call him mad; for if he were King of England that might be the wisest thing for the existing authorities to do.  Or if a man says that he is Jesus Christ, it is no answer to tell him that the world denies his divinity; for the world denied Christ's when he was here on earth.

Nevertheless the madman is wrong.  There is objective truth here, and it is that the madman is mad.

But if we attempt to trace his error in exact terms, we shall not find it quite so easy as we had supposed.  Perhaps the nearest we can get to expressing it is to say this: that his mind moves in a perfect but narrow circle.  A small circle is quite as infinite as a large circle; but, though it is quite as infinite, it is not so large.  In the same way the insane explanation is quite as complete as the sane one, but it is not so large.  A bullet is quite as round as the world, but it is not the world.  There is such a thing as a narrow universality; there is such a thing as a small and cramped eternity; you may see it in many modern religions.

Now, generally speaking, we may say that the strongest and most unmistakable mark of madness is this combination between a logical completeness and a spiritual contraction.  The lunatic's theory explains a large number of things, but it does not explain them in a large way.  I mean that if you or I were dealing with a mind that was growing morbid, we should be chiefly concerned not so much to give it arguments as to give it air, to convince it that there was something cleaner and cooler outside the suffocation of a single argument.  Suppose, for instance, you were actually dealing with the first example I gave; suppose it were the case of a man who accused everybody of conspiring against him. If we could express our deepest feelings of protest and appeal against this obsession, I suppose we should say something like this:

"Oh, I admit that you have your case and have it by heart, and that many things do fit into other things as you say.  I admit that your explanation explains a great deal; but what a great deal it leaves out!  Are there no other stories in the world except yours; and are all men busy with your business?  Suppose we grant the details; perhaps when the man in the street did not seem to see you it was only his cunning; perhaps when the policeman asked you your name it was only because he knew it already.  But how much happier you would be if you only knew that these people cared nothing about you!  How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it; if you could really look at other men with common curiosity and pleasure; if you could see them walking as they are in their sunny selfishness and their healthy indifference!  You would begin to be interested in them, because they were not interested in you.  You would break out of this tiny and cheap theatre in which your own little plot is always being played, and you would find yourself under a freer sky, in a street full of splendid strangers."

Or suppose it were the second case of madness, that of a man who claims the crown, your impulse would be to answer: "All right! Perhaps you know that you are the King of England; but why do you care?  Make one magnificent effort and you will be a normal human being and be able to look down on all the kings of the earth."

Or it might be the third case, of the madman who called himself Christ.  If we said what we really felt, we should say:

"So you are the Creator and Redeemer of the world: but what a small world it must be!  What a little heaven you must inhabit, with angels no bigger than butterflies!  How sad it must be to be God; and an inadequate God!  Is there really no life fuller and no love more marvelous than yours; and is it really in your small and painful pity that all flesh must put its faith?  How much happier you would be, how much more of you there would be, if the hammer of a higher God could smash your small cosmos, scattering the stars like spangles, and leave you in the open, free like other men to look up as well as down!"

The truth of the matter is that secular believers in "science" and "progress" do, in fact, take this purely physical view of mental evil; they do not seek to argue with it like a heresy but simply to snap it like a spell.  To be fair (and accurate), neither modern science nor ancient religion believes in complete free thought.  Theology rebukes certain thoughts by calling them blasphemous or immoral.  Science rebukes certain thoughts by calling them gloomy.  For example, some religious societies discouraged men from thinking about sex.  The new scientific society definitely discourages men from thinking about death (and the fate of their souls); death is a fact, but it is considered a morbid fact.  And in dealing with those whose morbidity has a touch of mania, modern science cares far less for pure logic than a dancing Dervish.  In these cases it is not enough that the unhappy man should desire truth; he must desire health.  Nothing can save him but a blind hunger for normality, like that of a beast.  A man cannot think himself out of mental evil; for it is actually the organ of thought that has become diseased, ungovernable, and, as it were, independent.  He can only be saved by will or faith.  The moment his mere reason moves, it moves in the old circular rut; he will go round and round his logical circle, just as a man in a third-class car on the Inner Circle train will go round and round the Inner Circle unless he performs the voluntary, vigorous, and mystical act of getting out at the Gower Street stop.

Decision is the whole business here; a door must be shut forever.

Every remedy is a desperate remedy.  Every cure is a miraculous cure.  Curing a madman is not arguing with a philosopher; it is casting out a devil.  And however quietly doctors and psychologists may go to work in the matter, their attitude is profoundly intolerant -- as intolerant as Bloody Mary.  Their attitude is really this: that the man must stop thinking, if he is to go on living.  Their counsel is one of intellectual amputation.

If thy head offend thee, cut it off; for it is better, not merely to enter the Kingdom of Heaven as a child, but to enter it as an imbecile, rather than with your whole intellect to be cast into hell -- or into Hanwell.

Such is the madman of experience; he is commonly a reasoner, frequently a successful reasoner.  Doubtless he could be vanquished in mere reason, and the case against him put logically.  But it can be put much more precisely in more general and even visual terms.  He is in the clean and well-lit prison of one idea: he is sharpened to one painful point.  He is without healthy hesitation and healthy complexity.

Now, as I explained in the introduction, I have determined in these early chapters to give not so much a detailed diagram of a doctrine as some pictures of a point of view.  And I have described at length my vision of the mental maniac for this reason: that just as I am affected by the maniac, so I am affected by most modern thinkers.  That unmistakable mood or note that I can hear from crazy people in Hanwell I hear also from half the chairs of science and tenured seats of higher learning today; and most of the mad intellectuals are mad intellectuals in more senses than one.

They all have exactly that combination we have noted: the combination of an expansive and exhaustive reason with a contracted (and closed-off) common sense.  They are universal only in the sense that they take one thin explanation and carry it very far.  But a pattern can stretch for ever and still be a small pattern.  They see a chess-board white on black, and if the universe is paved with it, it is still white on black.  Like the lunatic, they cannot alter their standpoint; because they are stuck, they cannot make a mental effort and suddenly see it black on white.

Take first the more obvious case of materialism.  As an explanation of the world, materialism has a sort of insane simplicity.  It has just the quality of the madman's argument; we have at once the sense of it covering everything and the sense of it leaving everything out.  Contemplate some able and sincere materialist, as, for instance, Mr. Joseph McCabe, and you will have exactly this unique sensation.

He understands everything, and because there is no deeper meaning to life, everything does not seem worth understanding.  His cosmos may be complete in every rivet and cog-wheel, but still his cosmos is smaller than our actual world and day-to-day life experiences.  Somehow his scheme, like the lucid scheme of the madman, seems unconscious of the alien energies and the large indifference of the earth; it is not thinking of the real things of the earth, of fighting peoples or proud mothers, or first love or fear upon the sea.  The earth is so very large, and his cosmos is so very small.  His cosmos is about the smallest hole that a man can hide his head in.

It must be understood that I am not now discussing the relation of the secular worldview to objective truth; but, for the present, solely its relation to mental (and moral) health.  Later in the argument I hope to tackle the question of objective truth; here I speak only of a phenomenon of psychology.  I do not for the present attempt to prove to a committed materialist like Ernst Haeckel that materialism is untrue, any more than I attempted to prove to the man who thought he was Christ that he was laboring under an error.  I merely remark here on the fact that both cases have the same kind of completeness and the same kind of incompleteness.  You can explain about a man's detention at Hanwell by saying that it is the crucifixion of a god of whom the world is not worthy.  That explanation does, I guess, explain.  Similarly you may explain the order in the universe by saying that all things, even the souls of men, are leaves inevitably unfolding on an utterly unconscious tree -- the blind destiny of matter.  The explanation does explain, though not, of course, so completely as the madman's.

But the point here is that the normal human mind not only objects to both, but feels to both the same objection.  Essentially this objection goes as follows: if the man in Hanwell is the real God, he is not much of a god.  And, similarly, if the cosmos of the secular materialist is the real cosmos, it is not much of a cosmos.  The thing has shrunk.  The deity is less divine than many other men I know myself; and (if we are to believe an intellectual like Haeckel) the whole of life is something much more grey, narrow, and trivial than many separate aspects of it.

The parts seem greater than the whole.

For we must remember that the materialist philosophy (whether true or not) is certainly much more limiting than any religion.  In one sense, of course, all intelligent ideas are narrow.  They cannot be broader than themselves.  A Christian is only restricted in the same sense that an atheist is restricted.  He cannot think Christianity false and continue to be a Christian; and the atheist cannot think atheism false and continue to be an atheist.  But as it happens, there is a very special sense in which materialism has more restrictions than spiritualism.  Mr. McCabe thinks me a slave because I am not allowed to believe in determinism.  I think Mr. McCabe a slave because he is not allowed to believe in fairies (or fairy tales).

But if we examine the two vetoes we shall see that his is really much more of a pure veto than mine.

The Christian is quite free to believe that there is a considerable amount of settled order and inevitable development in the universe.  But the materialist is not allowed to admit into his spotless machine-of-a-worldview the slightest speck of spiritualism or miracle.  Poor Mr. McCabe is not allowed to retain even the tiniest fairy or angel, though it might be hiding in a small piece of toast.  The Christian admits that the universe is diverse and even varied, just as a sane man knows that he is complex.  The sane man knows that he has a touch of the beast, a touch of the devil, a touch of the saint, a touch of the honorable citizen.  To be perfectly honest, the really sane man knows that he has a touch of the madman.

But the materialist's world is quite simple and solid, just as the madman in the asylum is quite sure he is sane.  The materialist is sure that history has been simply and solely a chain of causation, just as the interesting person I mentioned earlier is quite sure that he is simply and solely a chicken.

Materialists and madmen never have doubts.

Spiritual doctrines do not actually limit the mind in the same way (or degree) as do materialistic denials.  Even if I believe in immortality I don’t have to think about it (and certainly not all of the time).  But if I disbelieve in immortality I must not think about it.  In the first case the road is open and I can go as far as I like; in the second the road is shut.

But the case is even stronger, and the parallel with madness is even stranger.  For it was our case against the exhaustive and logical theory of the lunatic that, right or wrong, it gradually destroyed his humanity.  Now it is our charge against the main conclusions of the materialist that, right or wrong, they gradually destroy his humanity; I do not mean only kindness, I mean hope, courage, poetry, initiative.  I mean all that is uniquely and wonderfully human.

For instance, when materialism leads men to complete fatalism (as it generally does), it is quite disingenuous to pretend that it is in any sense a liberating force.  It is absurd to say that you are specially advancing freedom when you are using free thought to destroy free will.

The determinists come to bind, not to loose.

They are right to call their law the "chain” of causation.  It is the worst chain that ever fettered a human being.  You may use the language of liberty, if you like, about materialistic teaching, but it is obvious to me that it is just as inapplicable a term as it would be in describing the state of a man locked up in a mad-house.  You may say, if you like, that the man is free to think himself a poached egg.  But it is surely a more massive and important fact that if he is a poached egg he is not free to eat, drink, sleep, walk, or smoke a cigarette.

Similarly you may say, if you like, that the bold determinist in society is free to disbelieve in the existence of any degree of free will.  But it is a much more massive and important fact that because of his philosophy he is not free to object, to curse, to thank, to justify, to urge, to punish, to resist temptations, to incite mobs, to make New Year resolutions, to pardon sinners, to rebuke tyrants, or even to say "thank you" for the mustard at lunch.

In passing from this subject I may note that there is a curiously misleading notion that some have which involves the idea that, between the two, materialistic fatalism is in some way favorable to Christian mercy.  Some claim that a kinder, gentler society will emerge from materialism than from one rooted in orthodoxy.  This is the reverse of the truth.  It is quite reasonable to say that the doctrine of necessity makes no difference at all; that when practiced it leaves both the executioner killing and the kind friend encouraging as before.  But obviously if fatalistic materialism stops either of those two things it stops the encouragement of a friend.  To say, as fatalists do, that the sins we commit are inevitable does not prevent a fatalist from handing down punishment; if it prevents anything it prevents persuasion and compassion.  Determinism is quite as likely to lead to cruelty as it is certain to lead to cowardice.  Determinism is not inconsistent with the cruel treatment of criminals.  What it is (perhaps) inconsistent with is the generous treatment of criminals; with any appeal to their better feelings or encouragement in their moral struggle.

The determinist does not believe in appealing to the will or soul, but he does believe in changing the environment.  According to his own life-philosophy he must not say to the sinner, "Go and sin no more," because the sinner cannot help it.  But he can put him in boiling oil; for boiling oil is an environment.

When comparing the materialist to something (or someone), therefore, the materialist has the fantastic outline of the figure of the madman.  Both take up a position that is at once un-answerable and intolerable.

Of course it is not only of the materialist that all this is true.  The same would apply to the other extreme of speculative logic.  There is a skeptic far more terrible than he who believes that everything began in matter.  It is possible to meet the skeptic who believes that everything began in himself.  He doubts not the existence of angels or devils, but the existence of men and cows.  For him his own friends are a mythology made up by himself.  He created his own father and his own mother.  This horrible existentialist concept has in it something decidedly attractive to the mystical egoism of our day.  That publisher who thought that men would get on if they believed in themselves, those seekers after the Superman who are always looking for him in the mirror, those writers who talk about impressing their personalities on their reader instead of creating life through their pen for the world to read, all these people have really only an inch between them and this awful emptiness.

And when our real and magnificent world that is all around such a man has been blackened out like a lie; when friends fade into ghosts, and the foundations of the world fail; then when the man, believing in nothing and in no man, is alone in his own nightmare, then the great individualistic motto shall be written over him in avenging irony.  The stars will be only dots in the blackness of his own brain; his mother's face will be only a sketch from his own insane pencil on the walls of his cell.

Over his cell shall be written, with dreadful truth, "He believes in himself."

All that concerns us here, however, is to note that this egoistic extreme of thought exhibits the same paradox as the other extreme of materialism.  It is equally complete in theory and equally crippling in practice.  For the sake of simplicity, it is easier to state the notion by saying that a man can believe that he is always in a dream.  Now, obviously there can be no positive proof given to him that he is not in a dream, for the simple reason that no proof can be offered that might not be offered in a dream.

But if the man began to burn down London and say that his housekeeper would soon call him to breakfast, we should take him and put him with other logicians in a place which has often been alluded to in the course of this chapter.  The man who cannot believe his senses, and the man who cannot believe anything else, are both insane, but their insanity is proved not by any error in their argument, but by the apparent mistake of their whole lives.  They have both locked themselves up in two boxes, painted inside with the sun and stars; they are both unable to get out, the one into the health and happiness of heaven, the other even into the health and happiness of the earth.  Their position is quite reasonable; nay, in a sense it is infinitely reasonable, just as a coin is infinitely circular.

But there is such a thing as a cruel infinity, an ignoble and slavish eternity.

It is amusing to notice that many of the modern writers and thinkers, whether skeptics or mystics, have taken as their sign a certain eastern symbol, which is the very symbol of this ultimate nonentity.  When they wish to represent eternity, they represent it by a serpent with his tail in his mouth.  There is a startling sarcasm in the image of that snake’s very unsatisfactory meal.  The eternity of the material fatalists, the eternity of the eastern pessimists, the eternity of the condescending theosophists and higher scientists of today is perfectly represented by a serpent eating his tail.

A degraded animal who destroys even himself.

This chapter is purely practical and is concerned with what actually is the chief mark and element of insanity; we may say in summary that it is reason used without root, reason in the void.  The man who begins to think without the proper first principles goes mad; he begins to think at the wrong end. And for the rest of these pages we have to try and discover what is the right end.

But we may ask in conclusion: If what I’ve detailed is what tends to drive men mad, what is it that keeps them sane?  By the end of this book I hope to give a definite, some will think a far too definite, answer.  But for the moment it is possible in the same solely practical manner to give a general answer touching what in actual human history keeps men sane.

Mysticism keeps men sane.

As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity.  The ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic.  He has permitted the twilight.  He has always had one foot in earth and the other in fairyland.  He has always left himself free to doubt his gods; but (unlike the agnostic and atheist of today) free also to believe in them.  He has always cared more for truth than for consistency.  If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and the contradiction along with them.  His spiritual sight is stereoscopic, like his physical sight: he sees two different pictures at once and yet sees all the better for that.

Thus he has always believed that there was such a thing as fate, but such a thing as free will also.  Thus he believed that children were indeed the kingdom of heaven, but nevertheless ought to be obedient to the kingdom of earth.  He admired youth because it was young and age because it was not.  It is exactly this balance of apparent contradictions that has been the source of resilience of the healthy man.

The whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of what he does not understand.

The melancholic logician seeks to make everything logical, and succeeds in making everything mysterious.  The mystic allows one thing (the supernatural world) to be mysterious, and everything else becomes logical. The determinist makes the theory of causation quite clear, and then finds that he cannot say "If you like, you can have the day off” to the housemaid.

The Christian permits free will to remain a sacred mystery; but because of this his relations with the housemaid become of a sparkling and crystal clearness. He puts the seed of dogma in a central darkness; but it branches forth in all directions with abounding natural health.

As we have taken the circle as the symbol of reason and madness, we may very well take the cross as the symbol at once of mystery and of health.  Buddhism is centripetal, but Christianity is centrifugal: it breaks out.  For the circle is perfect and infinite in its nature; but it is fixed for ever in its size; it can never be larger or smaller.

But the cross, though it has at its heart a collision and a contradiction, can extend its four arms forever without altering its shape.  Because it has a paradox in its center it can grow without changing.  The circle returns upon itself and is bound.  The cross opens its arms to the four winds; it is a signpost for free travelers.

Symbols alone are not entirely sufficient when speaking of this deep matter; but hopefully one other symbol from physical nature will express sufficiently well the real place of mysticism before mankind.

The one created thing which we cannot look at is the one thing in the light of which we look at everything.  Like the sun at noonday, mysticism explains everything else by the blaze of its own victorious invisibility.  Secular intellectualism is (in the exact sense of a popular phrase) all moonshine; for it is light without heat, and it is secondary light, reflected from a dead world.

But the Greeks were right when they made Apollo the god both of imagination and of sanity; for he was both the patron of poetry and the patron of healing.  Of the finer points of my own worldview I shall speak later, but that transcendentalism by which all men live has primarily much the position of the sun in the sky.  We are conscious of it as of a kind of splendid confusion; it is something both shining and shapeless, at once a blaze and a blur.  But the circle of the moon is as clear and unmistakable, as recurrent and inevitable, as the circle of Euclid on a blackboard in Geometry class.

For the moon is utterly reasonable; and the moon is the mother of lunatics and has given to them all her name.

Tune in soon for Chapter III: The Suicide of Thought