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

Orthodoxy Revisited: “The Suicide of Thought”

We are happy to offer up to you the third installment of our exciting Orthodoxy: Revisited project.  In Chapter III, Chesterton dissects the folly of the most prevalent secular worldviews of the 20th (and now 21st) century.

III--The Suicide of Thought

Those phrases popular enough to become common-place in our daily conversations are usually not only very effective but subtle: for a figure of speech can often get into a crack too small for an exact definition.  Phrases like "I was put out by what you said" or "That joke you told was off-putting" might have been coined by an author like Mr. Henry James,known for his meticulousness, (and pictured right) in an agonizing attempt to be verbally precise.  And there is no more subtle truth than that of the everyday phrase about a man having "his heart in the right place."

It involves the idea of normal proportion; not only does a certain function exist, but it is rightly related to other functions.  The heart beats and it beats in the proper place (and in the proper way).

Indeed, the negation of this phrase would describe with peculiar accuracy the somewhat morose mercy and perverse tenderness of those who best represent our modern age.  If, for instance, I had to describe with fairness the character of Mr. Bernard Shaw, I could not express myself more exactly than by saying that he has a heroically large and generous heart; but not a heart in the right place.

And this is the case for many of the most prominent intellectuals of our time.

The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good.  It is full of wild and wasted virtues.  When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was in many ways shattered at the Reformation when the Christian world made the first of its many subsequent splits), it is not merely the sinful vices that are let loose.  The vices are, indeed, let loose and they wander and do damage.  But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage.

The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad.  The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone.

Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless.  Thus some social justice advocates only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.

For example, Mr. Robert Blatchford attacks Christianity because he is obsessed with (and gone mad on) one specific Christian virtue: the virtue of charity.  He has a strange idea that he will make it easier to forgive sins by saying that there are no sins to forgive.  Mr. Blatchford not only attempts to live like an early Christian, he is the only early Christian who ought really to have been eaten by lions.  For in his case the pagan accusation made against Christians in the 2^nd and 3^rd century is really true: his mercy would mean mere anarchy.  He really is the enemy of the human race – because he is recklessly humane.

As an example of the other extreme, we may take the bitter realist, who has deliberately killed in himself all human pleasure in the hearing of happy tales or in the healing of the heart. Torquemada tortured people physically for the sake of moral truth in the Inquisition.  Emile Zola tortured people morally for the sake of physical truth.  But in Torquemada's time there was at least a system (Christianity) that could to some extent make righteousness and peace kiss each other in a fallen world.  Now they do not even bow.

But a much stronger case than these two of truth and pity can be found in the remarkable case of the dislocation of humility in modern times.

To be more specific, it is only with one aspect of humility that we are here concerned.  Humility was largely meant as a restraint upon the arrogance and greedy appetite of man.  Mankind was always surpassing its mercies with its own newly invented needs.  Our very power of enjoyment as humans destroyed half our joys.  By asking for pleasure, we lost the chief pleasure; for the chief pleasure is surprise.  Hence it became evident that if a man would make his world large, he must be always making himself small.  Even the arrogant visions, the tall cities, and the toppling pinnacles of skyscrapers are the creations of humility.  Stories of giants that tread down forests like grass are the creations of humility.  Towers that vanish upwards above the loneliest star are the creations of humility.  For towers are not tall unless we look up at them; and giants are not giants unless they are larger than we.  All this gigantesque imagination, which is, perhaps, the mightiest of the pleasures of man, is at bottom entirely humble.

It is impossible to enjoy anything – even pride – without humility.

But what we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place.  Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition.  Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be.

What I mean is that a man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; today this has been exactly reversed.  Nowadays the part of a man that a man does declare is exactly the part he ought not to declare himself.  The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt: the Divine Reason and Higher Power behind it.

Aldous Huxley (pictured left) preached a humanist humility content to learn from Nature.  But the new skeptic is so humble that he doubts if he can even learn at all.  Thus we should be wrong if we had said hastily that there is no humility typical of our time.  The truth is that there is a real humility typical of our time; but it so happens that it is practically a more poisonous humility than the wildest prostrations of the ascetic.

The old humility was a spur that prevented a man from stopping; not a nail in his boot that prevented him from going on.  For the old humility made a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder.  But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will (sooner or later) make him stop working altogether.

At any street corner we may meet a man who utters the frantic and blasphemous statement that he “may be wrong.”  Every day one comes across somebody who says that of course his view “may not be the right one.” But of course his view must be the right one, or it is not his view!

We are on the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table.  We are in danger of seeing philosophers who doubt the law of gravity as being a mere fancy of their own devices.  Disbelievers and cynics of old time were too proud to be convinced; but these are too humble to be convinced.  It is true that the meek do inherit the earth; but the modern skeptics are too meek even to claim their inheritance.

It is exactly this intellectual helplessness which is our second problem.

The last chapter was concerned only with a fact of observation: that the man who becomes morbid and morose does so much more from his reason rather than from his imagination. This observation was not meant to attack the authority of reason; rather it is my ultimate purpose to defend it.  For it needs defense. The whole modern world is at war with reason; and the tower already reels.

The contemporary sages, it is often said, can see no answer to the riddle of religion.  But the trouble with our sages is not that they cannot see the answer; it is that they cannot even see the riddle.  They are like children so stupid as to notice nothing paradoxical in the playful assertion that a door is not a door.  The modern latitudinarians (those who see no need for doctrine or dogma) speak, for instance, about authority in religion not only as if there were no reason in it, but as if there had never been any reason for it.  Apart from seeing its philosophical basis, they cannot even see its historical cause.

Religious authority has often, doubtless, been oppressive or unreasonable; just as every legal system (and especially our present one) has been callous and full of a cruel apathy.  It is rational to attack the police if they are abusive with their power.  More than that, it is glorious to attack them if this is the case.  But the modern critics of religious authority are like men who should attack the police without ever having heard of burglars.  For there is a great and possible peril to the human mind: a peril as practical as burglary.  Against it religious authority was put into place, rightly or wrongly, as a barrier.  And against this possible peril something certainly must be put into place as a barrier, if our human race is to avoid ruin.

That peril is that the human intellect is free to destroy itself.

Just as one generation could prevent the very existence of the next generation, by all entering a monastery or jumping into the sea or marrying members of their own sex, so one set of thinkers can in some degree prevent further thinking by teaching the next generation that there is no validity in any human thought.  It is pointless for people to talk as if one had to choose between reason and faith.  Reason is itself a matter of faith.  It is, in every sense of the word, an act of faith to claim that our own thoughts have any relation to reality at all.

If you are merely a skeptic, you must sooner or later ask yourself the question, "Why should anything go right; even observation and deduction?  Why shouldn’t good logic be as misleading as bad logic?  They are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape?"

The young skeptic says, "I have a right to think for myself."  But the old skeptic, the honest and complete skeptic, says, "I have no right to think for myself. I have no right to think at all."

There is a thought that stops thought, and that is the only thought that ought to be stopped.

That is the ultimate evil against which all religious authority was aimed.  It only appears at the end of decadent ages like our own: and already Mr. H. G. Wells has raised its disastrous banner; he has written a flimsy piece of skepticism called "Doubts of the Instrument."  In this he questions the brain itself, and endeavors to remove all reality from all his own assertions, past, present, and to come.  But it was against this remote ruin that all the military systems in religion were originally ranked and ruled.  The creeds and the crusades, the hierarchies and the horrible persecutions were not organized, as is ignorantly said, for the suppression of reason.  They were organized for the difficult defense of reason.

Man, perhaps by a blind instinct, knew that if once things were wildly questioned, reason could be questioned first.  The authority of priests to absolve, the authority of popes to define the authority, even of inquisitors to terrify: these were all only dark defenses erected around one central authority harder to demonstrably prove, one more supernatural than all – the authority of a man to think.

We know now that this is so; we have no excuse for not knowing it.  For we can hear skepticism crashing through the old ring of authorities, and at the same moment we can see reason swaying upon her throne.  In so far as religion is gone, reason is going.  For they are both of the same primary and authoritative kind.  They are both methods of proof which cannot themselves be proved.  And in the act of destroying the idea of Divine authority we have largely destroyed the idea of that human authority by which we do a long-division sum.  With a long and sustained tug we have attempted to pull the mitre off pontifical man; and his head has come off with it.

In order that my claims here not be called “loose assertions,” it is perhaps desirable, however dull, to run rapidly through the chief modern fashions of thought which have this effect of stopping thought itself.

Materialism, secular humanism, and the view that everything is little more than a personal illusion all have this dehabilitating effect; for if the mind is mechanical, thought cannot be very exciting, and if the cosmos is causeless, there is nothing to think about.  But in these cases the effect is indirect and doubtful.  In some cases it is direct and clear; notably in the case of what is generally called Darwinian evolution.

Evolution is a good example of that modern intelligence which, if it destroys anything, destroys itself.  Evolution is either an innocent scientific description of how certain earthly things came about; or, if it is anything more than this, it is an attack upon thought itself.  If evolution destroys anything, it does not destroy religion but rationalism.

If evolution simply means that a positive thing called an ape turned very slowly into a positive thing called a man, then it is stingless for the most orthodox; for a personal God might just as well do things slowly as quickly, especially if, like the Christian God, he were outside time.  But if it means anything more, it means that there is no such thing as an ape to change, and no such thing as a man for him to change into.  It means that there is no such thing as a thing.  At best, there is only one thing, and that is a flux of everything and anything.

Evolution is an attack not upon the faith, but upon the mind; you cannot think if there are no things to think about.  You cannot think if you are not separate from the subject of thought.

Descartes said, "I think; therefore I am."  The philosophic evolutionist reverses and negatives the axiom.  He says, "I am not; therefore I cannot think."

Then there is the opposite attack on thought: that urged by Mr. H. G. Wells when he insists that every separate thing is "unique," and there are no categories at all.  This also is destructive.  Thinking means connecting things, and thinking stops if they cannot be connected.  It need hardly be said that this skepticism forbidding thought requires that speech be forbidden; a man cannot open his mouth without contradicting it.  Thus when Mr. Wells says (as he did somewhere), "All chairs are quite different," he utters not merely a misstatement, but a contradiction in terms.

If all chairs were quite different, you could not call them "all chairs."

Akin to these is the false theory of progress, which basically says that we should perpetually alter the test instead of trying to pass the test.  We often hear it said, for instance, "What is right in one age is wrong in another."  This is quite reasonable, if it means that there is a clear and fixed aim, and that certain methods work better at certain times to attain that aim.  For example, if women desire to be seen as attractive by men, it may be true to say that at one point in history they had to gain weight and at other times lose it.  But you cannot say that they are improved by ceasing to wish to be attractive and beginning to wish to be oblong.

If the standard changes, how can there be improvement, which implies a standard?

Nietzsche started a nonsensical idea that men had once sought as good what we now call evil; if it were so, we could not talk of surpassing or even falling short of them.  How can you overtake Jones if you walk in the other direction?  You cannot discuss whether one people has succeeded more in being miserable than another succeeded in being happy.  It would be like discussing whether the poet Milton was more puritanical than a pig is fat.

It is true that a man – a silly man – might make “change” itself his object or ideal.  But as an ideal, change itself becomes unchangeable.  If the change-worshipper wishes to estimate his own progress, he must be sternly loyal to the ideal of change; he must not begin to even flirt with the ideal of repetitiveness.  Progress itself cannot progress.

It is worth remark, in passing, that when Tennyson, in a wild and rather weak manner, welcomed the idea of perpetual change in society, he instinctively took a metaphor which suggests an imprisoned monotony. He wrote --

"Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change."

He thought of change itself as an unchangeable groove; and so it is.  Change is about the narrowest and hardest groove that a man can get into.

The main point here, however, is that this idea of a fundamental alteration in the standard is one of the things that make meaningful thought about the past or future simply impossible.  The theory of a complete change of standards in human history does not merely deprive us of the pleasure of honoring our fathers; it deprives us even of the more modern and aristocratic pleasure of despising them.

This bald summary of the thought-destroying forces of our time would not be complete without some reference to pragmatism; for though I have here used and should everywhere defend the pragmatist method as a preliminary guide to truth, there is an extreme application of it which involves the absence of all truth whatever.

My meaning can be explained liked this: I agree with the pragmatists that apparent objective truth is not the whole matter; that there is an authoritative need to believe the things that are necessary to the human mind.  But I say that one of those necessities precisely is a belief in objective truth.  The pragmatist tells a man to think what he must think and never mind the Absolute.  But precisely one of the things that he must think is the Absolute.

This philosophy, indeed, is a kind of verbal paradox.  Pragmatism is concerned with the basics of human needs; and one of the first of human needs is the need to be something more than a pragmatist.  Extreme pragmatism is just as inhuman as the determinism it so powerfully attacks.  The determinist (who, to do him justice, does not pretend to be a human being as we commonly understand the word) makes nonsense of the human sense of actual choice.  The pragmatist, who professes to be especially human, makes nonsense of the human sense of actual fact.

To sum up our contention so far, we may say that the most common of the current, popular philosophies have not only a touch of mania, but a touch of suicidal mania.  The person who merely asks questions without any real interest in finding true, objective answers has knocked his head against the limits of human thought; and he has cracked it.  This fact is what makes both the worries of the out-of-touch orthodox and the boasts of the progressive intelligentsia regarding the radical nature of some new era of free thought seem so outdated (and inconsequential).  What we are looking at is not the beginning of free thought, it’s “boyhood” one might say; what we are looking at is the old age and ultimate suspension of free thought.

It is vain for bishops and other religious leaders to discuss what dreadful things will happen if wild skepticism runs its course.  It has run its course.  It is also vain for eloquent atheists to talk of the great truths that will be revealed if once we see free thought begin.  We have seen it end.  It has no more questions to ask; it has questioned itself.  You cannot call up any wilder vision than a city in which men ask themselves if they have any selves.  You cannot fancy a more skeptical world than that in which men doubt if there is a world.  Now it may be fair to say that it might certainly have reached its bankruptcy more quickly and cleanly if it had not been feebly hampered by the common religious morality prevalent in Western society, but it would have reached the bankruptcy anyhow eventually.

Militant atheists are still verbally harassed by religious people in the culture; but not because their ideas are so new and unheard of, but rather because their ideas and attacks on religious faith are so tried and tired.  Free thought has exhausted its own freedom.  It is weary of its own success.  If any eager freethinker graduating college today hails “the dawn” of philosophic freedom, he is only like the man in Mark Twain who came out wrapped in blankets to see the sun rise and was just in time to see it set.  If any timid pastor or priest says that it will be awful if the darkness of free thought should spread, we can only answer him in the high and powerful words of Mr. Hilaire Belloc, "Do not, I beseech you, be troubled about the increase of forces already in dissolution. You have mistaken the hour of the night: it is already morning."

We have no more questions left to ask.  We have looked for questions in the darkest corners and on the wildest peaks.  We have found all the questions that can be found.

It is time we gave up looking for questions and began looking for answers.

But one more word must be added.  At the beginning of this preliminary negative sketch I said that our cultural mental ruin has been produced by wild reason, not by wild imagination.  A man does not go mad because he makes a statue a mile high, but he may go mad by thinking it out in square inches.

Now, one school of thinkers has seen this and jumped at it as a way of renewing the pagan health of the world.  They see that reason destroys; but Will, they say, creates. The ultimate authority, they say, is in will, not in reason.  The supreme point is not why a man demands a thing, but the fact that he does demand it.  I have no space to trace or expound this philosophy of Will.  It came, I suppose, through Nietzsche (pictured right), who preached something that is called egoism.  That, indeed, was simpleminded enough; for Nietzsche denied egoism simply by preaching it.

To preach anything is to give it away.

First, the egoist calls life a war without mercy, and then he takes the greatest possible trouble to drill his enemies in war.  To preach egoism is to practice altruism.  But however it began, the views of egoism are common enough in current literature.  The main defense of these thinkers is that they are not thinkers; they are makers.  They say that choice is itself the divine thing.  Thus Mr. Bernard Shaw has attacked the old idea that men's acts are to be judged by the standard of the desire of happiness.  He says that a man does not act for his happiness, but from his will.  He does not say, "Jam will make me happy," but "I want jam."  And in all this others follow him with yet greater enthusiasm.

Mr. John Davidson, a remarkable poet, is so passionately excited about the divine nature of his egoist’s will that he is inspired to write prose about it.  He publishes a short play with several long prefaces.  This is natural enough in Mr. Shaw, for all his plays are prefaces: Mr. Shaw is (I suspect) the only man on earth who has never written any poetry.  But that Mr. Davidson (who can write excellent poetry) should waste his talents on writing lengthy pieces on metaphysics, in defense of this “doctrine of will,” does show that the doctrine of will has taken hold of many modern men – many prominent and influential modern men.  Even Mr. H. G. Wells has half spoken in its language; saying that one should test acts not like a thinker, but like an artist, saying, "I feel this curve is right," or "that line shall go thus."  They are all excited; and I believe that they well may be.  For by this doctrine of the divine authority of will, they think they can break out of the doomed fortress of rationalism.  They think they can escape the parameters of thought the rest of us know by common sense exist.

But the truth is that they cannot escape.

This pure praise of volition and will ends in the same destructive manner as the mere pursuit of logic and reason.  Exactly as complete free thought involves the doubting of thought itself, so the acceptation of mere "willing" really paralyzes the will.  An otherwise brilliant man like Mr. Bernard Shaw has somehow not yet perceived the real difference between the old practical test of pleasure – of whether something was good and made one happy or not – and the “test” which he advocates for.

The real difference between the test of happiness and the test of will is simply that the test of happiness is a test and the other isn't.

You can discuss whether a man's act in jumping off of a bridge was directed towards happiness; you cannot discuss whether it was derived from will.  Of course it was.

You can praise an action by saying that it is calculated to bring pleasure or pain to discover truth or to save the soul.  But you cannot praise an action because it shows will; for to say that is merely to say that it is an action.  By this praise of will you cannot really choose one course as better than another.  And yet choosing one course as better than another is the very definition of the will you are praising.

The worship of will is the negation of will.  To admire mere choice is to refuse to choose.

If Mr. Bernard Shaw comes up to me and says, "Will something," that is tantamount to saying, "I do not mind what you will," and that is tantamount to saying, "I have no will in the matter."  You cannot admire will in general, because the essence of will is that it is particular.  A brilliant anarchist like Mr. John Davidson feels an irritation against ordinary morality, and therefore he invokes will – will to anything.  He only wants humanity to want something.

But humanity does want something.  It wants ordinary morality.

He rebels against the law and tells us to will something or anything.  But we have willed something.  We have willed the law and standards against which he rebels.

All the will-worshippers, from Nietzsche to Mr. Davidson, are really quite empty of the ability to choose.  They cannot will, they can hardly wish.  And if anyone wants a proof of this, it can be found quite easily.  It can be found in this fact: that they always talk of will as something that expands and breaks out.  But it is quite the opposite.  Every act of will is an act of self-limitation.

To desire action is to desire limitation.  In that sense every act is an act of self-sacrifice.  When you choose anything, you reject everything else.  That objection, which men of this school used to make to the act of marriage, is really an objection to every act.  Every act is an irrevocable selection of exclusion.  Just as when you marry one woman you give up all the others, so when you take one course of action you give up all the other courses.

If you become King of England, you must give up the post of being the postman in the town of Brompton.  If you go to Rome, you sacrifice a rich, comfortable life in Wimbledon.  It is the existence of this negative or limiting side of the will that makes most of the talk of the anarchic will-worshippers little better than nonsense.

For instance, Mr. John Davidson tells us to have nothing to do with the Biblical command "Thou shalt not"; but it is surely obvious that "Thou shalt not" is only one of the necessary consequences of saying "I will."

For example: "I will go to the opera tonight, and thou shalt not stop me."

Anarchism commands us to be bold creative artists, and care for no laws or limits.  But it is impossible to be an artist and not care for laws and limits.  Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame.  If you draw a giraffe, you must draw him with a long neck.  If, in your bold creative way, you deem yourself free to draw a giraffe with a short neck, you will really find that you are not free to draw a giraffe.

The moment you step into the world of facts, you step into a world of limits.

You can free things from alien or accidental laws, but not from the laws of their own nature.  You may, if you like, free a tiger from his bars at the zoo; but you cannot free him from his stripes.  Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump: you may be freeing him from being a camel.  Do not go about as a demagogue, encouraging triangles to break out of the prison of their three sides.  If a triangle breaks out of its three sides, its life comes to a lamentable end.

Somebody wrote a work called "The Loves of the Triangles"; I never read it, but I am sure that if triangles ever were loved, they were loved for being triangular.  This is certainly the case with all artistic creation, which is in some ways the most decisive example of pure will.  The artist loves his limitations: they constitute the thing he is doing. The painter is glad that the canvas is flat.  The sculptor is glad that the clay is colorless.

In case the point is not clear, an historic example may illustrate it.  The French Revolution was really a heroic and decisive thing, because the Jacobins willed something definite and limited.  They desired the freedoms of democracy, but also all the vetoes of democracy.  They wished to have votes and not to have titles.  Republicanism had a frugal side in Ben Franklin or Robespierre as well as an unrestrained side in Danton or Wilkes.  Therefore they have created something with a solid substance and shape, the “square” social equality and peasant wealth of France.  But since then the revolutionary or speculative mind of Europe has been weakened by shrinking from any proposal because of the limits of that proposal.

Liberalism has been degraded into liberality.

Men have tried to turn "revolutionize" from a transitive to an intransitive verb.  The authentic Jacobin could tell you not only the system he would rebel against, but (what was more important) the system he would not rebel against, the system he would trust.  But the new rebel is a Skeptic, and will not entirely trust anything.  He has no loyalty; therefore he can never be really a revolutionist.  And the fact that he doubts everything really gets in his way when he wants to denounce anything.  For all denunciation implies a moral doctrine of some kind; and the modern revolutionist doubts not only the institution he denounces, but the doctrine by which he denounces it.

Thus he writes one book complaining that imperial oppression insults the purity of women, and then he writes another book (denouncing monogamy) in which he insults the purity of women himself.  He curses the Christian family who allows their daughter to marry young because she is supposedly losing her virginity too early, and then curses Mrs. Grundy because other Christian girls hold on to their virginity too long.  As a politician, he will cry out that war is a waste of life, and then, as a philosopher, that all life is waste of time.  A Russian pessimist will denounce a policeman for killing a peasant, and then prove by the highest philosophical principles that the peasant ought to have killed himself.  A man denounces marriage as a lie, and then denounces aristocrats who cheat on their wives for treating it as a lie.  He calls a nation’s flag a meaningless piece of cloth, and then blames the oppressors of countries like Poland or Ireland because they take away that meaningless piece of cloth from the people.

The man of this school goes first to a political meeting, where he complains that indigenous people-groups are treated as if they were beasts; then he takes his hat and umbrella and goes on to a scientific meeting, where he proves that they are nothing more than beasts.

In short, the modern revolutionist, being an infinite skeptic, is always engaged in undermining his own mines.

In his book on politics he attacks men for trampling on morality; in his book on ethics he attacks morality for trampling on men.  Therefore the modern man in revolt has become practically useless for all purposes of revolt.  By rebelling against everything he has lost his right to rebel against anything.

It may be added that the same empty and bankrupt type of thinking can be observed in all types of modern literature, especially in satire.  Satire may be mad and chaotic, but it presupposes an admitted superiority in certain things over others; it presupposes a standard.

When little boys in the street laugh at the fatness of some distinguished journalist, they are unconsciously comparing that fat man to the standard of Greek sculpture.  They are appealing to the marble Apollo.   And the curious disappearance of satire from our literature is an instance of the fierce things fading for want of any principle to be fierce about.  Nietzsche had some natural talent for sarcasm: he could sneer, though he could not laugh; but there is always something bodiless and without weight in his satire, simply because it has not any mass of common morality behind it.  He is himself more preposterous than anything he denounces.  But, indeed, Nietzsche is a great example of the failure of this type of thinking I’ve been critiquing in this chapter.

The softening of the brain which ultimately overtook him was not a physical accident.  If Nietzsche had not ended in imbecility, Nietzscheism would end in imbecility.  Thinking in isolation, and with pride, ends in one becoming an idiot.  Every man who will not have softening of the heart must at last have softening of the brain.

This last attempt to evade intellectualism ends in intellectualism, and therefore in death.  The attempt at and end-around has failed.  The wild worship of lawlessness and the materialist worship of law end in the same void.  Nietzsche scales staggering mountains, but he turns up ultimately in Tibet.  He sits down beside Tolstoy in the land of nothing and Nirvana.  They are both helpless – one because he must not grasp anything, and the other because he must not let go of anything.  The Tolstoyan's will is frozen by a Buddhist instinct that all special actions are evil.  But the Nietzscheite's will is quite equally frozen by his view that all special actions are good; for if all special actions are good, none of them are special.

They stand at the crossroads, and one hates all the roads and the other likes all the roads.  The result is – well, some things are not hard to calculate.

They stand at the cross-roads.

Here I end (“thank God” some of you are thinking) the first and dullest business of this book – the rough review of the most popular ideas in recent thought.  After this I begin to sketch a view of life which may not interest my reader, but which, at any rate, interests me.  In front of me, as I close this page, is a pile of modern books that I have been leafing through for the purposes of writing this chapter.  This pile of books is a pile of ingenuity, as well as a pile of futility.  By the accident of my present detachment from these ideas, I can see the inevitable smash of the philosophies of Schopenhauer and Tolstoy, Nietzsche and Shaw, as clearly as an inevitable train crash could be seen from a hot-air balloon.

They are all on the road to the emptiness of the asylum.

For madness may be defined as using mental activity so as to reach mental helplessness; and they have nearly reached it.  He who thinks he is made of glass, thinks to the destruction of thought; for glass cannot think.  So he who wills to reject nothing, wills the destruction of will; for will is not only the choice of something, but the rejection of almost everything.

And as I turn and tumble over the clever, wonderful, tiresome, and useless modern books in front of me, the tide of one of them catches my eye.  It is called "Jeanne d'Arc," by Anatole France.  I have only glanced at it, but a glance was enough to remind me of Ernest Renan's "Vie de Jesus."  It has the same strange method of the serious skeptic.  It discredits supernatural stories that have some foundation, simply by telling natural stories that have no foundation.  Because we cannot believe in what a saint did, we are to pretend that we know exactly what he or she felt.

But I do not mention either book in order to criticize it, but because the accidental combination of the names called up two startling images of Sanity which put to shame all the so-called intellectual books before me.  Joan of Arc was not stuck at the cross-roads, either by rejecting all the paths like Tolstoy, or by accepting them all like Nietzsche.

She chose a path, and went down it like a thunderbolt.

Yet Joan, when I came to think of her, had in her all that was true either in Tolstoy or Nietzsche, all that was even tolerable in either of them.  I thought of all that is noble in Tolstoy, the pleasure in plain things, especially in plain pity, the everyday-issues of the earth, the reverence for the poor, the dignity of the bowed back.  Joan of Arc had all that and with this great addition, that she endured poverty as well as admiring it; whereas Tolstoy is only a typical aristocrat trying to find out poverty’s “noble” secret.

And then I thought of all that was brave and proud and pathetic in poor Nietzsche, and his mutiny against the emptiness and timidity of our time.  I thought of his cry for the ecstatic equilibrium of danger, his hunger for the rush of great horses, his cry to arms.  Well, Joan of Arc had all that, and again with this difference, that she did not praise fighting, but fought.  We know that she was not afraid of an army, while Nietzsche, for all we know, was afraid of a cow.

Tolstoy only praised the peasant; she was the peasant. Nietzsche only praised the warrior; she was the warrior.

She beat them both at their own antagonistic ideals; she was gentler than the one (Tolstoy), more violent than the other (Nietzsche).  Yet she was a perfectly practical person who did something, while they are wild speculators who did nothing.  It was impossible that the thought should not cross my mind that she and her faith had perhaps some secret of moral unity and practicality that has, sadly, been lost in contemporary times.

And with that thought came a larger one, and the colossal figure of her Master (Jesus Christ) had also crossed the theatre of my thoughts.  The same modern difficulty which darkened the subject-matter of Anatole France also darkened that of Ernest Renan.  Renan also divided his hero's pity from his hero's pugnacity.  Renan even represented the righteous anger of Jesus over-turning the money-changers’ tables in the Temple at Jerusalem as a mere nervous breakdown after the idyllic, pleasant expectations of Christ’s ministry in Galilee.

As if there were any inconsistency between having a love for humanity and having a hatred for inhumanity!

Altruists, with thin, weak voices, denounce Christ as an egoist.  Egoists (with even thinner and weaker voices) denounce Him as an altruist.  In our present atmosphere such petty quibbles with great men, even the greatest man, are comprehensible enough.  The love of a hero is more terrible than the hatred of a tyrant.  The hatred of a hero is more generous than the love of a philanthropist.

There is a huge and heroic sanity of which moderns can only collect the fragments.  There is a giant of whom we see only the lopped arms and legs walking about.  They have torn the soul of Christ into silly strips, labeled egoism and altruism, and they are equally puzzled by His insane magnificence and His insane meekness.

They have parted His garments among them, and for His cloak they have cast lots; though the coat he wore (and the Truth he represented) was without seam woven from the top throughout.