so people might remember of what sort of man
Dryden was talking. He was not talking of any unworldly visionary like
Vaughan or George Herbert. He was talking of a cynical man of the world,
a sceptic, a diplomatist, 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 reckon up 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 do
not dwell here upon the disastrous lapse in 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 man. But my purpose is to point out something more
practical. It was natural, perhaps, that a modern Marxian Socialist
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 did 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 private
property. He would think that the kicking of the heels was a signal to
an accomplice. If the madman could for an instant become careless, he
would become sane. Every one who has had the misfortune to talk with
people in the heart or on the edge of mental disorder, knows that