y well as the type of
the whole of this failure of abstract violence. 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 being 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 sortie 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 cross-roads, 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) the first and dullest business of this book--the
rough review of 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 turning over for the purpose--a pile of ingenuity, a pile of
futility. By the accident of my present detachment, I can see the
inevitable smash of the philosophies of Schopenhauer and Tolstoy,
Nietzsche and Shaw, as clearly as an inevitable railway smash could be
seen from a 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, the title of one
of them rivets my eye. It is called "Jeanne d'Arc," b