best, the emotions most natural to men "fighting
peoples or proud mothers, or first love or fear upon the sea"--if all
these things stand for nothing, if they are not to be thought about by
our philosophers, what have we got left? The cosmos? "The cosmos is
about the smallest hole that a man can hide his head in." He finds that
the great popular thinkers--and it is right that he, a potent popular
writer, should concern himself with these rather than with the
systematic philosophers who observe conventions incomprehensible to the
common mind--are each and all of them prone to follow exclusively some
strange bent of thought, leading by pure reason to one of those awful
conclusions which "tend to make a man lose his wits:" Tolstoy, for
instance, reaching an unthinkable doctrine of self-sacrifice, Nietzsche
an equally unthinkable doctrine of egoism, Ibsen, Haeckel, Mr. Shaw,
Mr. McCabe--that never-to-be-forgotten Mr. McCabe--each of them by
sheer force of logic betrayed into insanity.

Just as I am affected by the maniac, so I am affected by most modern
thinkers. That unmistakable mood or note that I hear from Hanwell, I
hear also from half the chairs of science and seats of learning
to-day; and most of the mad doctors are mad doctors in more senses
than one. They all have exactly that combination we have noted; the
combination of one expansive and exhaustive reason with a contracted
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, they
cannot make a mental effort and suddenly see it black on white.

Madness, he says, is "reason used without root, reason in the void."
"Madness may be defined as using mental activity so as to reach mental
helplessness." For he notes how some of the rationalists, in doubting
everything, have cast doubt even on the validity of thought. The
complete sceptic says, "I have no right to think for myself. I have no
right to think at all." The intellect has destroyed, but has not
constructed; there is no proposition which is not doubted, no ideal
which is not an object of attack; there is no rebel who has a sure
faith in his own revolt, no fanatic except the fanatic about nothing.
Where are the common things--the thing