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 aesthetic 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 explain in the introduction,
I have determined in these early chapters to give not so much
a diagram of a doctrine as some pictures of a point of view. And I
have described at length my vision of the 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 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 an 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.

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. McCabe, and you will have exactly this unique sensation.
He underst