writers
as Butler, Coleridge and Newman. Taking as his text the saying,
"Truth can understand error, but error cannot understand truth,"
Wilfrid Ward called his article, "Mr. Chesterton among the Prophets."

He showed especially the curious confusion made in such comments as
the one I have quoted from the _Times_, and made clearer what
Chesterton was really saying by a comparison with the "illative
sense" of Cardinal Newman. It is the usual difficulty of trying to
express a partly new idea. Newman had coined an expression, but it
did not express all he meant, still less all that Chesterton meant.
Yet it was difficult to use the word "reason" in this particular
discussion, without giving to it two different meanings. For in two
chapters, "The Maniac" and "The Suicide of Thought," Chesterton was
concerned to show that Authority was needed for the defence of reason
(in the larger sense) against its own power of self-destruction. Yet
the maniac commits this suicide by an excessive use of reason (in the
narrower sense). "He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by
charity, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is the more
logical for losing certain sane affections. . . . He is in the clean
and well-lit prison of one idea: he is sharpened to one painful
point."

To Chesterton it seemed that most of the modern religions and
philosophies were like the argument by which a madman suffering from
persecution mania proves that he is in a world of enemies: it is
complete, it is unanswerable, yet it is false. The madman's mind
"moves in a perfect but narrow circle. . . . The insane explanation
is quite as complete as the sane one, only it is not so large. . . .
There is such a thing as a narrow universality; there is such a thing
as a small and cramped eternity; you may see it in many modern
religions." Philosophies such as Materialism, Idealism, Monism, all
have in their explanations of the universe this quality of the
madman's argument of "covering everything and leaving everything
out." The Materialist, like the Madman is "unconscious of the alien
energies and the large indifference of the earth; he is not thinking
of the real things of the earth, of fighting peoples or proud mothers
or first love or fear upon the sea. The earth is so very large and
the cosmos is so very small."

People sometimes say, "life is larger than logic," when they want to
dismiss logic, but that was not Chesterton's way. He wanted logic,