own little plot is always being played, and you would find yourself under a freer sky, in a street full of splendid strangers.”  Or suppose it were the second case of madness, that of a man who claims the crown, your impulse would be to answer, “All right!  Perhaps you know that you are the King of England; but why do you care?  Make one magnificent effort and you will be a human being and look down on all the kings of the earth.”  Or it might be the third case, of the madman who called himself Christ.  If we said what we felt, we should say, “So you are the Creator and Redeemer of the world:  but what a small world it must be!  What a little heaven you must inhabit, with angels no bigger than butterflies!  How sad it must be to be God; and an inadequate God!  Is there really no life fuller and no love more marvellous than yours; and is it really in your small and painful pity that all flesh must put its faith?  How much happier you would be, how much more of you there would be, if the hammer of a higher God could smash your small cosmos, scattering the stars like spangles, and leave you in the open, free like other men to look up as well as down!”

And it must be remembered that the most purely practical science does take this view of mental evil; it does not seek to argue with it like a heresy but simply to snap it like a spell.  Neither modern science nor ancient religion believes in complete free thought.  Theology rebukes certain thoughts by calling them blasphemous.  Science rebukes certain thoughts by calling them morbid.  For example, some religious societies discouraged men more or less from thinking about sex.  The new scientific society definitely discourages men from thinking about death; it is a fact, but it is considered a morbid fact.  And in dealing with those whose morbidity has a touch of mania, modern science cares far less for pure logic than a dancing Dervish.  In these cases it is not enough that the unhappy man should desire truth; he must desire health.  Nothing can save him but a blind hunger for normality, like that of a beast.  A man cannot think himself out of mental evil; for it is actually the organ of thought that has become diseased, ungovernable, and, as it were, independent.  He can only be saved by will or faith.  The moment his mere reason moves, it moves in the old circular rut; he will go round and round his logical circle, just as a man in a third-class carriage on the Inner Circle will go round and round the Inner Circle unless he performs the voluntary, vigorous, and mystical act of getting out at Gower Street.  Decision is the whole business here; a door must be shut for ever.  Every remedy is a desperate remedy.  Every cure is a miraculous cure.  Curing a madman is 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.