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.
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.