At any street corner we may meet a man who utters the frantic and blasphemous statement that he may be wrong.  Every day one comes across somebody who says that of course his view may not be the right one.  Of course his view must be the right one, or it is not his view.  We are on the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table.  We are in danger of seeing philosophers who doubt the law of gravity as being a mere fancy of their own.  Scoffers of old time were too proud to be convinced; but these are too humble to be convinced.  The meek do inherit the earth; but the modern sceptics are too meek even to claim their inheritance.  It is exactly this intellectual helplessness which is our second problem.

The last chapter has been concerned only with a fact of observation:  that what peril of morbidity there is for man comes rather from his reason than his imagination.  It was not meant to attack the authority of reason; rather it is the ultimate purpose to defend it.  For it needs defence.  The whole modern world is at war with reason; and the tower already reels.

The sages, it is often said, can see no answer to the riddle of religion.  But the trouble with our sages is not that they cannot see the answer; it is that they cannot even see the riddle.  They are like children so stupid as to notice nothing paradoxical in the playful assertion that a door is not a door.  The modern latitudinarians speak, for instance, about authority in religion not only as if there were no reason in it, but as if there had never been any reason for it.  Apart from seeing its philosophical basis, they cannot even see its historical cause.  Religious authority has often, doubtless, been oppressive or unreasonable; just as every legal system (and especially our present one) has been callous and full of a cruel apathy.  It is rational to attack the police; nay, it is glorious.  But the modern critics of religious authority are like men who should attack the police without ever having heard of burglars.  For there is a great and possible peril to the human mind:  a peril as practical as burglary.  Against it religious authority was reared, rightly or wrongly, as a barrier.  And against it something certainly must be reared as a barrier, if our race is to avoid ruin.

That peril is that the human intellect is free to destroy itself.  Just as one generation could prevent the very existence of the next generation, by all entering a monastery or jumping into the sea, so one set of thinkers can in some degree prevent further thinking by teaching the next generation that there is no validity in any human thought.  It is idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and faith.  Reason is itself a matter of faith.  It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.  If you are merely a sceptic, you must sooner or later ask yourself the question, “Why should anything go right; even observation and deduction?  Why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic?  They are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape?” The young sceptic says, “I have a right to think for myself.”  But the old sceptic, the complete sceptic, says, “I have no right to think for myself.  I have no right to think at all.”