The discovery was that “the Daisy has a ring of red.”  Purity is not the enemy of passion; nor must passion and purity be so toned down and blent with one another, as to give a neutral result.  Both must remain, and both in full brilliance, the virgin white and the passionate blood-red ring.

In the present age of reason, the cry is all for tolerance, and for redefinition which will remove sharp contrasts and prove that everything means the same as everything else.  In such an age a doctrine like this seems to have a certain barbaric splendour about it, as of a crusader risen from the dead.  But Mr. Chesterton is not afraid of the consequences of his opinions.  If rationalism opposes his presentation of Christianity, he will ride full tilt against reason.  In recent years, from the time of Newman until now, there has been a recurring habit of discounting reason in favour of some other way of approach to truth and life.  Certainly Mr. Chesterton’s attack on reason is as interesting as any that have gone before it, and it is even more direct.  Even on such a question as the problem of poverty he frankly prefers imagination to study.  In art he demands instinctiveness, and has a profound suspicion of anybody who is conscious of possessing the artistic temperament.  As a guide to truth he always would follow poetry in preference to logic.  He is never tired of attacking rationality, and for him anything which is rationalised is destroyed in the process.

In one of his most provokingly unanswerable sallies, he insists that the true home of reason is the madhouse.  “The madman is not the man who has lost his reason.  The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.”  When we say that a man is mad, we do not mean that he is unable to conduct a logical argument.  On the contrary, any one who knows madmen knows that they are usually most acute and ingeniously consistent in argument.  They isolate some one fixed idea, and round that they build up a world that is fiercely and tremendously complete.  Every detail fits in, and the world in which they live is not, as is commonly supposed, a world of disconnected and fantastic imaginations, but one of iron-bound and remorseless logic.  No task is more humiliating, nor more likely to shake one’s sense of security in fundamental convictions, than that of arguing out a thesis with a lunatic.

Further, beneath this rationality there is in the madman a profound belief in himself.  Most of us regard with respect those who trust their own judgment more than we find ourselves able to trust ours.  But not the most confident of them all can equal the unswerving confidence of a madman.  Sane people never wholly believe in themselves.  They are liable to be influenced by the opinion of others, and are willing to yield to the consensus of opinion of past or present thinkers.  The lunatic cares nothing for the views of others.  He believes in himself against the world, with a terrific grip of conviction and a faith that nothing can shake.