Chesterton on Madness

TH - Whether he is taking some liberties with inferential leaps from an incomplete basis or whether he is dead on, the guy is brilliant on the insight. Makes you go, hmmmm...

"And if great reasoners are often maniacal, it is equally true that maniacs are commonly great reasoners...The last thing that can be said of a lunatic is that his actions are causeless. If any human acts may loosely be called causeless, they are the minor acts of a healthy man; whistling as he walks; slashing the grass with a stick; kicking his heels or rubbing his hands. It is the happy man who does the useless things; the sick man is not strong enough to be idle. It is exactly such careless and causeless actions that the madman could never understand; for the madman (like the determinist) generally sees too much cause in everything...

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. Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason...

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...

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. (TH - I presume the name of London's psyche ward)

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."

TH - tremendous application for theological discourse (the point of the book) and a good reminder to not get stuck in this rut to which he refers, but know there is no universal explanation for everything. As much as I like, use, and defend "systems", I think he is dead on.

For more on this brilliant, creative work, Orthodoxy, http://www.pagebypagebooks.com/Gilbert_K_Chesterton/Orthodoxy/The_Maniac_p1.html