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Page 8
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.
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.
Take first the more obvious case of materialism. As an explanation
of the world, materialism has a sort of insane simplicity. It has
just the quality of the madman's argument; we have at once the sense
of it covering everything and the sense of it leaving everything out.
Contemplate some able and sincere materialist, as, for instance,
Mr. McCabe, and you will have exactly this unique sensation.
He understands everything, and everything does not seem
worth understanding. His cosmos may be complete in every rivet
and cog-wheel, but still his cosmos is smaller than our world.
Somehow his scheme, like the lucid scheme of the madman, seems unconscious
of the alien energies and the large indifference of the earth;
it is not thinking of the real things of the earth, of fighting
peoples or proud mothers, or first love or fear upon the sea.
The earth is so very large, and the cosmos is so very small.
The cosmos is about the smallest hole that a man can hide his head in.
It must be understood that I am not now discussing the relation
of these creeds to truth; but, for the present, solely their relation
to health. Later in the argument I hope to attack the question of
objective verity; here I speak only of a phenomenon of psychology.
I do not for the present attempt to prove to Haeckel that materialism
is untrue, any more than I attempted to prove to the man who thought
he was Christ that he was labouring under an error. I merely remark
here on the fact that both cases have the same kind of completeness
and the same kind of incompleteness. You can explain a man's
detention at Hanwell by an indifferent public by saying that it
is the crucifixion of a god of whom the world is not worthy.
The explanation does explain. Similarly you may explain the order
in the universe by saying that all things, even the souls of men,
are leaves inevitably unfolding on an utterly unconscious tree--
the blind destiny of matter. The explanation does explain,
though not, of course, so completely as the madman's. But the point
here is that the normal human mind not only objects to both,
but feels to both the same objection. Its approximate statement
is that if the man in Hanwell is the real God, he is not much
of a god. And, similarly, if the cosmos of the materialist is the
real cosmos, it is not much of a cosmos. The thing has shrunk.
The deity is less divine than many men; and (according to Haeckel)
the whole of life is something much more grey, narrow, and trivial
than many separate aspects of it. The parts seem greater than
the whole.
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