Orthodoxy

by G.K. Chesterton

This is also why the new novels die so quickly, and why the old fairy tales endure for ever. The old fairy tale makes the hero a normal human boy; it is his adventures that are startling; they startle him because he is normal. But in the modern psychological novel the hero is abnormal; the centre is not central.

Hence the fiercest adventures fail to affect him adequately, and th...

The fairy tale discusses what a sane man will do...

The sober realistic novel of to-day discusses what an essential lunatic w...

Imagination does not breed insanity.

Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination.

when a poet really was morbid it was commonly because he had some weak spot of rationality on his brain. Poe, for instance, really was morbid; not because he was poet...

He avowedly preferred the black discs of draughts, because they were more like the mere black dots on a diagram.

only one great English poet went mad, Cowper. And he was definitely driven mad by logic, by the ugly and alien logic of predestination. Poetry was not the disease, but the medicine; poetry partly kept him in health.

necessita...

He was damned by John Calvin; he was almost saved...

Critics are much madder t...

though St. John the Evangelist saw many strange monsters in his vision, he saw no creature so wild as one of his own commentators.

Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite.

The result is mental e...

To accept everything is an exercise, to understand ev...

poet only desires exaltation an...

The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head...

Dryden as "Great genius is to madness near allied." But Dryden did not say that great genius was to madness near allied.

of the intellect that is in peril of a breakdown.

He was talking of a cynical man of the world, a sceptic, a diplomatist, a great practical politician.

incessant calculation of their own brains and other people's brains is a dangerous trade.

It is always perilous to the mind to reck...

"As mad as a ...

Obviously if any actions, even a lunatic's, can be causeless, determinism is done for.

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 str...

the madman (like the determinist) generally sees too much c...

If the madman could for an instant become careless, he would become sane.

their most sinister quality is a horrible clarity of detail; a connecting of one thing with another in a map more elaborate than a maze.

He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by charity, or by the dumb certainties of experience.

If a man says (for instance) that men have a conspiracy against him, you cannot dispute it except by saying that all the men deny that they are conspirators; which is exactly what conspirators would do.

Or if a man says that he is Jesus Christ, it is no answer to tell him that the world denies his divinity; for the world denied Christ's.

There is such a thing as a narrow universality; there is such a thing as a small and cramped eternity;

The lunatic's theory explains a large number of things, but it does not explain them in a large way.

I admit that your explanation explains a great deal; but what a great deal it leaves out! Are there no other stories in the world except yours; and are all men busy with your business?

You would begin to be interested in them, because they were not interested in you.

"So you are the Creator and Redeemer of the world: but what a small world it must be!

How sad it must be to be God; and an inadequate God! Is there really no life fuller and no love more marvellous than yours; and is it really in your small and painful pity that all flesh must put its faith?

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 thoug...

The new scientific society definitely discourages men from thinking about death; it is a fact, but it...

in dealing with those whose morbidity has a touch of mania, modern science cares far less for pure ...

it is not enough that the unhappy man should desire truth; he...

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, independe...

their attitude is profoundly intolerant-- as intolerant as Bloody Mary.

the man must stop thinking, if he is to go on living.

intellectual amputation. If thy HEAD offend t...