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.
To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain. The poet only desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in. The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.
And if great reasoners are often maniacal, it is equally true that maniacs are commonly great reasoners.
Every one who has had the misfortune to talk with people in the heart or on the edge of mental disorder, knows that 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. If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment. 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.
The madman’s explanation of a thing is always complete, and often in a purely rational sense satisfactory. Or, to speak more strictly, the insane explanation, if not conclusive, is at least unanswerable;
Nevertheless he is wrong. But if we attempt to trace his error in exact terms, we shall not find it quite so easy as we had supposed. Perhaps the nearest we can get to expressing it is to say this: that his mind moves in a perfect but narrow circle. A small circle is quite as infinite as a large circle; but, though it is quite as infinite, it is not so large. In the same way the insane explanation is quite as complete as the sane one, but it is not so large. A bullet is quite as round as the world, but it is not the world. There is such a thing as a narrow universality; there is such a thing as a small and cramped eternity; you may see it in many modern religions. Now, speaking quite externally and empirically, we may say that the strongest and most unmistakable MARK of madness is this combination between a logical completeness and a spiritual contraction. The lunatic’s theory explains a large number of things, but it does not explain them in a large way.
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,
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.
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.
The Christian is quite free to believe that there is a considerable amount of settled order and inevitable development in the universe. But the materialist is not allowed to admit into his spotless machine the slightest speck of spiritualism or miracle.
Spiritual doctrines do not actually limit the mind as do materialistic denials. Even if I believe in immortality I need not think about it. But if I disbelieve in immortality I must not think about it. In the first case the road is open and I can go as far as I like; in the second the road is shut.
Mysticism keeps men sane. As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity. The ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic. He has permitted the twilight. He has always had one foot in earth and the other in fairyland. He has always left himself free to doubt his gods; but (unlike the agnostic of to-day) free also to believe in them. He has always cared more for truth than for consistency. If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and the contradiction along with them. His spiritual sight is stereoscopic, like his physical sight: he sees two different pictures at once and yet sees all the better for that. Thus he has always believed that there was such a thing as fate, but such a thing as free will also. Thus he believed that children were indeed the kingdom of heaven, but nevertheless ought to be obedient to the kingdom of earth. He admired youth because it was young and age because it was not. It is exactly this balance of apparent contradictions that has been the whole buoyancy of the healthy man. The whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of what he does not understand. The morbid logician seeks to make everything lucid, and succeeds in making everything mysterious. The mystic allows one thing to be mysterious, and everything else becomes lucid.
Like the sun at noonday, mysticism explains everything else by the blaze of its own victorious invisibility. Detached intellectualism is (in the exact sense of a popular phrase) all moonshine; for it is light without heat, and it is secondary light, reflected from a dead world.
But that transcendentalism by which all men live has primarily much the position of the sun in the sky. We are conscious of it as of a kind of splendid confusion; it is something both shining and shapeless, at once a blaze and a blur. But the circle of the moon is as clear and unmistakable, as recurrent and inevitable, as the circle of Euclid on a blackboard. For the moon is utterly reasonable; and the moon is the mother of lunatics and has given to them all her name.
“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen not only because I see it but because by it I see everything else.” – C. S. Lewis
This is a very interesting piece– long, but rewarding in the end. I love the idea that living with contradiction is the sane way to live. How many problems or stupid heresies would have been avoided if people would have been content to live with illogic for a while?
By the way, Jon, is there a specific point you’re wanting to play up here?
Wonderful, Jon. Thanks for sharing this. So true and Chesterton accurately puts into words something that I’ve been thinking for some time, though far more eloquently than I could have.
Perhaps the poets and creative artists don’t go mad because they already are. 😉
Statistically, artists (musicians, theatre, authors, etc) are 2/3 more likely to be depressed than the rest of the population. At least that’s what I read in a study in the late 80s. Then everyone went on Prozac so maybe that number has changed.
The protagonists of Chesterton’s Manalive, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, The Ball and the Cross, The Flying Inn, and The Poet and the Lunatics all seemed a little nuts to me. Did Chesterton consider them poster children for mental health?
Its easy to see someone descend into madness when you can see them at a logical, rational starting point. Artists generally have no boundaries other than what they set on themselves, freeing them to act as they see fit.
Society accepts this because they are “artists” and expected to be such.
Swiped from the Web:
“Notions of an association between creativity and mental illness have a long history (Jamison, 1993; Nettle, 2001). Moreover, contemporary research has provided considerable support to traditional speculations. The evidence comes from five different types of studies. First, biographical and survey studies have found high levels of psychopathology, especially, depression and bipolar disorder, in eminent individuals in the fields of literature and the arts (Ludwig, 1995, Jamison, 1993, Andreasen, 1987, Andreasen & Canter, 1974; Jamison, 1989; Post, 1994). Second, family studies have produced evidence of creative interests and aptitudes in close relatives of psychiatric patients, including biological relatives separated by adoption (Heston, 1966; Karlson, 1970; McNeil, 1971; Richards, Kinney, & Lunde, 1988). Such studies are suggestive of an inherited personality or cognitive trait that has both creativity and mental illness in its range of effects.”
Byron was not a stable man. A good poetm but sane?
And then there was William Blake…..
(I still think Chesterton’s overall point is valid).
JMW,
That’s awesome.
Finally, as one who fancies himself a “creative artist”, I can rest assured that I need not attribute my insanity to my obsession with creative endeavors. (big sigh of relief)
Seriously though, I love the reminder that we simply cannot make sense of our existence by viture of an intellectual process alone. We must view ourselves as if positioned on a small piece of the giant web of existence with its threads spreading out beyond our intellection horizons and into unknown “mystical” realms. And like a spider at the center of her web, we are alerted of things unseen by tremors in the fabric which originate beyond the threshold of our understanding.
Ryan, despite the length of my selection, my excepts represent a 1188 word distillation of the essence of Chesterton’s thoughts from a passage 5597 words long. There is no particular point I wanted to emphasize. If anything, my post was only made in the hope that some might be tempted by these excerpts to wade through Chesterton’s meandering prose–it’s worth it. Orthodoxy is available for free, online at Project Gutenberg.
Adeline, Nat, Charles, Ivan,
In my attempt to be brief, I left out the following applicable passages that pertain to your comments:
—Deleted at comment writer’s request
Uh, my feelings would not be terribly hurt should somebody kind of decide to delete my comments.
Barb,
You’re not alone around here as one who carries “mental scars”. The are a good number of us in blogland who are here because we’ve found it a viable alternative to cutting ourselves off completely from good society.
Don’t change your name. You have nothing to be ashamed of.
Hey Jack, You know that is very decent of you to say. However, this is not my first time exhibiting such behavior here under various screen names. It seems to be a pattern of mine to draw negative attention. And just yesterday, I felt so apart of the cohesive whole. Then, again yesterday was a good day with intro blogs and feel good thread complimenting everybody in the LDS ‘Nacle community. I do participate in forums under various screen names and will contiue to do so. I will not be here under any name. I actually think reading logical discourse does me good! On the other hand, I avoid conspiracy theories like a plague! Good luck on your move! Thank you again, Barb
“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.”
Yup, it always strengthens your argument to start by making up a factoid with no supporting evidence, and then immediately jump to to a fallacious post hoc conclusion. Great stuff!