G.K. Chesterton Quote to Accompany Ken Brown's Great Commentary

by John Coleman

I don't mean to knock Ken Brown's post on determinism's philosophical and practical implications off the top of the board, so please click through and read it. It is very good. I just wanted to post one of my favorite G.K. Chesterton quotes to accompany it.

[I]f the 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 humor 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 in this respect is 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.[1]

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Did I mention that you should read Ken's post? Did I mention that it's good?

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[1] Chesterton, G.K. Orthodoxy.(2001) Image Books.

Comments

[Ken Brown]

Dawkins and Dennett always come to mind when I read that chapter of Orthodoxy. In particular this comment a couple pages later:

"As an explanation of the world, [naturalism] has a certain insane simplicity. It has just the quality of a madman's argument; we have at once the sense of it covering everying and the sense of it leaving everything out.... His cosmos may be complete in every rivet and cog-wheel, but still his cosmos is smaller than our world."

[John]

Lol...I like that one. Sometimes quotes like that make me wish I could invent a time machine, gather up a bunch of old geezers like Walker Percy and G.K. Chesterton and have them over for a game of poker. Oh, to be a fly on that wall...

[Ken Brown]

I'd like to be in on that game.

I haven't read any Walker Percy, but as you consistently put him (or her?) in the same category as Lewis and Chesterton, I'll have to remedy that. Any suggestions on where to start?

[Bobby]

Walker Percy: start with the Moviegoer and then read The Last Gentleman, The Second Coming, and the pseudo-self-help book Lost in the Cosmos. You'll be a fan for life.

[Ken]

Thanks!

[John]

I liked both the Moviegoer and Lost in the Cosmos (though I read them in reverse order--LITC first, then the Movigoer). If you only have time for one or two short essays at a time (all non-fiction), pick up Signposts in a Strange Land.