Vaughan or George Herbert. He was talking of a cynical man of the world,
a sceptic, a diplomatist, a great practical politician. Such men are
indeed to madness near allied. Their incessant calculation of their own
brains and other people's brains is a dangerous trade. It is always
perilous to the mind to reckon up the mind. A flippant person has asked
why we say, "As mad as a hatter." A more flippant person might answer
that a hatter is mad because he has to measure the human head.

And if great reasoners are often maniacal, it is equally true that
maniacs are commonly great reasoners. When I was engaged in a
controversy with the _Clarion_ on the matter of free will, that able
writer Mr. R.B. Suthers said that free will was lunacy, because it meant
causeless actions, and the actions of a lunatic would be causeless. I do
not dwell here upon the disastrous lapse in determinist logic. Obviously
if any actions, even a lunatic's, can be causeless, determinism is done
for. If the chain of causation can be broken for a madman, it can be
broken for a man. But my purpose is to point out something more
practical. It was natural, perhaps, that a modern Marxian Socialist
should not know anything about free will. But it was certainly
remarkable that a modern Marxian Socialist should not know anything
about lunatics. Mr. Suthers evidently did not know anything about
lunatics. 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. The madman
would read a conspiratorial significance into those empty activities. He