cared nothing about you! How much larger your life would be if your self
could become smaller in it; if you could really look at other men with
common curiosity and pleasure; if you could see them walking as they are
in their sunny selfishness and their virile indifference! You would
begin to be interested in them, because they were not interested in you.
You would break out of this tiny and tawdry theatre in which your own
little plot is always being played, and you would find yourself under a
freer sky, in a street full of splendid strangers." Or suppose it were
the second case of madness, that of a man who claims the crown, your
impulse would be to answer, "All right! Perhaps you know that you are
the King of England; but why do you care? Make one magnificent effort
and you will be a human being and look down on all the kings of the
earth." Or it might be the third case, of the madman who called himself
Christ. If we said what we felt, we should say, "So you are the Creator
and Redeemer of the world: but what a small world it must be! What a
little heaven you must inhabit, with angels no bigger than butterflies!
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? How much
happier you would be, how much more of you there would be, if the hammer
of a higher God could smash your small cosmos, scattering the stars like
spangles, and leave you in the open, free like other men to look up as
well as down!"

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