and well-lit prison of one idea: he is sharpened to one painful point.
He is without healthy hesitation and healthy complexity. Now, as I
explain in the introduction, I have determined in these early chapters
to give not so much a diagram of a doctrine as some pictures of a point
of view. 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. That unmistakable mood or note that I hear from
Hanwell, I hear also from half the chairs of science and seats of
learning to-day; and most of the mad doctors are mad doctors in more
senses than one. They all have exactly that combination we have noted:
the combination of an expansive and exhaustive reason with a contracted
common sense. They are universal only in the sense that they take one
thin explanation and carry it very far. But a pattern can stretch for
ever and still be a small pattern. They see a chess-board white on
black, and if the universe is paved with it, it is still white on black.
Like the lunatic, they cannot alter their standpoint; they cannot make a
mental effort and suddenly see it black on white.

Take first the more obvious case of materialism. As an explanation of
the world, materialism has a sort of insane simplicity. It has just the
quality of the madman's argument; we have at once the sense of it
covering everything and the sense of it leaving everything out.
Contemplate some able and sincere materialist, as, for instance, Mr.
McCabe, and you will have exactly this unique sensation. He understands
everything, and everything does not seem worth understanding. His cosmos
may be complete in every rivet and cog-wheel, but still his cosmos is
smaller than our world. Somehow his scheme, like the lucid scheme of the
madman, seems unconscious of the alien energies and the large
indifference of the earth; it is not thinking of the real things of the
earth, of fighting peoples or proud mothers, or first love or fear upon