which we look at everything. 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 the Greeks were right
when they made Apollo the god both of imagination and of sanity; for he
was both the patron of poetry and the patron of healing. Of necessary
dogmas and a special creed I shall speak later. 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.




CHAPTER III.--_The Suicide of Thought_


The phrases of the street are not only forcible but subtle: for a figure
of speech can often get into a crack too small for a definition. Phrases
like "put out" or "off colour" might have been coined by Mr. Henry James
in an agony of verbal precision. And there is no more subtle truth than
that of the everyday phrase about a man having "his heart in the right
place." It involves the idea of normal proportion; not only does a
certain function exist, but it is rightly related to other functions.
Indeed, the negation of this phrase would describe with peculiar