ike the wind because of this,
And ran like gospel and apocalypse
From door to door, with wild, anarchic lips,
Crying the very blasphemy of bliss."

The discovery was that "the Daisy has a ring of red." Purity is not the
enemy of passion; nor must passion and purity be so toned down and blent
with one another, as to give a neutral result. Both must remain, and
both in full brilliance, the virgin white and the passionate blood-red
ring.

In the present age of reason, the cry is all for tolerance, and for
redefinition which will remove sharp contrasts and prove that everything
means the same as everything else. In such an age a doctrine like this
seems to have a certain barbaric splendour about it, as of a crusader
risen from the dead. But Mr. Chesterton is not afraid of the
consequences of his opinions. If rationalism opposes his presentation of
Christianity, he will ride full tilt against reason. In recent years,
from the time of Newman until now, there has been a recurring habit of
discounting reason in favour of some other way of approach to truth and
life. Certainly Mr. Chesterton's attack on reason is as interesting as
any that have gone before it, and it is even more direct. Even on such a
question as the problem of poverty he frankly prefers imagination to
study. In art he demands instinctiveness, and has a profound suspicion
of anybody who is conscious of possessing the artistic temperament. As a
guide to truth he always would follow poetry in preference to logic. He
is never tired of attacking rationality, and for him anything which is
rationalised is destroyed in the process.

In one of his most provokingly unanswerable sallies, he insists that the
true home of reason is the madhouse. "The madman is not the man who has
lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except
his reason." When we say that a man is mad, we do not mean that he is
unable to conduct a logical argument. On the contrary, any one who knows
madmen knows that they are usually most acute and ingeniously consistent
in argument. They isolate some one fixed idea, and round that they build
up a world that is fiercely and tremendously complete. Every detail fits
in, and the world in which they live is not, as is commonly supposed, a
world of disconnected and fantastic imaginations, but one of iron-bound
and remorseless logic. No task is more humiliating, nor more likely to
shake one's sense of security in fund