ll magic machine like a
coffee-mill, which would grind anything he wanted when he said one
word and stop when he said another. After performing marvels (which I
wish my conscience would let me put into this book for padding) the
mill was merely asked to grind a few grains of salt at an officers'
mess on board ship; for salt is the type everywhere of small luxury
and exaggeration, and sailors' tales should be taken with a grain of
it. The man remembered the word that started the salt mill, and then,
touching the word that stopped it, suddenly remembered that he forgot.
The tall ship sank, laden and sparkling to the topmasts with salt like
Arctic snows; but the mad mill was still grinding at the ocean bottom,
where all the men lay drowned. And that (so says this fairy tale) is
why the great waters about our world have a bitter taste. For the
fairy tales knew what the modern mystics don't--that one should not
let loose either the supernatural or the natural.

CHAPTER IV

THE LUNATIC AND THE LAW

The modern evil, we have said, greatly turns on this: that people do
not see that the exception proves the rule. Thus it may or may not be
right to kill a murderer; but it can only conceivably be right to kill
a murderer because it is wrong to kill a man. If the hangman, having
got his hand in, proceeded to hang friends and relatives to his taste
and fancy, he would (intellectually) unhang the first man, though the
first man might not think so. Or thus again, if you say an insane man
is irresponsible, you imply that a sane man is responsible. He is
responsible for the insane man. And the attempt of the Eugenists and
other fatalists to treat all men as irresponsible is the largest and
flattest folly in philosophy. The Eugenist has to treat everybody,
including himself, as an exception to a rule that isn't there.

The Eugenists, as a first move, have extended the frontiers of the
lunatic asylum: let us take this as our definite starting point, and
ask ourselves what lunacy is, and what is its fundamental relation to
human society. Now that raw juvenile scepticism that clogs all thought
with catchwords may often be heard to remark that the mad are only the
minority, the sane only the majority. There is a neat exactitude
about such people's nonsense; they seem to miss the point by magic.
The mad are not a minority because they are not a corporate body; and
that is what their madness means. The sane are not a majority; they