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 fundamental convictions, than that of
arguing out a thesis with a lunatic.
Further, beneath this rationality there is in the madman a profound
belief in himself.
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