In the main, and from the beginning of time, mysticism has kept men sane. The thing that has driven them mad was logic.
Interpretation
Mysticism offers sanity while logic can lead to madness.
In this quote, Chesterton suggests that mysticism, which encompasses spiritual and intuitive understanding, has been a stabilizing force for humanity throughout history. He argues that the rigid and sometimes cold principles of logic can overwhelm the mind, causing confusion and madness, whereas a more mystical approach can provide a sense of peace and grounding.
In practice
In a discussion about the importance of intuition over pure rationality, one might reference this quote to highlight the balance needed in understanding life.
Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago; I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago.
I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
The good Bishop of Assisi expressed a sort of horror at the hard life which the Little Brothers lived at the Portiuncula, without comforts, without possessions, eating anything they could get and sleeping anyhow on the ground. St. Francis answered him with that curious and almost stunning shrewdness which the unworldly can sometimes wield like a club of stone. He said, 'If we had any possessions, we should need weapons and laws to defend them.
The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.
I suppose every one must have reflected how primeval and how poetical are the things that one carries in one's pocket; the pocket-knife, for instance, the type of all human tools, the infant of the sword. Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.
Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.
When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.
Liberty is the harmony between the will and the law.
People who cannot recognize a palpable absurdity are very much in the way of civilization.
Investing a lot of time and money in external beauty and caring little about internal beauty.
A man who is eating or lying with his wife or preparing to go to sleep in humility, thankfulness and temperance, is, by Christian standards, in an infinitely higher state than one who is listening to Bach or reading Plato in a state of pride.
I do not speak as I think, I do not think as I should, and so it all goes on in helpless darkness.
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