THE one
created thing which we cannot look at is the one thing in the light
of 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.
Chesterton, Sanity and Imagination
