After this I begin to sketch a view of life which may not interest my reader, but which, at any rate, interests me.

In front of me, as I close this page, is a pile of modern books that I have been turning over for the purpose--a pile of ingenuity, a pile of futility.

By the accident of my present detachment, I can see the inevitable smash of the philosophies of Schopenhauer and Tolstoy, Nietzsche and Shaw, as clearly as an inevitable railway smash could be seen from a balloon.

They are all on the road to the emptiness of the asylum.

For madness may be defined as using mental activity so as to reach mental helplessness; and they have nearly reached it.