Mental health as common ground, rather than a proof of truth
all modern thoughts and theories may be judged by whether they tend to make a man lose his wits.
The substitution changes the audience's point of agreement: readers who reject sin and damnation may still recognize intellectual breakdown as an evil. It does not yet establish that a damaging theory is false. Chesterton explicitly restricts the exercise later in this chapter: the paragraph beginning ‘It must be understood’ distinguishes a creed's relation to health from its truth. Reading the present proposal as an immediate refutation of materialism would erase that restriction. Orthodoxy, chapter II.
William James offers a useful contemporary comparison in The Varieties of Religious Experience (first published 1902; inspected here in the 1917 Longmans text). In lecture I he attacks the dismissal of religious beliefs through their proponents' neurological condition: bodily causes apply to scientific and irreligious thinking too. He distinguishes this argument about origins from assessment through experience and consequences. A disordered nervous system cannot by itself invalidate Teresa's theology, nor could perfect neurological composure validate it; her claims require independent evaluation. James therefore helps separate two questions that Chesterton's asylum image might blur: whether a thinker is ill, and whether adopting a doctrine impoverishes life. Chesterton proposes the latter test. James does not thereby certify Chesterton's judgments about particular philosophies. This is a comparison of methods, not evidence of borrowing or an identified reply. James, lecture I, pp. 13–19.
The remaining burden is causal: agreement that intellectual collapse exists does not establish that a given philosophy produces it. That connection requires argument beyond the existence of an asylum.
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