In a chapter of the Autobiography entitled "How to Be a Lunatic," Chesterton recounts the spiritual crisis of his late adolescence in terms which recall the breakdown of J. S. Mill. The leading symptom of this crisis was an extreme skepticism which made him feel "an overpowering impulse to record or draw horrible ideas and images." Long after Chesterton's two-year period of skepticism and depression ended, he concluded of his dabblings in spiritualism that although in his experiments with a ouija board something had happened "which is not in the ordinary sense natural, or produced by the normal and conscious human will," and although he could not tell whether the effects produced could be attributed to subconscious or to external forces, he could say "with complete confidence, about that mystic and invisible power, ... that it tells lies."
The acknowledgment of the possibility that otherworldly powers are either deceptive or ultimately nonexistent and the affirmation of rationality (the power to distinguish lies from truth as the hallmark of the healthy intellect) remain throughout in Chesterton's most characteristic fiction, which is shaped by an alternating rhythm in which reason is first challenged and then reaffirmed.
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