"G.K.Chesterton. The man who was Thursday. A nightmare (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

enemies. But you seem to be exactly in the right frame of mind. I think you
might almost join us."
"Join you in what?" asked Syme.
"I will tell you," said the policeman slowly. "This is the situation:
The head of one of our departments, one of the most celebrated detectives in
Europe, has long been of opinion that a purely intellectual conspiracy would
soon threaten the very existence of civilisation. He is certain that the
scientific and artistic worlds are silently bound in a crusade against the
Family and the State. He has, therefore, formed a special corps of
policemen, policemen who are also philosophers. It is their business to
watch the beginnings of this conspiracy, not merely in a criminal but in a
controversial sense. I am a democrat myself, and I am fully aware of the
value of the ordinary man in matters of ordinary valour or virtue. But it
would obviously be undesirable to employ the common policeman in an
investigation which is also a heresy hunt."
Syme's eyes were bright with a sympathetic curiosity.
"What do you do, then?" he said.
"The work of the philosophical policeman," replied the man in blue, "is
at once bolder and more subtle than that of the ordinary detective. The
ordinary detective goes to pot-houses to arrest thieves; we go to artistic
tea-parties to detect pessimists. The ordinary detective discovers from a
ledger or a diary that a crime has been committed. We discover from a book
of sonnets that a crime will be committed. We have to trace the origin of
those dreadful thoughts that drive men on at last to intellectual fanaticism
and intellectual crime. We were only just in time to prevent the
assassination at Hartle pool, and that was entirely due to the fact that our
Mr. Wilks (a smart young fellow) thoroughly understood a triolet."
"Do you mean," asked Syme, "that there is really as much connection
between crime and the modern intellect as all that?"
"You are not sufficiently democratic," answered the policeman, "but you
were right when you said just now that our ordinary treatment of the poor
criminal was a pretty brutal business. I tell you I am sometimes sick of my
trade when I see how perpetually it means merely a war upon the ignorant and
the desperate. But this new movement of ours is a very different affair. We
deny the snobbish English assumption that the uneducated are the dangerous
criminals. We remember the Roman Emperors. We remember the great poisoning
princes of the Renaissance. We say that the dangerous criminal is the
educated criminal. We say that the most dangerous criminal now is the
entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists
are essentially moral men; my heart goes out to them. They accept the
essential ideal of man; they merely seek it wrongly. Thieves respect
property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they
may more perfectly respect it. But philosophers dislike property as
property; they wish to destroy the very idea of personal possession.
Bigamists respect marriage, or they would not go through the highly
ceremonial and even ritualistic formality of bigamy. But philosophers
despise marriage as marriage. Murderers respect human life; they merely wish
to attain a greater fulness of human life in themselves by the sacrifice of
what seems to them to be lesser lives. But philosophers hate life itself,
their own as much as other people's."