"it is not possible to get the blessing without the madness"

"It is fifteen years since H. G. Wells said Mind was at the End of its Tether—with a frightful queerness come into life:  there is no way out or around or through, he said; it is the end.  It is because I think mind is at the end of its tether that I would be silent.  It is because I think there is a way out—a way down and out— . . . —that I will speak.
     ". . . The alternative to mind is certainly madness.  Our greatest blessings, says Socrates in the Phaedrus, come to us by way of madness—provided, he adds, that the madness comes from the god.  Our real choice is between holy and unholy madness. . . .
     "And there is a way out—the blessed madness of the maenad and the baccant. . . .  It is possible to be mad and to be unblest; but it is not possible to get the blessing without the madness; it is not possible to get the illuminations without the derangement."

     Norman Oliver Brown, "Apocalypse:  the place of mystery in the life of the mind" (Columbia University, May 31, 1960), in Apocalypse and/or metamorphosis (Berkeley:  The University of California Press, 1991), 2 (1-7).    The reference is to John Senior, The way down and out: the occult in symbolist literature (Cornell University Press, [1959]).  "Sometimes—most times—I think that the way down and out leads out of the university, out of the academy.  But perhaps it is rather that we should recover the academy of earlier days—the Academy of Plato in Athens, the Academy of Ficino in Florence. . . ."
     My thanks to Dana R. Wright, who put me onto this passage by asking for help in tracking a James E. Loder, Jr. quotation of it to source.