These fancies are so delightful at first that they could spend whole days and nights without sleep, even whole years alone, in such contemplations and fanciful meditations, which are like dreams. They can scarcely be drawn away from them and will not willingly interrupt them. Their empty imaginings are so pleasant that they obstruct ordinary tasks and necessary business; they cannot set themselves to these, or to almost any study or occupation.

These fanciful, bewitching thoughts attack them so secretly, so keenly, so insistently, so continually; creep in, insinuate themselves, possess, overcome, distract and hold them. They cannot, I say, attend to their more necessary business, ward the thoughts off or free themselves. They are always musing, indulging in melancholy, carried along like someone who, as the story goes, is led round and round a heath at night by a puck.

They hurry on through this labyrinth of anxious, troubled, melancholy meditations, unable or unwilling to hold back or easily stop, winding and unwinding themselves like so many clocks, still indulging their inclinations. At last some distressing object suddenly changes the scene. By now accustomed to these empty meditations and solitary places, they cannot bear company and can brood on nothing but harsh and unpleasant subjects.

Fear, sorrow, suspicion, awkward shyness, discontent, cares and weariness of life take them by surprise in a moment. They can think of nothing else and are continually suspicious. No sooner do they open their eyes than this infernal plague of melancholy seizes them and terrifies their souls, presenting some dismal object to their minds which no means, no effort, no persuasion can now avert. “The deadly arrow clings to their side”: they cannot get rid of it; they cannot resist.

I cannot deny that there is a profitable meditation, contemplation and kind of solitude to be embraced: that which the Fathers—Jerome, Chrysostom, Cyprian and Augustine—praised so highly in whole treatises, and which Petrarch, Erasmus, Stella and others extol in their books. Used rightly, it is a paradise, a heaven on earth, good for the body and better for the soul.

Many monks of old used it for divine contemplation; Simulus, a courtier in Hadrian’s time, and the emperor Diocletian withdrew from the world, and so on. In this sense, “Vatia alone knows how to live”—Vatia lives alone—as the Romans used to say in praise of country life. Or people withdraw to improve their knowledge, as Democritus, Cleanthes and those excellent philosophers have always done, secluding themselves from the tumultuous world; or as at Pliny’s Laurentine villa, Cicero’s Tusculan retreat or Giovio’s study, so that they might better “devote themselves to study and to God,” serve God and pursue their studies.

It seems to me, therefore, that our overzealous reformers were ill advised in that wholesale destruction of abbeys and religious houses, indiscriminately pulling everything down. They might have removed the gross abuses that had crept in and corrected those evils, without raging so furiously against those beautiful buildings, those enduring monuments to our forefathers’ devotion, consecrated to pious uses.

Some monasteries and collegiate houses might well have been spared, their revenues put to other uses: one here and there, at least in substantial towns or cities, for men and women of every rank and condition to live in, secluded from the world’s cares and turmoil. People who did not wish to marry, or were unsuited to it, or were unwilling to be troubled with ordinary affairs and did not know where to settle, could live apart there for greater convenience, good education and better company; to pursue their studies, I say, advance the arts and sciences, serve the common good and, as some truly devoted monks of old had done, freely and sincerely serve God.

For these people are neither solitary nor idle. As the poet answered the farmer in Aesop who accused him of idleness, he was never so idle as in the farmer’s company. Or as Scipio Africanus said in Cicero: “Never less alone than when alone; never less idle than when at leisure”—never less solitary than when he was alone, never busier than when he seemed most idle.

Plato reports in his dialogue On Love, in that extraordinary tribute to Socrates, how a profound thought happened to enter Socrates’ mind and he stood still pondering, “lost in thought on the very same spot,” from morning until noon. When he had not yet finished his meditation, “he remained standing in thought,” and continued until evening. The soldiers—for he was then on campaign—watched him in amazement and deliberately kept watch all night. He remained motionless “until sunrise,” until the sun rose in the morning; then, saluting the sun, he went on his way.

I do not know in what frame of mind steadfast Socrates acted thus, or what he felt; but this would be harmful to another man. I cannot easily guess what intricate problem could so thoroughly absorb him. But this is “idle leisure”; it is quite otherwise with these people. As Seneca says, “Solitude persuades us to every evil.” This solitude ruins us; “it fights against social life”; it is a destructive solitude.

These people are devils when alone. As the saying goes, “A solitary man is either a god or a demon”: a man alone is either a saint or a devil; “his mind either languishes or swells with pride.” And “woe to the solitary,” in this sense: woe to anyone so alone. These wretches often degenerate from human beings, turning from sociable creatures into beasts, monsters, inhuman and hideous to behold, haters of humankind. They even loathe themselves and hate human company, like so many Timons and Nebuchadnezzars, through indulging these pleasing inclinations too much and through their own fault.

Thus the reproach Mercurialis once addressed to his melancholy patient in consultation 11 may justly be applied to every solitary and idle person individually. “Nature seems entitled to complain of you,” and so on. Nature may justly complain of you: she gave you a good, healthy constitution, a sound body, and God gave you so divine and excellent a soul, so many good abilities and useful gifts; yet you have not only despised and rejected them, but corrupted and polluted them, destroyed their balance and perverted those gifts through dissipation, idleness, solitude and many other ways. You are a traitor to God and nature, an enemy to yourself and the world.

“Your destruction comes from yourself”: you have wilfully lost and cast yourself away. You yourself are the active cause of your own misery, by yielding to such empty thoughts instead of resisting them.