MEMBER 5 SUBSECTION 1 Immediate, internal, antecedent and proximate causes, and how the body acts upon the mind.

Like a hunter in the purlieus, I have so far beaten about the outskirts of the forest of this microcosm, following only those external, adventitious causes. I shall now break into its inner chambers and lay open the antecedent, immediate causes to be found there.

For just as disturbance of the mind, among other external causes and perturbations, alters the bodily temperament, so bodily disturbance and disorder will cause disorder in the soul; and it is hard to decide which of these two does more harm to the other.

Plato, Cyprian and some others, as I have said before, place the greatest blame on the soul and excuse the body. Others, in turn, accuse the body and excuse the soul from being the chief agent. Their reason is that character follows the bodily temperament, as Galen proves in his book on that subject, and as do Prospero Calano in On Black Bile, Jason Pratensis in his chapter On Madness, Lemnius in book 4, chapter 16, and many others.

And what Gwalther says in homily 10 on John’s epistle is most true: concupiscence and original sin, inclinations and bad humours, are rooted in every one of us, causing these disturbances, passions and various disorders, and often doing violence to the soul.

Everyone is tempted by his own concupiscence, James 1:14. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak and rebels against the spirit, as our Apostle teaches us. So it seems to me that the soul has the better case against the body, which inclines us so powerfully that we cannot resist.

We have not strength to struggle against it, Nor to strive so hard.

How the material body acts upon the immaterial soul, through the mediation of humours and spirits, which partake of both, and through disordered organs, is discussed by Cornelius Agrippa, On Occult Philosophy, book 1, chapters 63–65; Levinus Lemnius, On the Hidden Wonders of Nature, book 1, chapters 12 and 16, and chapter 21 of his Rules for the Best Life; Perkins, Cases of Conscience, book 1, chapter 12; and Timothy Bright, A Treatise of Melancholy, chapters 10–12.

For just as anger, fear, sorrow, disparagement, rivalry and so on, “if they occupy the innermost recesses of the mind,” says Lemnius, “are also harmful to the body and inflict the most dreadful diseases upon it”—cause grievous bodily diseases—so bodily diseases affect the soul through their mutual sympathy.

Now the principal causes proceed from the heart, humours and spirits: as they are purer or more impure, so is the mind, and it suffers correspondingly. As with a lute out of tune, if one string or one organ is disordered, all the rest go wrong.

A body burdened with yesterday’s excesses weighs down the mind as well.

The body is “the soul’s dwelling,” her house, abode and support. Just as a torch gives a better light and a sweeter smell according to the material from which it is made, so our soul performs all her actions better or worse according to the condition of her organs. Or, as wine takes on the flavour of the cask in which it is kept, the soul receives a tinge from the body through which she works.

We see this in old men, children, Europeans, Asians, and hot and cold climates. Sanguine people are merry, melancholic people sad, phlegmatic people dull, because of the abundance of those humours; and they cannot resist the passions these impose upon them.

For, in this weakness of human nature, as Melanchthon declares, the understanding is so bound to and held captive by its lower senses that it cannot perform its functions without their help. The weakened will has little power to restrain those outward parts, but allows herself to be overruled by them.

So I must conclude with Lemnius that “spirits and humours hold the greatest power to harm”: spirits and humours do the greatest harm in disturbing the soul. How can a man help being choleric and angry when his body is so clogged with an abundance of thick humours? Or melancholy when he is so disposed within? That this malady, madness, apoplexies, lethargies and so on arise from this cannot, then, be denied.

Now this body of ours is generally disordered by some preceding diseases, which trouble its internal organs and instruments, and so, as a consequence, cause melancholy, according to the agreement of the most highly regarded physicians.

This humour—as Avicenna, book 3, fen 1, treatise 4, chapter 18; Arnoldus, Breviary, book 1, chapter 18; Jacchinus, commentary on book 9 of Rhazes, chapter 15; Montalto, chapter 10; Nicolas Le Pois, chapter On Melancholy; and others suppose—is generated by a disorder of some internal part, either inborn or remaining after an inflammation, or else is contained in the blood after a fever or some other malignant disease.

This opinion agrees with Galen’s, On the Affected Parts, book 3, chapter 6. Guaineri gives an example of someone whose condition was caused by a quartan fever; and Montanus, consultation 32, describes a young man of twenty-eight who became disordered in this way after a quartan fever that had troubled him for five years.

Hildesheim, gleaning 2, On Madness, tells of a German baron grievously tormented with melancholy after a long fever. Galen, On Black Bile, chapter 4, gives plague as a cause; Botaldus, On Venereal Disease, chapter 2, gives the French pox; others give frenzy, epilepsy and apoplexy, because those diseases often develop into this one.

I have already spoken of the suppression of haemorrhoidal bleeding, haemorrhage or nosebleeds, the retention of menstrual flow—though these deserve fuller explanation, as the sole cause of a distinct kind of melancholy in older unmarried women, nuns and widows, treated separately by Rodrigo de Castro and Mercado, as I have indicated elsewhere—or any other discharge being stopped.

I shall add only this: melancholy caused by such infirmities deserves everyone’s pity and should be regarded with a more tender compassion, according to Du Laurens, because it arises from a cause harder to avoid.