To see a reckless fellow, like those Danes of old “who would rather be beheaded than flogged,” die rather than be punished, embracing death eagerly in his foolishness, yet disdaining to mourn his own sins and miseries or the deaths of his dearest friends.

To see wise men demoted and fools promoted; a man governing towns and cities, yet ruled at home by an insignificant woman; commanding a province, yet taking orders from his own servants or children, as Themistocles did from his son in Greece: “What I want,” said the boy, “my mother wants, and what my mother wants, my father does.”

To see horses riding in coaches and men pulling them; dogs devouring their masters; towers building masons; children ruling; old men going to school; women wearing the breeches; sheep demolishing towns and devouring people, and so on. In a word, the world turned upside down. “If only Democritus were alive!” To dwell on every particular would be one of Hercules’ labours: the ridiculous examples are as countless as motes in a sunbeam. “How much emptiness there is in things!” Who could speak of them all? “From one crime, learn what they all are”: take this as a sample.

But these things are plain to the senses, commonplace, familiar, and easy to see. How would Democritus have felt if he could have seen the secrets of their hearts? If every man had a window in his breast, as Momus wanted in the man Vulcan made; or if, as Cicero so wished, every man had written on his forehead “what he thought about the commonwealth”—what he thought; or if what Mercury did for Charon in Lucian could be achieved in an instant, touching his eyes to let him discern “rumours and whispers, all at once and together”: Men’s blind hopes, their maladies, the labours of their prayers, and cares flying everywhere through all the air. Blind hopes and wishes, their thoughts and affairs, whispers and rumours, and those flying cares.

If he could “unbar the closed doors of bedrooms and penetrate the secrets of hearts,” as Cyprian wished; open doors and locks and slide back bolts, as Lucian’s cock did with a feather from his tail; or use Gyges’ ring of invisibility, or some extraordinary optical glass or listening instrument that so amplified impressions that a man could hear and see everything at once—as Martianus Capella’s Jupiter did in a sphere held in his hand, which showed him everything done each day upon the earth; observe cuckolds’ horns, alchemists’ frauds, the philosophers’ stone, new schemers, and so on, and all those deeds of darkness, foolish vows, hopes, fears, and wishes—what laughter it would have afforded! He would have seen windmills in one man’s head and a hornets’ nest in another.

Or if he had been with Lucian’s sky-travelling Menippus at Jupiter’s listening place, hearing one man pray for rain and another for fine weather, one for his wife’s death and another for his father’s, and so on—asking God for things they would be ashamed to let any human hear—how bewildered he would have been! Do you think he, or anyone else, would say these men were in their right minds? “What sane Orestes would swear that this is a sane man’s conduct?” Could all the hellebore in the Anticyras cure these men? Surely not: an acre of hellebore would not do it.

More lamentable still, they are mad like Seneca’s blind woman and will neither acknowledge it nor seek a cure, for “few see their own disease; everyone loves it.” If a leg or arm troubles us, we do everything possible to relieve it; if we suffer a bodily illness, we send for a physician. But we pay no attention to diseases of the mind.

Lust harrows us on one side, envy, anger, and ambition on the other. Our passions tear us apart like wild horses. In one person the trouble is a passing disposition, in another an established condition; one is melancholy, another mad. Yet who among us seeks help, admits his error, or knows he is ill? Like the stupid fellow who put out the candle so the biting fleas could not find him, a man hides behind an unfamiliar guise and borrowed titles so that no one will recognize him.

Everyone thinks to himself, “To my own eyes, I am sane”—I am well, I am wise—and laughs at others. This is a common fault among them all: the food, clothing, opinions, inclinations, customs, and manners our forefathers approved, we now deride and reject as absurd. Old men think all younger people fools, though they themselves are mere dolts. As sailors think “the lands and cities are receding,” when it is they who move and the land stands still, so these men are themselves deluded, while the world has much more sense.

The Turks mock us, and we mock them; Italians mock the French, considering them frivolous, and the French in turn scoff at Italians and their various customs. Greeks have condemned everyone but themselves as barbarians; the world now holds them in equal contempt. We think Germans slow and dull, and ridicule many of their customs; they think just as contemptuously of us. Spaniards laugh at everyone, and everyone in turn laughs at them.