Thales sent the golden tripod that the fishermen found, and that the oracle ordered to be “given to the wisest,” to Bias; Bias sent it to Solon, and so on. If such a thing were found now, we would all fight over it, as the three goddesses did over the golden apple: we are so wise!

We have women practising statecraft and children practising metaphysics. Every simpleton can square the circle, invent perpetual motion, find the philosopher’s stone, interpret Revelation, devise new theories, a new system of the universe, a new logic, a new philosophy, and so on.

“Our country, indeed,” says Petronius, “is so full of deified spirits, divine souls, that you may sooner find a god than a man among us.” We think so well of ourselves, and that is abundant evidence of great folly.

My second argument rests on a similar passage of Scripture. Although I have already mentioned its substance, there are reasons to repeat it—and, with Plato’s permission, I may: “There is no harm in saying a good thing twice.” “Fools,” says David, “because of their transgressions,” and so on, Psalm 107:17. From this Musculus infers that all transgressors must necessarily be fools.

So we read in Romans 2: “Tribulation and anguish upon the soul of everyone who does evil”; but everyone does evil. And Isaiah 65:14: “My servants shall sing for joy, and you shall cry out in sorrow of heart and distress of mind.” The common agreement of all philosophers confirms it. “Wickedness,” says Cardan, “is nothing but folly and madness.” What upright man lives among us? Show me an honest man. “No one is wicked without being foolish”: that is Fabius’s maxim to the same effect. If none is honest, none is wise; then all are fools.

And they may well be considered fools. Who could judge otherwise of someone who prepares to travel west when he should be hurrying east—who goes backwards all his life, westward when he is bound east? Or who could think a man wise, asks Musculus, if he prefers momentary pleasures to eternity, or spends his master’s property in his absence, only to be condemned for it at once? Wisdom is useless in someone who cannot be wise for himself.

Who will call a sick man wise when he eats and drinks in ways that upset his body’s balance? Can you call someone wise or sensible who wants his health but will do nothing to obtain or preserve it? Theodoret, drawing on the Platonist Plotinus, thinks it ridiculous for a man to live by his own rules, do what offends God, and yet hope that God will save him; or, when he wilfully neglects his own safety and despises the means of securing it, expect someone else to deliver him. Who will call such people wise?

A third argument follows from the preceding one. Everyone is carried away by passion, discontent, lust, pleasures, and so forth; people generally hate the virtues they ought to love and love the vices they ought to hate. They are therefore more than melancholy: quite mad, brute beasts, without reason—so Chrysostom argues. Or rather, they are dead and buried alive, as Philo the Jew concludes with certainty of all who are carried away by passions or suffer from any disease of the mind.

Where there is fear and sorrow, Lactantius firmly maintains, wisdom cannot dwell. Whoever desires will also fear; Whoever lives in fear will never, to my mind, be free. Seneca and the other Stoics hold that wisdom cannot be found wherever there is even the slightest disturbance of the emotions.

What could be more ridiculous, as Lactantius asks, than to hear how Xerxes whipped the Hellespont, threatened Mount Athos, and so on? To come to the point, who is free from passion? “There is no mortal whom pain or sickness does not touch,” as Cicero declares, quoting an old poem. No mortal can avoid sorrow and sickness, and sorrow is melancholy’s inseparable companion.

Chrysostom goes further still: they are more than mad, actual beasts, stupefied and without common sense. “How,” he asks, “am I to recognise you as a man when you kick like an ass, neigh after women like a horse, rage with lust like a bull, gorge like a bear, sting like a scorpion, prey like a wolf, and are as cunning as a fox and as shameless as a dog? Shall I call you a man when you show every sign of a beast? How shall I recognise you as a man? By your shape? That frightens me still more, to see a beast in the likeness of a man.”

Seneca calls that saying of Epicurus a magnificent utterance, a heroic speech: “A fool is always beginning to live.” He considers it shameful fickleness to lay new foundations for one’s life every day. But who does otherwise? One travels, another builds; one pursues this business, another that, and old people are as far astray as the rest. “O foolish old age!” Cicero exclaims. Thus young, old, and middle-aged are all senseless and foolish.

Among many others, Aeneas Sylvius sets down three particular ways to recognise a fool. He is a fool who seeks what he cannot find; he is a fool who seeks something that, once found, will do him more harm than good; and he is a fool who, having several routes to his journey’s end, chooses the worst. If so, it seems to me that most people are fools. Examine their conduct and you will soon see what simpletons and madmen the greater part of them are.

Beroaldus considers drunkards, afternoon drinkers, and those who take more than ordinary pleasure in drink to be mad. The first cup quenches thirst, as the poet Panyasis declares in Athenaeus; “the second belongs to the Graces, the Hours, and Dionysus.” The second makes people merry, the third is for pleasure, “the fourth for madness”: the fourth drives them mad. If this proposition is true, what a catalogue of madmen we shall have! What must we call those who drink four times four? Do they not make themselves utterly mad, beyond every frenzy, beyond all madness? I agree with him: they are more than mad, much worse than mad.

The people of Abdera judged Democritus mad because he was sometimes sad and at other times extravagantly merry. “In this country,” says Hippocrates, “they say that he raves and is mad because he laughs”: his countrymen think him mad because he laughs. He therefore asks his correspondent to warn all his friends at Rhodes neither to laugh too much nor to be excessively sad. Had those Abderites lived among us and merely seen the sneering and grinning of our age, they would certainly have concluded that we were all out of our minds.

Aristotle holds in his Ethics that the happy man is also the wise man: to be wise and to be happy are interchangeable terms; the good man is likewise wise and honourable. Cicero’s paradox is that wise men are free, but fools are slaves. Freedom is the power to live by our own laws, as we ourselves wish. Who has this freedom? Who is free?

The wise man who commands himself, Whom neither poverty nor death nor chains can frighten, Strong enough to resist desires and scorn honours, Complete in himself, smooth and round. He is wise who can command his own will, Brave and always steadfast in himself, Whom neither poverty, death, nor chains can frighten, Who checks his desires, scorns honours, and is just and upright.

But where is such a man to be found? If nowhere, then, at the opposite extreme, we are all slaves, senseless or worse. “No wicked man is happy.” But no one is happy in this life, no one good; therefore no one is wise. For good people are rare. For one virtue you will find ten vices in the same person: few Prometheuses, many Epimetheuses.

We may perhaps claim the title for ourselves or bestow it upon others as a favour—Charles the Wise, Philip the Good, Louis the Pious, and so on. We may describe the qualities of a wise man, as Cicero describes an orator, Xenophon Cyrus, Castiglione a courtier, or Galen a balanced bodily constitution, and as political writers describe an aristocracy. But where is such a man to be found?