A good and wise man, such as Apollo, when consulted, Could scarcely find one among many thousands. A wise and good man in a million: Apollo, when consulted, could scarcely find one. A human being is a marvel in himself, but Trismegistus adds, “The greatest marvel is a wise man”: a wise man is a wonder. Many carry the thyrsus; few are true initiates of Bacchus.

When Alexander was presented with King Darius’s rich and costly casket, and everyone advised him what to put in it, he kept it for Homer’s works, as the most precious jewel of human genius. Yet Scaliger attacks Homer’s Muse as “the nurse of mad wisdom,” a nursery of madness, as shameless as a lady at court who blushes at nothing.

Jacobus Micyllus, Gilbertus Cognatus, Erasmus, and almost all later generations admire Lucian’s exuberant wit. Yet Scaliger rejects him in his critical judgement and calls him the Cerberus of the Muses. Socrates, whom the whole world praised so highly, is condemned as a fool by Lactantius and Theodoret. Plutarch praises Seneca’s genius above that of all the Greeks, “second to none”; yet Seneca says of himself, “When I want to amuse myself with a fool, I turn to myself, and there I have him.”

In the sixteenth book of On Subtlety, Cardan lists twelve outstanding and penetrating philosophers for their merit, subtlety, and wisdom: Archimedes, Galen, Vitruvius, Archytas of Tarentum, Euclid, Geber, the first inventor of algebra, and al-Kindi the mathematician—the last two both Arabs—among others. But his “three rulers of the world,” far above the rest, are Ptolemy, Plotinus, and Hippocrates.

In Exercise 224, Scaliger mocks this judgement of Cardan’s, calls some of these men carpenters and artisans, and makes Galen “the fringe of Hippocrates,” a mere hem of Hippocrates’s garment. Elsewhere Cardan himself condemns both Galen and Hippocrates for tediousness, obscurity, and confusion. Paracelsus considers them both utter ignoramuses, infants in medicine and philosophy.

Scaliger and Cardan admire Suisset the Calculator, “who almost exceeded the limits of human intelligence,” yet Luis Vives calls his work “Suisset’s trifles.” And Cardan contradicts himself elsewhere, disparaging the ancients in comparison with the present age: “Our predecessors, compared with people today, may justly be called children.”

In the end, Cardan and Saint Bernard will admit no one to this catalogue of wise men except prophets and apostles. You have already heard what they think of themselves. We are wise in worldly matters, admire ourselves, and seek applause. But listen to Saint Bernard: “The wiser you are outwardly, the more foolish you become inwardly,” and so on; “you are prudent in everything, but foolish about yourself.” The wiser you are for others, the greater fool you are for yourself.

I cannot deny that some folly is approved: a divine frenzy, a holy madness, even a spiritual drunkenness in God’s saints themselves. Bernard calls it “holy madness”—not a passion affecting God himself, as the blasphemous Vorstius would infer, but a familiar experience of good people. So Paul, in 2 Corinthians, says that he was a fool, and so on; and in Romans 9 he wishes himself accursed for their sake.

Such is the drunkenness Ficino speaks of, when the soul is lifted up and transported by a divine taste of that heavenly nectar, which poets represented through the rites of Dionysus. In this sense, with the poet, “I long to run mad”; as Augustine exhorts us, “Let everyone prepare himself for drunkenness.” Let us all be mad and drunk. But we commonly misunderstand and overstep our commission; we reel towards the opposite extreme and cannot receive this spiritual intoxication.

And, as he said of the Greeks, “You Greeks are always children”—you Britons, French, Germans, Italians, and the rest: you are a company of fools.

Proceed now from the parts to the whole—or from the whole to the parts—and you will find no different result. The parts will be discussed sufficiently in the remainder of this preface. The conclusion about the whole must follow through a chain of reasoning or induction. Every crowd is mad: a many-headed beast, hasty and rash, without judgement, a stupid animal, a roaring mob. Roger Bacon proves it from Aristotle: “The common people are set in opposition to the wise; what seems true to the common people is false.” What the common people consider true is mostly false; they are always opposed to the wise.

But the whole world has this disposition—the crowd—and you yourself belong to it, one of the common people. So does he, and he, and everyone else. Therefore, as Phocion concludes, you deserve approval in nothing you say or do: mere idiots and asses. Begin wherever you please, go backwards or forwards, choose from the whole pack, shut your eyes and choose: you will find them all alike, no barrel with better herrings than another.

Copernicus, the successor of Atlas, holds that the earth is a planet, moving and shining for others as the moon does for us. Digges, Gilbert, Kepler, Origanus, and others defend his hypothesis in all seriousness, and maintain that the moon is inhabited. If the earth is a moon, then we too are dizzy, spinning, and moonstruck within this maze beneath the moon.

I could produce arguments like these until nightfall. If you heard the rest, Evening would close heaven’s gates and lay the day to rest first. But, as I promised, I will come down to particulars.