The Anatomy of Melancholy

The Pope is more than a man, a demigod, as his parrots often make him out to be; besides, His Holiness cannot err—when speaking from his official chair, presumably. Yet some popes have been magicians, heretics, atheists, or children. As Platina says of John XXII: though a learned man, he did many things that showed stupidity and frivolity, being a man of foolish and sluggish intelligence. A competent scholar, yet he did many things foolishly and frivolously.

I can say no more, then, of particular people; but of the rest I can say in general that they are all mad. Their wits have evaporated and, as Ariosto imagines in book 34, are kept in jars above the moon. Some lose their wits to love, some to ambition, Some serving lords and men of high position; Some in fine jewels richly, dearly set, Others in poetry their wits forget. Another dreams of being an alchemist, Until all’s spent and his reckoning goes amiss.

They are convicted fools, certified madmen, and many of them, I fear, beyond cure. Their groins rumble; the symptoms are obvious. They all belong to Gotham parish: Since madness is beyond doubt, and frenzy plain to see, what remains but to send for the lash-bearing attendants, those officers who can take them all off together to Bedlam for company, and appoint Rabelais their physician?

If anyone meanwhile asks who I am to judge others so boldly—do you have no faults yourself? Have I no faults? Yes, more than you have, whoever you are. We are part of the crowd. I confess it again: I am as foolish, as mad, as anyone. I seem mad to you; I do not myself ask To be spared the name of madman.

I do not deny it: let one madman be taken out of the crowd. My comfort is that I have plenty of companions, including some very distinguished ones. And though I am not as sound in mind or as judicious as I ought to be, I am not as mad, or as bad either, as you perhaps suppose.

To conclude: once it is granted that the whole world, and every member of it, is melancholy, mad, or foolish, I have finished my task and sufficiently illustrated what I first undertook to demonstrate. For now I have no more to say. Democritus wishes them a sound mind. I can only wish myself and them a good physician, and all of us a better state of mind.

And although the reasons already given justified my taking up this subject and pointing to these particular kinds of folly, so that people might acknowledge their failings and try to correct what is wrong, I now have a more serious purpose. To leave aside all irrelevant digressions, and say no more about those who are melancholy only in a loose sense, mad metaphorically, slightly mad, or merely disposed that way—

the stupid, angry, drunken, silly, brutish, sullen, proud, boastful, ridiculous, bestial, ill-tempered, stubborn, shameless, erratic, barren of wit, foolish, dull, desperate, harebrained, and so on; mad, frantic, foolish, irregular specimens whom no new hospital can hold and no medicine help—

my purpose and endeavour in the following discussion is to dissect this humour of melancholy in all its parts and varieties, as a settled condition or a disease in the usual sense. I shall examine it philosophically and medically, showing its causes, symptoms, and various cures, so that it may be better avoided.