The Anatomy of Melancholy

Now the usual cause of this mischief comes from ourselves or from others: we both act and are acted upon. It proceeds inwardly from ourselves when we are the active causes, from an inflated opinion of our good qualities and our own worth—which is really no worth—our generosity, attractiveness, grace, courage, strength, wealth, patience, meekness, hospitality, beauty, temperance, gentle birth, knowledge, intelligence, science, art, learning, our excellent gifts and good fortune. For these, like Narcissus, we admire, flatter and applaud ourselves, and think the whole world values us as highly. Just as unattractive women readily believe those who tell them they are beautiful, we too readily believe in our own good qualities and praises, and are too well satisfied with ourselves.

We boast of and advertise our own works, and scorn everyone else’s in comparison. “Puffed up with knowledge,” as Paul says: our wisdom, our learning! All our geese are swans, and we value other men’s works as low and disparage them as much as we overvalue and prize our own. We will not allow them second place, no, not even third. What, “is Ulysses compared with me?” They are “mice, flies and gnats beside him,” nits and flies compared with his implacable and haughty, eminent and arrogant worship, though in truth they are far ahead of him.

They alone are wise, alone rich, alone fortunate, brave and beautiful, puffed up with this dropsy of self-conceit. Like that proud Pharisee, they suppose they are unlike other men, made of a purer and more precious metal. “They alone are effective in conducting affairs”—what the wise Periander said of those “who first consider every undertaking,” and so on.

“I knew a certain man,” says Erasmus: I knew someone so arrogant that he thought himself inferior to no man alive, like Callisthenes the philosopher, whose insolence was such that he thought neither Alexander’s deeds nor any other subject worthy of his pen; or Seleucus, king of Syria, who thought nobody fit to contend with him except the Romans, “judging them alone worthy to contest dominion with him.”

What Cicero wrote to Atticus long ago still holds: there has never yet been a true poet or orator who thought anyone else better than himself. Such, for the most part, are your princes, potentates, great philosophers, historians, founders of sects or heresies, and all our great scholars. As Jerome defines him, a natural philosopher is a vainglorious creature, an utter slave to rumour, fame and popular opinion. Though they write “on contempt for glory,” as he observes, they still put their names on their books.