The Anatomy of Melancholy

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.