The Anatomy of Melancholy

It often causes sudden madness and almost every kind of disease, as I have sufficiently illustrated in my Digression on the Power of Imagination, and shall discuss more fully in my section on Terrors. Fear makes our imagination conceive whatever it pleases, invites the devil to come to us, as Agrippa and Cardan maintain, and tyrannizes over our imagination more than any other emotion, especially in the dark. We see this borne out in most people, as Lavater says: “They imagine what they fear.” What they fear, they conceive and invent for themselves. They think they see goblins, hags and devils, and often become melancholy as a result.

Cardan, in On Subtlety, book 18, gives an example of someone made melancholy in this way for the rest of his life by the sight of a frightening apparition. Augustus Caesar did not dare sit in the dark “unless someone sat beside him,” says Suetonius; “he never lay awake in darkness.” And it is strange what women and children will imagine if they cross a churchyard at night, lie down or remain alone in a dark room: how suddenly they sweat and tremble!

Many people are troubled by future events, by foreknowledge of their fortunes and destinies, as were the emperor Severus, Hadrian and Domitian: “Because he knew the last day of his life,” says Suetonius, he was “deeply anxious”—greatly tormented in mind because he foresaw his end. There are many such cases, which I shall discuss more appropriately elsewhere. Anxiety, compassion, pity, indignation and similar fearful branches growing from these two stems of fear and sorrow I deliberately pass over. Read more about them in Charles Paschal, Dandini and others.