The Anatomy of Melancholy

Thus they commonly go about meditating to themselves; thus they sit; such are their movements and gestures. Fulgosius, book 8, chapter 7, tells how Thomas Aquinas, dining with King Louis of France, suddenly struck the table with his fist and cried, “The argument against the Manichaeans is settled!” His mind was woolgathering, as they say, and his head was occupied with other matters. When he realized his mistake, he was deeply embarrassed.

Vitruvius tells such a story of Archimedes: having discovered how to determine how much gold was mixed with the silver in King Hiero’s crown, he ran naked from the bath crying “I have found it!”—I have found it. He was habitually so absorbed in his studies that he never noticed what went on around him. When the city was captured and soldiers were about to plunder his house, he took no notice. Saint Bernard rode all day beside the Lemnian lake and at last asked where he was: Marullus, book 2, chapter 4.

It was Democritus’s behaviour alone that made the people of Abdera suppose him mad and send for Hippocrates to cure him. In any solemn company, he would burst out laughing at every opportunity. Theophrastus says much the same of Heraclitus, because he wept continually, and Laertius of Menedemus Lampsacus, because he ran about like a madman, saying that he had come from hell as a spy to report to the devils what mortals did.

Your greatest students are commonly no better: foolish, ineffectual fellows in their outward behaviour, absurd and ridiculous to others, with no experience of worldly business. They can measure the heavens, range across the world and teach wisdom to others, yet every lowly tradesman outwits them in bargains and contracts. Are these men not fools? How could they be anything but so many school-bred dolts when, as he rightly observed, they neither hear nor see the things commonly done in the world outside? How are they to gain experience? By what means?

“I knew many scholars in my time,” says Aeneas Sylvius, in a letter to Gaspar Schlick, the emperor’s chancellor, “who were exceedingly learned, yet so uncouth and foolish that they lacked ordinary civility and did not know how to manage domestic or public affairs.” Paglarensis was astonished, and said that his farmer must have cheated him, when he heard that his sow had eleven piglets but his donkey only one foal.

To say the best of this profession, I can give no other testimony about them in general than Pliny gives of Isaeus: “He is still a scholar; no kind of men is so simple, so sincere, or better.” They are mostly harmless, honest, upright, innocent and plain-dealing men.