The Anatomy of Melancholy

And who is not a fool? Who is free from melancholy? Who is not affected by it, more or less, as an established condition or a passing disposition? If it is a disposition, bad dispositions become habits when they persist, says Plutarch; habits either are diseases or turn into them. Cicero maintains the same thing in the second book of his Tusculan Disputations: “The minds of all the unwise, and of all the disturbed, are diseased.” Fools are sick, and so is everyone troubled in mind;

for what is sickness but, as Gregorius of Toulouse defines it, a breaking or disturbing of the bodily alliance that health holds together? And who is not sick or unwell? In whom do passion, anger, envy, discontent, fear, and sorrow not rule? Who does not suffer from this disease? Give me a little time and you will see the evidence, admissions, and arguments by which I shall prove that most people are mad. They need to make a pilgrimage to the Anticyras—as people did in Strabo’s time—as much as people now hurry to Compostela, Our Lady of Sichem, or Loreto for help. The voyage is likely to be as successful as the voyage to Guiana; and there is far more need for hellebore than for tobacco.

To show that people are so disordered, melancholy, mad, and giddy-headed, hear Solomon’s testimony, Ecclesiastes 2:12: “And I turned to consider wisdom, madness, and folly,” and so on. And verse 23: “All his days are sorrow, his labour grief, and his heart takes no rest at night.” So take melancholy in whatever sense you like—strictly or loosely, as a disposition or an established condition, involving pleasure or pain, delusion, discontent, fear, sorrow, or madness; for part of this or all of it, literally or metaphorically—it comes to the same thing. Laughter itself is madness, according to Solomon; and, as Saint Paul says, “Worldly sorrow brings death.” “Human hearts are evil, and madness is in their hearts while they live,” Ecclesiastes 9:3.

Wise people themselves are no better: Ecclesiastes 1:18, “In much wisdom there is much grief, and whoever increases wisdom increases sorrow.” Chapter 2:17: he hated life itself; nothing pleased him; he hated his labour. Everything, he concludes, is sorrow, grief, emptiness, and vexation of spirit. And although he was the wisest man in the world, “a sanctuary of wisdom,” possessing wisdom in abundance, he will not defend himself or justify his own actions. “Surely I am more foolish than anyone, and I do not have a human being’s understanding,” Proverbs 30:2. Whether these are Solomon’s words or those of Agur son of Jakeh, they belong to the canon of Scripture.