The Anatomy of Melancholy

Or if he had been with Lucian’s sky-travelling Menippus at Jupiter’s listening place, hearing one man pray for rain and another for fine weather, one for his wife’s death and another for his father’s, and so on—asking God for things they would be ashamed to let any human hear—how bewildered he would have been! Do you think he, or anyone else, would say these men were in their right minds? “What sane Orestes would swear that this is a sane man’s conduct?” Could all the hellebore in the Anticyras cure these men? Surely not: an acre of hellebore would not do it.

More lamentable still, they are mad like Seneca’s blind woman and will neither acknowledge it nor seek a cure, for “few see their own disease; everyone loves it.” If a leg or arm troubles us, we do everything possible to relieve it; if we suffer a bodily illness, we send for a physician. But we pay no attention to diseases of the mind.

Lust harrows us on one side, envy, anger, and ambition on the other. Our passions tear us apart like wild horses. In one person the trouble is a passing disposition, in another an established condition; one is melancholy, another mad. Yet who among us seeks help, admits his error, or knows he is ill? Like the stupid fellow who put out the candle so the biting fleas could not find him, a man hides behind an unfamiliar guise and borrowed titles so that no one will recognize him.

Everyone thinks to himself, “To my own eyes, I am sane”—I am well, I am wise—and laughs at others. This is a common fault among them all: the food, clothing, opinions, inclinations, customs, and manners our forefathers approved, we now deride and reject as absurd. Old men think all younger people fools, though they themselves are mere dolts. As sailors think “the lands and cities are receding,” when it is they who move and the land stands still, so these men are themselves deluded, while the world has much more sense.

The Turks mock us, and we mock them; Italians mock the French, considering them frivolous, and the French in turn scoff at Italians and their various customs. Greeks have condemned everyone but themselves as barbarians; the world now holds them in equal contempt. We think Germans slow and dull, and ridicule many of their customs; they think just as contemptuously of us. Spaniards laugh at everyone, and everyone in turn laughs at them.