The Anatomy of Melancholy

So we are foolish and ridiculous, absurd in our actions, behaviour, food, clothing, customs, and deliberations. We mock and point at one another, though in the end we are all fools, and the greatest asses are those who take most care to hide their ears. An individual, once convinced or fixed in an opinion, counts everyone who does not share his feelings an idiot and an ass: “He considers nothing right except what pleases him.” Those who think differently are all fools in his eyes, for “people think whatever they want is right to want.” He will not say with Atticus, “To each his own bride; to me, mine”—let everyone enjoy his own spouse. His alone is beautiful, “his own love,” and so on.

He despises everyone in comparison with himself, will imitate no one and listen to no one but himself: as Pliny said, he is his own law and example. What Hippocrates long ago rebuked in his letter to Dionysius is borne out in our own time: “Everyone considers superfluous in another what he himself neither possesses nor values.” Whatever he lacks or does not esteem, he calls unnecessary, useless, mere foolishness in someone else—like Aesop’s fox, who, after losing his tail, wanted all the other foxes to cut theirs off.

The Chinese say that we Europeans have one eye, they themselves two, and everyone else is blind—though Scaliger counts them beasts too, “nothing but cattle.” Just so, you and your followers are the only wise people, others are middling, and the rest out of their minds, mere idiots and asses. Failing to acknowledge our own errors and imperfections, we confidently ridicule others, as though we alone were exempt and merely watching everyone else. We think it a fine thing—as indeed it is—“to enjoy other people’s madness,” amusing ourselves with their crooked ways, though the man who laughs is more at fault than the rest.

“Change the name, and the story is about you.” He might take himself by the nose for a fool. What one writer calls “the greatest proof of foolishness” is to be ridiculous to others without noticing it, as Marsyas was when he competed with Apollo, “not realizing he was being made a laughing-stock,” as Apuleius says. The case is his own; he stands convicted of madness. As Augustine aptly concludes, in the eyes of the wise and of angels, he looks like someone who, to our eyes, walks upside down.

So you laugh at me, I at you, and both of us at a third, who turns the poet’s words back upon us: “Alas! They say I am mad, when they themselves are mad.” We accuse others of madness and folly while being the greatest fools ourselves. For it is a chief sign and characteristic of a fool, as Ecclesiastes 10:3 indicates, to domineer, vilify, condemn, criticize, and call others fools out of pride and self-conceit—“we do not see the part of the knapsack behind our backs”—to rebuke in others the faults we are most guilty of, and teach what we do not practise ourselves.