The Anatomy of Melancholy

I cannot deny that some folly is approved: a divine frenzy, a holy madness, even a spiritual drunkenness in God’s saints themselves. Bernard calls it “holy madness”—not a passion affecting God himself, as the blasphemous Vorstius would infer, but a familiar experience of good people. So Paul, in 2 Corinthians, says that he was a fool, and so on; and in Romans 9 he wishes himself accursed for their sake.

Such is the drunkenness Ficino speaks of, when the soul is lifted up and transported by a divine taste of that heavenly nectar, which poets represented through the rites of Dionysus. In this sense, with the poet, “I long to run mad”; as Augustine exhorts us, “Let everyone prepare himself for drunkenness.” Let us all be mad and drunk. But we commonly misunderstand and overstep our commission; we reel towards the opposite extreme and cannot receive this spiritual intoxication.

And, as he said of the Greeks, “You Greeks are always children”—you Britons, French, Germans, Italians, and the rest: you are a company of fools.

Proceed now from the parts to the whole—or from the whole to the parts—and you will find no different result. The parts will be discussed sufficiently in the remainder of this preface. The conclusion about the whole must follow through a chain of reasoning or induction. Every crowd is mad: a many-headed beast, hasty and rash, without judgement, a stupid animal, a roaring mob. Roger Bacon proves it from Aristotle: “The common people are set in opposition to the wise; what seems true to the common people is false.” What the common people consider true is mostly false; they are always opposed to the wise.

But the whole world has this disposition—the crowd—and you yourself belong to it, one of the common people. So does he, and he, and everyone else. Therefore, as Phocion concludes, you deserve approval in nothing you say or do: mere idiots and asses. Begin wherever you please, go backwards or forwards, choose from the whole pack, shut your eyes and choose: you will find them all alike, no barrel with better herrings than another.

Copernicus, the successor of Atlas, holds that the earth is a planet, moving and shining for others as the moon does for us. Digges, Gilbert, Kepler, Origanus, and others defend his hypothesis in all seriousness, and maintain that the moon is inhabited. If the earth is a moon, then we too are dizzy, spinning, and moonstruck within this maze beneath the moon.

I could produce arguments like these until nightfall. If you heard the rest, Evening would close heaven’s gates and lay the day to rest first. But, as I promised, I will come down to particulars.