_A DIGRESSION CONCERNING THE ORIGINAL_, _THE USE_, _AND IMPROVEMENT OF
MADNESS IN A COMMONWEALTH_.
NOR shall it any ways detract from the just reputation of this famous
sect that its rise and institution are owing to such an author as I have
described Jack to be, a person whose intellectuals were overturned and
his brain shaken out of its natural position, which we commonly suppose
to be a distemper, and call by the name of madness or frenzy. For if we
take a survey of the greatest actions that have been performed in the
world under the influence of single men, which are the establishment of
new empires by conquest, the advance and progress of new schemes in
philosophy, and the contriving as well as the propagating of new
religions, we shall find the authors of them all to have been persons
whose natural reason hath admitted great revolutions from their diet,
their education, the prevalency of some certain temper, together with the
particular influence of air and climate. Besides, there is something
individual in human minds that easily kindles at the accidental approach
and collision of certain circumstances, which, though of paltry and mean
appearance, do often flame out into the greatest emergencies of life.
For great turns are not always given by strong hands, but by lucky
adaptation and at proper seasons, and it is of no import where the fire
was kindled if the vapour has once got up into the brain. For the upper
region of man is furnished like the middle region of the air, the
materials are formed from causes of the widest difference, yet produce at
last the same substance and effect. Mists arise from the earth, steams
from dunghills, exhalations from the sea, and smoke from fire; yet all
clouds are the same in composition as well as consequences, and the fumes
issuing from a jakes will furnish as comely and useful a vapour as
incense from an altar. Thus far, I suppose, will easily be granted me;
and then it will follow that as the face of Nature never produces rain
but when it is overcast and disturbed, so human understanding seated in
the brain must be troubled and overspread by vapours ascending from the
lower faculties to water the invention and render it fruitful. Now
although these vapours (as it hath been already said) are of as various
original as those of the skies, yet the crop they produce differs both in
kind and degree, merely according to the soil. I will produce two
instances to prove and explain what I am now advancing.
A certain great prince {126a} raised a mighty army, filled his coffers
with infinite treasures, provided an invincible fleet, and all this
without giving the least part of his design to his greatest ministers or
his nearest favourites. Immediately the whole world was alarmed, the
neighbouring crowns in trembling expectation towards what point the storm
would burst, the small politicians everywhere forming profound
conjectures. Some believed he had laid a scheme for universal monarchy;
others, after much insight, determined the matter to be a project for
pulling down the Pope and setting up the Reformed religion, which had
once been his own. Some again, of a deeper sagacity, sent him into Asia
to subdue the Turk and recover Palestine. In the midst of all these
projects and preparations, a certain state-surgeon {126b}, gathering the
nature of the disease by these symptoms, attempted the cure, at one blow
performed the operation, broke the bag and out flew the vapour; nor did
anything want to render it a complete remedy, only that the prince
unfortunately happened to die in the performance. Now is the reader
exceeding curious to learn from whence this vapour took its rise, which
had so long set the nations at a gaze? What secret wheel, what hidden
spring, could put into motion so wonderful an engine? It was afterwards
discovered that the movement of this whole machine had been directed by
an absent female, who was removed into an enemy’s country. What should
an unhappy prince do in such ticklish circumstances as these? He tried
in vain the poet’s never-failing receipt of _corpora quæque_, for
“Idque petit corpus mens unde est saucia amore;
Unde feritur, eo tendit, gestitque coire.”—_Lucr._
Having to no purpose used all peaceable endeavours, the collected part of
the semen, raised and inflamed, became adust, converted to choler, turned
head upon the spinal duct, and ascended to the brain. The very same
principle that influences a bully to break the windows of a woman who has
jilted him naturally stirs up a great prince to raise mighty armies and
dream of nothing but sieges, battles, and victories.
The other instance is what I have read somewhere in a very ancient author
of a mighty king {127a}, who, for the space of above thirty years, amused
himself to take and lose towns, beat armies and be beaten, drive princes
out of their dominions, fright children from their bread and butter,
burn, lay waste, plunder, dragoon, massacre subject and stranger, friend
and foe, male and female. It is recorded that the philosophers of each
country were in grave dispute upon causes natural, moral, and political,
to find out where they should assign an original solution of this
phenomenon. At last the vapour or spirit which animated the hero’s
brain, being in perpetual circulation, seized upon that region of the
human body so renowned for furnishing the _zibeta occidentalis_ {127b},
and gathering there into a tumour, left the rest of the world for that
time in peace. Of such mighty consequence is it where those exhalations
fix, and of so little from whence they proceed. The same spirits which
in their superior progress would conquer a kingdom descending upon the
anus, conclude in a fistula.
Let us next examine the great introducers of new schemes in philosophy,
and search till we can find from what faculty of the soul the disposition
arises in mortal man of taking it into his head to advance new systems
with such an eager zeal in things agreed on all hands impossible to be
known; from what seeds this disposition springs, and to what quality of
human nature these grand innovators have been indebted for their number
of disciples, because it is plain that several of the chief among them,
both ancient and modern, were usually mistaken by their adversaries, and,
indeed, by all, except their own followers, to have been persons crazed
or out of their wits, having generally proceeded in the common course of
their words and actions by a method very different from the vulgar
dictates of unrefined reason, agreeing for the most part in their several
models with their present undoubted successors in the academy of modern
Bedlam, whose merits and principles I shall further examine in due place.
Of this kind were Epicurus, Diogenes, Apollonius, Lucretius, Paracelsus,
Des Cartes, and others, who, if they were now in the world, tied fast and
separate from their followers, would in this our undistinguishing age
incur manifest danger of phlebotomy, and whips, and chains, and dark
chambers, and straw. For what man in the natural state or course of
thinking did ever conceive it in his power to reduce the notions of all
mankind exactly to the same length, and breadth, and height of his own?
Yet this is the first humble and civil design of all innovators in the
empire of reason. Epicurus modestly hoped that one time or other a
certain fortuitous concourse of all men’s opinions, after perpetual
jostlings, the sharp with the smooth, the light and the heavy, the round
and the square, would, by certain clinamina, unite in the notions of
atoms and void, as these did in the originals of all things. Cartesius
reckoned to see before he died the sentiments of all philosophers, like
so many lesser stars in his romantic system, rapt and drawn within his
own vortex. Now I would gladly be informed how it is possible to account
for such imaginations as these in particular men, without recourse to my
phenomenon of vapours ascending from the lower faculties to overshadow
the brain, and there distilling into conceptions, for which the
narrowness of our mother-tongue has not yet assigned any other name
beside that of madness or frenzy. Let us therefore now conjecture how it
comes to pass that none of these great prescribers do ever fail providing
themselves and their notions with a number of implicit disciples, and I
think the reason is easy to be assigned, for there is a peculiar string
in the harmony of human understanding, which in several individuals is
exactly of the same tuning. This, if you can dexterously screw up to its
right key, and then strike gently upon it whenever you have the good
fortune to light among those of the same pitch, they will by a secret
necessary sympathy strike exactly at the same time. And in this one
circumstance lies all the skill or luck of the matter; for, if you chance
to jar the string among those who are either above or below your own
height, instead of subscribing to your doctrine, they will tie you fast,
call you mad, and feed you with bread and water. It is therefore a point
of the nicest conduct to distinguish and adapt this noble talent with
respect to the differences of persons and of times. Cicero understood
this very well, when, writing to a friend in England, with a caution,
among other matters, to beware of being cheated by our hackney-coachmen
(who, it seems, in those days were as arrant rascals as they are now),
has these remarkable words, _Est quod gaudeas te in ista loca venisse_,
_ubi aliquid sapere viderere_ {129}. For, to speak a bold truth, it is a
fatal miscarriage so ill to order affairs as to pass for a fool in one
company, when in another you might be treated as a philosopher; which I
desire some certain gentlemen of my acquaintance to lay up in their
hearts as a very seasonable innuendo.
This, indeed, was the fatal mistake of that worthy gentleman, my most
ingenious friend Mr. Wotton, a person in appearance ordained for great
designs as well as performances, whether you will consider his notions or
his looks. Surely no man ever advanced into the public with fitter
qualifications of body and mind for the propagation of a new religion.
Oh, had those happy talents, misapplied to vain philosophy, been turned
into their proper channels of dreams and visions, where distortion of
mind and countenance are of such sovereign use, the base, detracting
world would not then have dared to report that something is amiss, that
his brain hath undergone an unlucky shake, which even his brother
modernists themselves, like ungrates, do whisper so loud that it reaches
up to the very garret I am now writing in.
Lastly, whoever pleases to look into the fountains of enthusiasm, from
whence in all ages have eternally proceeded such fattening streams, will
find the spring-head to have been as troubled and muddy as the current.
Of such great emolument is a tincture of this vapour, which the world
calls madness, that without its help the world would not only be deprived
of those two great blessings, conquests and systems, but even all mankind
would unhappily be reduced to the same belief in things invisible. Now
the former postulatum being held, that it is of no import from what
originals this vapour proceeds, but either in what angles it strikes and
spreads over the understanding, or upon what species of brain it ascends,
it will be a very delicate point to cut the feather and divide the
several reasons to a nice and curious reader, how this numerical
difference in the brain can produce effects of so vast a difference from
the same vapour as to be the sole point of individuation between
Alexander the Great, Jack of Leyden, and Monsieur Des Cartes. The
present argument is the most abstracted that ever I engaged in; it
strains my faculties to their highest stretch, and I desire the reader to
attend with utmost perpensity, for I now proceed to unravel this knotty
point.
There is in mankind a certain . . . _Hic multa_ . . . _desiderantur_. . .
and this I take to be a clear solution of the matter.
Having, therefore, so narrowly passed through this intricate difficulty,
the reader will, I am sure, agree with me in the conclusion that, if the
moderns mean by madness only a disturbance or transposition of the brain,
by force of certain vapours issuing up from the lower faculties, then has
this madness been the parent of all those mighty revolutions that have
happened in empire, in philosophy, and in religion. For the brain in its
natural position and state of serenity disposeth its owner to pass his
life in the common forms, without any thought of subduing multitudes to
his own power, his reasons, or his visions, and the more he shapes his
understanding by the pattern of human learning, the less he is inclined
to form parties after his particular notions, because that instructs him
in his private infirmities, as well as in the stubborn ignorance of the
people. But when a man’s fancy gets astride on his reason, when
imagination is at cuffs with the senses, and common understanding as well
as common sense is kicked out of doors, the first proselyte he makes is
himself; and when that is once compassed, the difficulty is not so great
in bringing over others, a strong delusion always operating from without
as vigorously as from within. For cant and vision are to the ear and the
eye the same that tickling is to the touch. Those entertainments and
pleasures we most value in life are such as dupe and play the wag with
the senses. For if we take an examination of what is generally
understood by happiness, as it has respect either to the understanding or
the senses we shall find all its properties and adjuncts will herd under
this short definition, that it is a perpetual possession of being well
deceived. And first, with relation to the mind or understanding, it is
manifest what mighty advantages fiction has over truth, and the reason is
just at our elbow: because imagination can build nobler scenes and
produce more wonderful revolutions than fortune or Nature will be at the
expense to furnish. Nor is mankind so much to blame in his choice thus
determining him, if we consider that the debate merely lies between
things past and things conceived, and so the question is only this:
whether things that have place in the imagination may not as properly be
said to exist as those that are seated in the memory? which may be justly
held in the affirmative, and very much to the advantage of the former,
since this is acknowledged to be the womb of things, and the other
allowed to be no more than the grave. Again, if we take this definition
of happiness and examine it with reference to the senses, it will be
acknowledged wonderfully adapt. How sad and insipid do all objects
accost us that are not conveyed in the vehicle of delusion! How shrunk
is everything as it appears in the glass of Nature, so that if it were
not for the assistance of artificial mediums, false lights, refracted
angles, varnish, and tinsel, there would be a mighty level in the
felicity and enjoyments of mortal men. If this were seriously considered
by the world, as I have a certain reason to suspect it hardly will, men
would no longer reckon among their high points of wisdom the art of
exposing weak sides and publishing infirmities—an employment, in my
opinion, neither better nor worse than that of unmasking, which, I think,
has never been allowed fair usage, either in the world or the playhouse.
In the proportion that credulity is a more peaceful possession of the
mind than curiosity, so far preferable is that wisdom which converses
about the surface to that pretended philosophy which enters into the
depths of things and then comes gravely back with informations and
discoveries, that in the inside they are good for nothing. The two
senses to which all objects first address themselves are the sight and
the touch; these never examine farther than the colour, the shape, the
size, and whatever other qualities dwell or are drawn by art upon the
outward of bodies; and then comes reason officiously, with tools for
cutting, and opening, and mangling, and piercing, offering to demonstrate
that they are not of the same consistence quite through. Now I take all
this to be the last degree of perverting Nature, one of whose eternal
laws it is to put her best furniture forward. And therefore, in order to
save the charges of all such expensive anatomy for the time to come, I do
here think fit to inform the reader that in such conclusions as these
reason is certainly in the right; and that in most corporeal beings which
have fallen under my cognisance, the outside hath been infinitely
preferable to the in, whereof I have been further convinced from some
late experiments. Last week I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly
believe how much it altered her person for the worse. Yesterday I
ordered the carcass of a beau to be stripped in my presence, when we were
all amazed to find so many unsuspected faults under one suit of clothes.
Then I laid open his brain, his heart, and his spleen, but I plainly
perceived at every operation that the farther we proceeded, we found the
defects increase upon us, in number and bulk; from all which I justly
formed this conclusion to myself, that whatever philosopher or projector
can find out an art to sodder and patch up the flaws and imperfections of
Nature, will deserve much better of mankind and teach us a more useful
science than that so much in present esteem, of widening and exposing
them (like him who held anatomy to be the ultimate end of physic). And
he whose fortunes and dispositions have placed him in a convenient
station to enjoy the fruits of this noble art, he that can with Epicurus
content his ideas with the films and images that fly off upon his senses
from the superfices of things, such a man, truly wise, creams off Nature,
leaving the sour and the dregs for philosophy and reason to lap up. This
is the sublime and refined point of felicity called the possession of
being well-deceived, the serene peaceful state of being a fool among
knaves.
But to return to madness. It is certain that, according to the system I
have above deduced, every species thereof proceeds from a redundancy of
vapour; therefore, as some kinds of frenzy give double strength to the
sinews, so there are of other species which add vigour, and life, and
spirit to the brain. Now it usually happens that these active spirits,
getting possession of the brain, resemble those that haunt other waste
and empty dwellings, which for want of business either vanish and carry
away a piece of the house, or else stay at home and fling it all out of
the windows. By which are mystically displayed the two principal
branches of madness, and which some philosophers, not considering so well
as I, have mistook to be different in their causes, over-hastily
assigning the first to deficiency and the other to redundance.
I think it therefore manifest, from what I have here advanced, that the
main point of skill and address is to furnish employment for this
redundancy of vapour, and prudently to adjust the seasons of it, by which
means it may certainly become of cardinal and catholic emolument in a
commonwealth. Thus one man, choosing a proper juncture, leaps into a
gulf, from thence proceeds a hero, and is called the saviour of his
country. Another achieves the same enterprise, but unluckily timing it,
has left the brand of madness fixed as a reproach upon his memory. Upon
so nice a distinction are we taught to repeat the name of Curtius with
reverence and love, that of Empedocles with hatred and contempt. Thus
also it is usually conceived that the elder Brutus only personated the
fool and madman for the good of the public; but this was nothing else
than a redundancy of the same vapour long misapplied, called by the
Latins _ingenium par negotiis_, or (to translate it as nearly as I can),
a sort of frenzy never in its right element till you take it up in
business of the state.
Upon all which, and many other reasons of equal weight, though not
equally curious, I do here gladly embrace an opportunity I have long
sought for, of recommending it as a very noble undertaking to Sir Edward
Seymour, Sir Christopher Musgrave, Sir John Bowles, John Howe, Esq., and
other patriots concerned, that they would move for leave to bring in a
Bill for appointing commissioners to inspect into Bedlam and the parts
adjacent, who shall be empowered to send for persons, papers, and
records, to examine into the merits and qualifications of every student
and professor, to observe with utmost exactness their several
dispositions and behaviour, by which means, duly distinguishing and
adapting their talents, they might produce admirable instruments for the
several offices in a state, . . . civil and military, proceeding in such
methods as I shall here humbly propose. And I hope the gentle reader
will give some allowance to my great solicitudes in this important
affair, upon account of that high esteem I have ever borne that
honourable society, whereof I had some time the happiness to be an
unworthy member.
Is any student tearing his straw in piecemeal, swearing and blaspheming,
biting his grate, foaming at the mouth, and emptying his vessel in the
spectators’ faces? Let the right worshipful the Commissioners of
Inspection give him a regiment of dragoons, and send him into Flanders
among the rest. Is another eternally talking, sputtering, gaping,
bawling, in a sound without period or article? What wonderful talents
are here mislaid! Let him be furnished immediately with a green bag and
papers, and threepence in his pocket {135}, and away with him to
Westminster Hall. You will find a third gravely taking the dimensions of
his kennel, a person of foresight and insight, though kept quite in the
dark; for why, like Moses, _Ecce cornuta erat ejus facies_. He walks
duly in one pace, entreats your penny with due gravity and ceremony,
talks much of hard times, and taxes, and the whore of Babylon, bars up
the wooden of his cell constantly at eight o’clock, dreams of fire, and
shoplifters, and court-customers, and privileged places. Now what a
figure would all these acquirements amount to if the owner were sent into
the City among his brethren! Behold a fourth in much and deep
conversation with himself, biting his thumbs at proper junctures, his
countenance chequered with business and design; sometimes walking very
fast, with his eyes nailed to a paper that he holds in his hands; a great
saver of time, somewhat thick of hearing, very short of sight, but more
of memory; a man ever in haste, a great hatcher and breeder of business,
and excellent at the famous art of whispering nothing; a huge idolator of
monosyllables and procrastination, so ready to give his word to everybody
that he never keeps it; one that has forgot the common meaning of words,
but an admirable retainer of the sound; extremely subject to the
looseness, for his occasions are perpetually calling him away. If you
approach his grate in his familiar intervals, “Sir,” says he, “give me a
penny and I’ll sing you a song; but give me the penny first” (hence comes
the common saying and commoner practice of parting with money for a
song). What a complete system of court-skill is here described in every
branch of it, and all utterly lost with wrong application! Accost the
hole of another kennel, first stopping your nose, you will behold a
surly, gloomy, nasty, slovenly mortal, raking in his own dung and
dabbling in his urine. The best part of his diet is the reversion of his
own ordure, which expiring into steams, whirls perpetually about, and at
last reinfunds. His complexion is of a dirty yellow, with a thin
scattered beard, exactly agreeable to that of his diet upon its first
declination, like other insects, who, having their birth and education in
an excrement, from thence borrow their colour and their smell. The
student of this apartment is very sparing of his words, but somewhat
over-liberal of his breath. He holds his hand out ready to receive your
penny, and immediately upon receipt withdraws to his former occupations.
Now is it not amazing to think the society of Warwick Lane {136} should
have no more concern for the recovery of so useful a member, who, if one
may judge from these appearances, would become the greatest ornament to
that illustrious body? Another student struts up fiercely to your teeth,
puffing with his lips, half squeezing out his eyes, and very graciously
holds out his hand to kiss. The keeper desires you not to be afraid of
this professor, for he will do you no hurt; to him alone is allowed the
liberty of the ante-chamber, and the orator of the place gives you to
understand that this solemn person is a tailor run mad with pride. This
considerable student is adorned with many other qualities, upon which at
present I shall not further enlarge. . . . Hark in your ear. . . . I am
strangely mistaken if all his address, his motions, and his airs would
not then be very natural and in their proper element.
I shall not descend so minutely as to insist upon the vast number of
beaux, fiddlers, poets, and politicians that the world might recover by
such a reformation, but what is more material, beside the clear gain
redounding to the commonwealth by so large an acquisition of persons to
employ, whose talents and acquirements, if I may be so bold to affirm it,
are now buried or at least misapplied. It would be a mighty advantage
accruing to the public from this inquiry that all these would very much
excel and arrive at great perfection in their several kinds, which I
think is manifest from what I have already shown, and shall enforce by
this one plain instance, that even I myself, the author of these
momentous truths, am a person whose imaginations are hard-mouthed and
exceedingly disposed to run away with his reason, which I have observed
from long experience to be a very light rider, and easily shook off; upon
which account my friends will never trust me alone without a solemn
promise to vent my speculations in this or the like manner, for the
universal benefit of human kind, which perhaps the gentle, courteous, and
candid reader, brimful of that modern charity and tenderness usually
annexed to his office, will be very hardly persuaded to believe.