1. Homer, having contemplated the various kinds of mortal animals, and
compared them one with another in respect to their lives and habits,
cried out:
What wretched creature of what wretched kind,
Than man more weak, calamitous, and blind![215]
attributing to man that unhappy primacy of having the superiority in
miseries. But we, considering man as having already gained the victory
for infelicity, and being publicly declared the most miserable of all
animals, will compare him with himself in a contention about his own
calamities, not unprofitably but even altogether necessarily dividing
his soul from his body; that we may thence learn, whether we live
more miserably on account of Fortune or of ourselves. For sickness is
indeed engendered in the body by Nature; but vice and malice in the
soul are first its own work, afterward its passion. Now it is of no
small advantage towards content of mind, if that which is the worse is
curable, and lighter and less violent in its attacks than we feared.
2. The fox in Aesop, disputing with the panther for the superiority
in beautiful variety,—when this latter had shown his body, and its
superficies curiously stained and spotted, whereas the fox’s tawny
skin was ill-favored and unpleasant to the sight,—said thus: “But if
you, sir judge, will look within me, you will find me much fuller of
variety than this leopard;” manifesting the nimble subtlety of his
natural disposition, frequently changing as occasions require. Let
us then say also to ourselves: Thy body, O man, naturally of itself
breeds many diseases and passions, and many it receives befalling it
from without; but if thou shalt open thy interior, thou wilt find a
certain various and abundantly furnished storehouse and (as Democritus
says) treasury of evils, not flowing into it from abroad, but having
as it were their inbred and original springs, which vice, exceedingly
affluent and rich in passions, causes to break forth. Now, whereas the
diseases in the flesh are discerned by the pulses, and the flushings
in the color of the skin, and discovered by unusual heats and sudden
pains, and these maladies of the soul lie hid from many who are
affected with them; these are therefore worse, as removing from them
the sense of the patient. For if the reason is sound, it is sensible
of the body’s diseases; but being itself diseased with those of the
soul, it has no judgment in what it suffers; for it suffers by what it
judges. We ought therefore to account, that the first and greatest of
the soul’s diseases is folly, by which vice being rendered incurable
cohabits, lives, and dies together with most men. For the beginning of
the cure is the sense of the disease, leading the patient to the use of
what is helpful; but he who, through his not believing himself sick,
is ignorant of his own necessities, though a remedy is presented him,
refuses it. For also amongst the diseases of the body, those are indeed
the worst which are accompanied with a stupefaction of the senses,—as
lethargies, headaches, epilepsies, apoplexies, and those burning fevers
which, carrying on the inflammation even to the loss of the wits, and
disturbing the senses, as it were in a musical instrument, “move the
heart-strings till then untouched.”
3. Wherefore the physicians do in the first place indeed desire that
a man should not be sick, and next, that being sick he should not be
ignorant that he is so; which nevertheless befalls all the diseases of
the soul. For neither those who are mad, those that are lascivious,
nor those who act unjustly, think that they sin; nay, some of them are
on the contrary persuaded even that they do well. Never yet did any
man call a fever health, a consumption a good constitution of body,
the gout swift-footedness, or the wanness of the face a fresh color;
but many there are who term anger courage, unchaste love amity, envy
emulation, and cowardice cautiousness. Moreover, those who are troubled
with corporeal sickness send for physicians, for they are sensible what
they stand in need of for the cure of their diseases; but these who are
sick in mind shun philosophers, because they think themselves to act
excellently in those very things in which they most offend. For making
use of this reasoning, we affirm that the blearness or soreness of the
eyes is a less malady than madness, and the gout in the feet than a
frenzy in the brain; for in the one a man is sensible of his distemper,
and crying out calls for the physician, to whom, when he is come, he
shows his eye to be anointed, stretches out his vein to be opened, and
gives up his head to be cured; but on the contrary, you hear Agave,
when seized with madness, through the violence of her passion not
knowing the dearest pledges of her womb, to cry out:
From the hill’s top into the plain,
Bring me this young fawn, newly slain,
Which happily’s become our prey.[216]
For he who is sick in body, presently yielding and betaking himself to
his bed, lies there quiet, till he is cured; and if the accession of
some violent hot fit makes him a little tumble and toss his body, any
one of those who are by saying to him,