Is one that keeps the worst company in the world; that is, his own; and
though he be always falling out and quarrelling with himself, yet he has
not power to endure any other conversation. His head is haunted, like a
house, with evil spirits and apparitions, that terrify and fright him
out of himself, till he stands empty and forsaken. His sleeps and his
wakings are so much the same that he knows not how to distinguish them,
and many times when he dreams he believes he is broad awake and sees
visions. The fumes and vapours that rise from his spleen and
hypochondrias have so smutched and sullied his brain (like a room that
smokes) that his understanding is blear-eyed and has no right perception
of anything. His soul lives in his body, like a mole in the earth that
labours in the dark, and casts up doubts and scruples of his own
imaginations, to make that rugged and uneasy that was plain and open
before. His brain is so cracked that he fancies himself to be glass, and
is afraid that everything he comes near should break him in pieces.
Whatsoever makes an impression in his imagination works itself in like a
screw, and the more he turns and winds it the deeper it sticks, till it
is never to be got out again. The temper of his brain, being earthy,
cold, and dry, is apt to breed worms, that sink so deep into it no
medicine in art or nature is able to reach them. He leads his life as
one leads a dog in a slip that will not follow, but is dragged along
until he is almost hanged, as he has it often under consideration to
treat himself in convenient time and place, if he can but catch himself
alone. After a long and mortal feud between his inward and his outward
man, they at length agree to meet without seconds and decide the
quarrel, in which the one drops and the other slinks out of the way and
makes his escape into some foreign world, from whence it is never after
heard of. He converses with nothing so much as his own imagination,
which, being apt to misrepresent things to him, makes him believe that
it is something else than it is, and that he holds intelligence with
spirits that reveal whatsoever he fancies to him, as the ancient rude
people that first heard their own voices repeated by echoes in the woods
concluded it must proceed from some invisible inhabitants of those
solitary places, which they after believed to be gods, and called them
sylvans, fauns, and dryads. He makes the infirmity of his temper pass
for revelations, as Mahomet did by his falling sickness, and inspires
himself with the wind of his own hypochondrias. He laments, like
Heraclitus, the maudlin philosopher, at other men's mirth, and takes
pleasure in nothing but his own unsober sadness. His mind is full of
thoughts, but they are all empty, like a nest of boxes. He sleeps
little, but dreams much, and soundest when he is waking. He sees visions
farther off than a second-sighted man in Scotland, and dreams upon a
hard point with admirable judgment. He is just so much worse than a
madman as he is below him in degree of frenzy, for among madmen the most
mad govern all the rest, and receive a natural obedience from their
inferiors.