Chapter LX, Section 1a

CHAPTER LX. Of Madness, and Divinations which are made when men are awake, and of the Power of a Melancholy Humor, by which Spirits are sometimes induced into Men's Bodies . It happens also, sometimes, that not only they that are asleep, but also they that are watchful, do, with a kind of instigation of mind, divine; which divination Aristotle calls ravishment, or a kind of madness, and teacheth that it proceeds from a melancholy humor, saying in his treaties of divination: Melancholy men, by reason of their earnestness, do far better conjecture, and quickly conceive a habit, and most easily receive an impression of the celestials. And he, in his Problems, saith that the Sibyls, and the Bacchides, and Niceratus the Syracusan, and Ammon, were, by their natural melancholy complexion, prophets and poets. The cause, therefore, of this madness, if it be anything within the body, is a melancholy humor; not that which they call black choler, which is so obstinate and terrible a thing, that the violence of it is said, by physicians and natural philosophers (besides madness, which it doth induce), to draw or entice evil spirits to seize upon men's bodies. Therefore, we understand a melancholy humor here, to be a natural and white choler. For this, when it is stirred up, burns, and stirs up a madness conducing to knowledge and divination, especially if it be helped by any celestial influx, especially of Saturn, who (seeing he is cold and dry, as is a melancholy humor, hath his influence upon it) increaseth and preserveth it. Besides, seeing he is the author of secret contemplation, and estranged from all public affairs, and the highest of all the planets, he doth, as he withcalls his mind from outward business, so also make it ascend higher, and bestows upon men the knowledge and presages of future things. And this is Aristotle's meaning, in his book of Problems. By melancholy, saith he, some men are made, as it were, divine, foretelling things to come; and some men are made poets. He saith, also, that all men that were excellent in any science, were, for the most part, melancholy. Democritus and Plato attest the same, saying that there were some melancholy men that had such excellent wits that they were thought and seemed to be more divine than human. So also there have been many melancholy men at first rude, ignorant and untractable, as they say Tynnichus, Hesiod, Ion, Calcinenses, Homer, and Lucretius were, who on a sudden were taken with a madness and became poets, and prophesied wonderful and divine things, which they themselves scarce understood. Whence Plato, in Ion, saith that many prophets, after the violence of their madness was abated, do not well understand what they wrote, yet treated accurately of each art in their madness; as all artists, by reading of them, judge. So great also, they say, the power of melancholy is of, that, by its force, celestial spirits also are sometimes drawn into men's bodies, by whose presence and instinct, antiquity testifies, men have been made drunk and spake most wonderful things.