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Section IX - 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 quaeque, 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.
Content of Section IX - A DIGRESSION CONCERNING THE ORIGINAL, THE USE, AND IMPROVEMENT OF MADNESS IN A COMMONWEALTH [Jonathan Swift's ebook: A Tale of a Tub]
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