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The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton
page 343 of 2094 (16%)
out of reason. _Contumax voluntas_, as Melancthon calls it, _malum facit_:
this stubborn will of ours perverts judgment, which sees and knows what
should and ought to be done, and yet will not do it. _Mancipia gulae_,
slaves to their several lusts and appetite, they precipitate and plunge
[1634]themselves into a labyrinth of cares, blinded with lust, blinded with
ambition; [1635]"They seek that at God's hands which they may give unto
themselves, if they could but refrain from those cares and perturbations,
wherewith they continually macerate their minds." But giving way to these
violent passions of fear, grief, shame, revenge, hatred, malice, &c., they
are torn in pieces, as Actaeon was with his dogs, and [1636]crucify their
own souls.


SUBSECT. IV.--_Sorrow a Cause of Melancholy_.

_Sorrow. Insanus dolor_.] In this catalogue of passions, which so much
torment the soul of man, and cause this malady, (for I will briefly speak
of them all, and in their order,) the first place in this irascible
appetite, may justly be challenged by sorrow. An inseparable companion,
[1637]"The mother and daughter of melancholy, her epitome, symptom, and
chief cause:" as Hippocrates hath it, they beget one another, and tread in
a ring, for sorrow is both cause and symptom of this disease. How it is a
symptom shall be shown in its place. That it is a cause all the world
acknowledgeth, _Dolor nonnullis insaniae causa fuit, et aliorum morborum
insanabilium_, saith Plutarch to Apollonius; a cause of madness, a cause of
many other diseases, a sole cause of this mischief, [1638]Lemnius calls it.
So doth Rhasis, _cont. l. 1. tract. 9._ Guianerius, _Tract. 15. c. 5_, And
if it take root once, it ends in despair, as [1639]Felix Plater observes,
and as in [1640]Cebes' table, may well be coupled with it.
[1641]Chrysostom, in his seventeenth epistle to Olympia, describes it to be
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