process of cooling, then the
blood which remains becomes fluid, but if they are left alone, they soon
congeal by reason of the surrounding cold. The fibres having this power
over the blood, bile, which is only stale blood, and which from being
flesh is dissolved again into blood, at the first influx coming in
little by little, hot and liquid, is congealed by the power of the
fibres; and so congealing and made to cool, it produces internal cold
and shuddering. When it enters with more of a flood and overcomes the
fibres by its heat, and boiling up throws them into disorder, if it have
power enough to maintain its supremacy, it penetrates the marrow and
burns up what may be termed the cables of the soul, and sets her free;
but when there is not so much of it, and the body though wasted still
holds out, the bile is itself mastered, and is either utterly banished,
or is thrust through the veins into the lower or upper belly, and is
driven out of the body like an exile from a state in which there has
been civil war; whence arise diarrhoeas and dysenteries, and all such
disorders. When the constitution is disordered by excess of fire,
continuous heat and fever are the result; when excess of air is the
cause, then the fever is quotidian; when of water, which is a more
sluggish element than either fire or air, then the fever is a tertian;
when of earth, which is the most sluggish of the four, and is only
purged away in a four-fold period, the result is a quartan fever, which
can with difficulty be shaken off.

Such is the manner in which diseases of the body arise; the disorders
of the soul, which depend upon the body, originate as follows. We must
acknowledge disease of the mind to be a want of intelligence; and of
this there are two kinds; to wit, madness and ignorance. In whatever
state a man experiences either of them, that state may be called
disease; and excessive pains and pleasures are justly to be regarded as
the greatest diseases to which the soul is liable. For a man who is in
great joy or in great pain, in his unreasonable eagerness to attain
the one and to avoid the other, is not able to see or to hear anything
rightly; but he is mad, and is at the time utterly incapable of any
participation in reason. He who has the seed about the spinal marrow too
plentiful and overflowing, like a tree overladen with fruit, has
many throes, and also obtains many pleasures in his desires and their
offspring, and is for the most p