On the Matter of Melancholy

Of the matter of melancholy, there is much question betwixt Avicenna and Galen, as you may read in Cardan’s Contradictions, Valesius’ Controversies, Montanus, Prosper Calenus, Capivaccius, Bright, Ficinus, that have written either whole tracts, or copiously of it in their several treatises of this subject. ‘What this humour is, or whence it proceeds, how it is engendered in the body, neither Galen no any old writer hath sufficiently discussed,’ as Jacchinus thinks: the neoterics cannot agree. Montanus, in his Consultantions, holds melancholy to be material or immaterial: and so doth Arculanus. The material is one of the four humours before mentioned, and natural; the immaterial or adventitious, acquisite, redundant, unnatural, artificial; which Hercules de Saxonia will have reside in the spirits alone, and to proceed from a ‘hot, cold, dry, moist distemperature, which, without matter, alters the brain and functions of it.’ Paracelsus wholly rejects and derides this division of four humours and complexions, but our Galenists generally approve of it, subscribing to this option of Montanus.