The prophetic spirit in its relation to wisdom and madness / by Augustus Clissold.

  • Clissold, Augustus, 1797?-1882.
Date:
1870
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The prophetic spirit in its relation to wisdom and madness / by Augustus Clissold. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    whom some indeed call diviners, through entire ignorance that prophets are only the represeuters of (the meaning of) enigmas and visions, and not at all entitled to be called diviners—heing, strictly speaking, interpreters of prophecies/' When therefore we speak of the Prophetic Mania, the term prophetic is used in a generic sense, as applying to the fj^avTL^ as well as the Trpo^Tyr?;?; and we shall find that this is its theological meaning, as applied especially to the prophets of the Old Testament. We must not, however, suppose that Plato conceived that all kinds of madness came from the gods : on the contrary, he notices a madness which proceeded from evil states both of the body and the mind. The madness proceeding from the gods he regards as the madness of wisdom ; the other kind as the madness of folly and insanity, in its common acceptation. We must admit,'' says he,^ that the disease of the soul is folly or a privation of intellect; and that there are two kinds of folly, the one madness, the other ignorance In the madness proceeding from the gods the intellect is not dc- stroyed, but superseded; whereas in the madness fiavia which is a disease whether of the soul or of the body, there is a predominance of the animal nature over reason and con- science. There arc then according to Plato two general forms of madness; one, the result of prophetic inspiration ; the other of disease, whether of mind or bodv. Let us now proceed to the sentiments of Cicero. We have seen that the disease commonly known as insanity, was called by some of the ancients morbus sacer • partly because they could not distinguish between the pro^ phetical mania, and that of ordinary insanity; and partly because even insanity they regarded as having a supernatural * Ibid., p. 102.