affect a wise man. Now, though these reasonings of the Stoics, and
their conclusions, are rather strained and distorted, and ought to be
expressed in a less stringent and narrow manner, yet great stress is to
be laid on the opinions of those men who have a peculiarly bold and
manly turn of thought and sentiment. For our friends the Peripatetics,
notwithstanding all their erudition, gravity, and fluency of language,
do not satisfy me about the moderation of these disorders and diseases
of the soul which they insist upon; for every evil, though moderate, is
in its nature great. But our object is to make out that the wise man is
free from all evil; for as the body is unsound if it is ever so
slightly affected, so the mind under any moderate disorder loses its
soundness; therefore the Romans have, with their usual accuracy of
expression, called trouble, and anguish, and vexation, on account of
the analogy between a troubled mind and a diseased body, disorders. The
Greeks call all perturbation of mind by pretty nearly the same name;
for they name every turbid motion of the soul [Greek: pathos], that is
to say, a distemper. But we have given them a more proper name; for a
disorder of the mind is very like a disease of the body. But lust does
not resemble sickness; neither does immoderate joy, which is an elated
and exulting pleasure of the mind. Fear, too, is not very like a
distemper, though it is akin to grief of mind, but properly, as is also
the case with sickness of the body, so too sickness of mind has no name
separated from pain. And therefore I must explain the origin of this
pain, that is to say, the cause that occasions this grief in the mind,
as if it were a sickness of the body. For as physicians think they have
found out the cure when they have discovered the cause of the
distemper, so we shall discover the method of curing melancholy when
the cause of it is found out.

XI. The whole cause, then, is in opinion; and this observation applies