The Devil’s Dictionary (10)

What is madness? To be mad, according to Ambrose Bierce in his The Devil’s Dictionary of 1906, is to be “affected by a high degree of intellectual independence; not conforming to standards of thought, speech, and action derived by the conformants from study of themselves; at odds with the majority; in short, unusual. It is noteworthy that persons are pronounced mad by officials destitute of evidence that themselves are sane”.  

Madness, of course, is an attribute of the mind. This is “a mysterious form of matter secreted by the brain. Its chief activity consists in the endeavour to ascertain it own nature, the futility of the attempt being due to the fact that it has nothing but itself to know itself with”.

I find something attractive about these two definitions and the accompanying explanation. Magnet: “something acted upon by magnetism” and magnetism: “something acting upon a magnet”. “The two definitions immediately foregoing are condensed from the works of one thousand eminent scientists, who have illuminated the subject with great white light, to the inexpressible advancement of human knowledge”.

Man, Bierce defines, is “an animal so lost in rapturous contemplation of what he thinks he is as to overlook what he indubitably ought to be. His chief occupation is extermination of other animals and his own species, which, however, multiplies with such insistent rapidity as to infest then whole habitable world and Canada”. No change there, then.