Yet another chapter from this fascinating forgotten work Oddities: A Book of Unexplained Facts (Allan, London 1928) by R.T. Gould. Gould was a polymath who appears to have tolerated fools and cranks gladly...however Johann Bessler was no fool (although he may have been insane) and no less a figure than the philosopher Leibniz and and the scientist and Newtonian Willem Jacob 's Gravesande thought he had the secret of perpetual motion. Gould gets to the heart of the matter -as always with footnotes blazing...this is the first part:-
The history of human folly, on any scale commensurate with the vast and "ever-increasing amount of material available, remains to be written. A casual effort in this direction was made by Sebastian Brant, who published his Ship of Fools* in 1494. But while this book may have inspired Erasmus to take up the cudgels "for self and fellows", and produce his Praise of Folly,† its satire fell, for the most part, on deaf ears. Centuries later an atrabilious Scotsman, peering at the world from an anacoustic study in Chelsea, recorded his conviction that it was peopled by "too many millions, mostly fools”–a sweeping statement, but embodying an essential truth. Most of those, for example, who have had experience (internal or otherwise) of Government Departments can testify to having, like Oxenstiern, been amazed at discovering how little wisdom it takes to govern the world; and if there be any truth in the often-quoted assertion that "a nation gets the government it deserves”, Carlyle's apothegm must be regarded as resting upon a very solid–one might even say dense–basis of fact.
* Das Narrenshiff.
† Encomium Moria. The title is a joke at the expense of his friend Sir Thomas More.
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Of the many millions of fools who cumber the earth, I suppose that the fanatics, taking them all round, are the greatest nuisance–and tested by old-fashioned notions of personal independence and "the liberty of the subject", the one most actively mischievous. Possessing, far too often, that misleading form of energy which it is fatally easy to mistake for capacity; restrained by no false modesty from minding everybody else's business; and simultaneously unbalanced and supported by a chronic inability to conceive that there can be two sides to any question, they are the bacteria of the civilized world–a fertile source of past, present, and future disorders.
But if the fanatic, generally speaking, is an unpleasant figure, the harmless "crank" can be very amusing
