Solemn Dissertation on the Philosophy of Silence

DE PHILOSOPHIA SILENTII.

...When here, plans and aids for looking out for oneself and defending oneself can be prepared, which are intercepted there even for the cautious, as often as the angry retain the impatience of silence, which is read about the Afer in the case of Pulchra and Furnius in Tacitus, Annals 4. 57. n. 7. Therefore our Germans avoid such taciturn people, struck by anger, with the utmost zeal: "For still waters are usually deep." Since it is confirmed by daily experience that rivers flow with greater silence where they have deeper channels: just so, where there is a tenacity of silence, there in the angry is the desire for vengeance recondite. Nor do those things which Seneca enumerated in On Anger, Book 1, chap. 1 stand in the way of silence as a sign of anger, which have nothing in common with silence, but are most opposed to it. I respond: It is clear from Moral Semiotics that most of these signs are "probable rather than apodictic," so that there is need for a perceptive mind that strives to conjecture hidden affects from them. Hence Scipio Chiaramonti, the most perceptive interpreter of them, in Book X, On the Conjecture of Affects, chap. IX, on silence, as a sign of anger, wrote circumspectly:

"We have understood that silence sometimes also follows anger."

Then there is one anger of those flaring up, another of the bitter: the former precipitate everything and hasten vengeance, so that they cannot be silent and quiet, toward whom Seneca seems to have aimed; the latter, what they differ, they do not indeed take away: nevertheless, so that they can harm more intensely and oppress the unprepared, they hide their anger with closed mouth and less changed countenance. It is long since moral philosophers have observed that in the sanguine, anger will be precipitate, because of the faster movement of the blood and the lightness of the spirit; in the choleric, atrocious, because of the abundance of yellow bile, which more and more ignites the desire for vengeance...