Compounded of Many Simples

In the above extract from Shakespeare’s comedy, Jacques (a character whose principal role is that of an ironic commentator on the action) is replying to a young woman who says she has heard that he has a somewhat melancholy temperament. He concedes this, but will not admit it to be a. weakness, because it arises as the distillation of a life’s experience. Scientific researchers also know and value the melancholy that derives from not knowing the solution to a problem; it is often the driving force for greater efforts, and has an uniquely personal quality deriving from ones past attempts to make sense of the evidence. That evidence is usually, in a quite literal sense, ‘compounded of many simples’ because of the natural belief that a. difficulty should always be studied in its simplest manifestation.