In the first case, we look at melancholy and madness as both participating in a similar, slightly skewed dialogue between the body and soul. One component is sensibly affected and begins to affect the other which in turn affects the first.
Feeling falls into a feedback loop which can no longer discern origin or intensity of feeling.
The acuteness of feeling can increase and increase until the capacity for diverse experience gives way to painful intensity and madness. In these first two cases melancholy and madness are potentially good or bad. While madness or melancholy remove one from community, they give one the opportunity to comment from outside on that same community, inviting those inside to learn a new language with which to speak in. Madness then invites an oppressive, unfeeling society to restructure itself after the prophetic moment of sensibility. The figure for madness, perhaps, is the Clarissa of pages 890 to 898.