The Complete Essays

by Michel de Montaigne

  [A] Only after showing the boy what will make him a wiser and a better man will you explain to him the elements of Logic, Physics, Geometry and Rhetoric. Since his judgement has already been formed he will soon get to the bottom of any science he chooses. His lessons will sometimes be discussion, sometimes reading from books; at times the tutor will provide him with extracts from authors suited to his purposes: at others the tutor will pick out the marrow and chew it over for him. If the tutor is not sufficiently familiar with those books to find the discourses in them which serve his purposes you could associate with him a scholar who could furnish him, as the need arises, with material for him to arrange and dispense to the growing boy.

  Who can doubt that such lessons will be more natural and easy than those in Theodore Gaza,41 whose precepts are prickly and nasty, and whose words are hollow and fleshless, with nothing to get hold of or to quicken the mind. Here then is nourishment for the soul to bite on. The fruit is incomparably more plentiful and will ripen sooner.

  Oddly, things have now reached such a state that even among men of intelligence philosophy means something fantastical and vain, without value or usefulness, [C] both in opinion and practice. [A] The cause lies in chop-logic which has captured all the approaches. It is a great mistake to portray Philosophy with a haughty, frowning, terrifying face, or as inaccessible to the young. Whoever clapped that wan and frightening mask on her face! There is nothing more lovely, more happy and gay – I almost said more amorously playful. What she preaches is all feast and fun. A sad and gloomy mien shows you have mistaken her address.

  Some philosophers were sitting together in the temple at Delphi one day. ‘Either I am mistaken,’ said Demetrius the grammarian, ‘or your calm happy faces show that you are not having an important discussion.’ One of them, Herakleon of Megara, retorted: ‘Furrowed brows are for grammarians telling us whether ballō takes two ls in the future, researching into the derivation of the comparatives keiron and beltion and of the superlatives keiriston and beltiston: philosophical discussions habitually make men happy and joyful not frowning and sad.’42

  [B] Deprendas animi tormenta latentis in œgro

  Corpore, deprendas et gaudia: sumit utrumque

  Inde habitum facies.

  [You can detect in a sickly body the hidden torments of the mind; you can detect her joys as well: the face reflects them both.]43

  [A] The soul which houses philosophy must by her own sanity make for a sound body. Her tranquillity and ease must glow from her; she must fashion her outward bearing to her mould, arming it therefore with gracious pride, a spritely active demeanour and a happy welcoming face. [C] The most express sign of wisdom is unruffled joy: like all in the realms above the Moon, her state is ever serene. [A] Baroco and Baralipton have devotees reeking of filth and smoke.44 She does not. They know her merely by hearsay. Why, her task is to make the tempests of the soul serene and to teach hunger and fever how to laugh – not by imaginary epicycles but by reasons, [C] natural and palpable.45 Her aim is virtue, which is not (as they teach in schools) perched on the summit of a steep mountain, rough and inaccessible. Those who have drawn nigh her hold that on the contrary she dwells on a beautiful plateau, fertile and strewn with flowers; from there she clearly sees all things beneath her; but if you know the road you can happily make your way there by shaded grassy paths, flower-scented, smooth and gently rising, like tracks in the vaults of heaven.46

  This highest virtue is fair, triumphant, loving, as delightful as she is courageous, a professed and implacable foe to bitterness, unhappiness, fear and constraint, having Nature for guide, Fortune and Pleasure for her companions: those who frequent her not have, after their own weakness, fashioned an absurd portrait of her, sad, shrill, sullen, threatening and glowering, perching her on a rocky peak, all on her own among the brambles – a spectre to terrify people.

  This tutor of mine, who knows that his duty is to fill the will of his pupil with at least as much love as reverence for virtue, will know how to tell him that our poets are following commonplace humours: he will make him realize that the gods place sweat on the paths to the chambers of Venus rather than of Pallas.47 And when he comes to know his own mind and is faced with a choice between Bradamante to court and enjoy or Angelica48 – one with her natural beauty, active, noble, virile though not mannish, contrasting with the other’s beauty, soft, dainty, delicate and all artifice; the one disguised as a youth with a shining helmet on her head, the other robed as a maiden with pearls in her headdress: then his very passion will be deemed manly if he chooses flat contrary to that effeminate Phrygian shepherd.49 The tutor will then be teaching him a new lesson: what makes true virtue highly valued is the ease, usefulness and pleasure we find in being virtuous: so far from it being difficult, children can be virtuous as well as adults; the simple, as well as the clever. The means virtue uses is control not effort. Socrates, the foremost of her darlings, deliberately renounced effort so as to glide along with her easy natural progress. She is a Mother who nurtures human pleasures: by making them just she makes them sure and pure; by making them moderate they never pant for breath or lose their savour; by cutting away those which she denies us she sharpens our appreciation of those she leaves us – an abundance of all those which Nature wills for us; Mother-like, she provides them not until we are satiated but until we are satisfied (unless, that is, we claim that her rule is the enemy of pleasure because she ordains drinking without drunkenness, eating without indigestion, and sex without the pox). If Virtue should lack the ordinary share of good fortune, she evades or does without it, or else she forges a private happiness of her own, neither floating nor changeable. She knows how to be rich, powerful and learned and how to lie on a perfumed couch; she does love life; she does love beauty, renown and health. But her own peculiar office is to know how to enjoy those good things with proper moderation and how to lose them with constancy: an office much more noble than grievous; without it the whole course of our life becomes unnatural, troubled, deformed; then you can indeed tie it to those rocky paths, those brambles and those spectres.

  Were our pupil’s disposition so bizarre that he would rather hear a tall story than the account of a great voyage or a wise discussion; that at the sound of the drum calling the youthful ardour of his comrades to arms he would turn aside for the drum of a troop of jugglers; that he would actually find it no more delightful and pleasant to return victorious covered with the dust of battle than after winning a prize for tennis or dancing: then I know no remedy except that his tutor should quickly strangle him when nobody is looking or apprentice him to make fairy-cakes in some goodly town – even if he were the heir of a Duke – following Plato’s precept that functions should be allocated not according to the endowments of men’s fathers but the endowments of their souls.50

  [A] Since philosophy is the art which teaches us how to live, and since children need to learn it as much as we do at other ages, why do we not instruct them in it?

  [B] Udum et molle lutum est; nunc nunc properandus et acri

  Fingendus sine fine rota.

  [The clay is soft and malleable. Quick! hurry to fashion it on that potter’s wheel which is for ever spinning.]

  [A] They teach us to live when our life is over. Dozens of students have caught the pox before they reach the lesson on temperance in their Aristotles. [C] Cicero said that even were he to live two men’s lives he would never find enough time to study the lyric poets.51 I find these chop-logic merchants even more gloomily useless. Our boy is too busy for that: to school-learning he owes but the first fifteen or sixteen years of his life: the rest is owed to action. Let us employ a time so short on things which it is necessary to know. [A] Get rid of those thorny problems of dialectics – they are trivial: our lives are never amended by them; take the simple arguments of philosophy: learn how to select the right ones and to apply them. They are easier to grasp than a tale in Boccaccio: a boy can do it as soon as he leaves his nanny; it is much easier than learning to read
and write. Philosophy has arguments for Man at birth as well as in senility.

  I share Plutarch’s conviction52 that Aristotle never spent much of the time of his great pupil Alexander on the art of syllogisms nor on the principles of geometry: he taught him, rather, sound precepts concerning valour, prowess, greatness of soul and temperance, as well as that self-assurance which fears nothing. With such an armoury he sent him still a child to conquer the empire of the world with merely thirty thousand foot-soldiers, four thousand horsemen and forty-two thousand crowns. As for the other arts and sciences, Plutarch says that he held them in esteem, praising their excellence and their nobility; but whatever pleasure he found in them he did not allow himself to be surprised by a desire to practise them himself.

  [B] Petite hinc, juvenesque senesque,

  Finem animo certum, miserisque viatica canis.

  [Seek here, young men and old, a lasting purpose for your mind and a provision for white-haired wretchedness.]53

  [C] That is what Epicurus says at the beginning of his letter to Meniceus: ‘Let the youngest not reject philosophy nor the oldest tire of it. Whoever does otherwise seems to be saying that the season for living happily has not yet come or is already past.’54

  [A] Despite all this I do not want to imprison the boy.55 I do not want him to be left to the melancholy humour of a furious schoolmaster. I do not want to corrupt his mind as others do by making his work a torture, slaving away for fourteen or fifteen hours a day like a porter. [C] When you see him over-devoted to studying his books because of a solitary or melancholy complexion, it would not be good I find to encourage him in it: it unfits boys for mixing in polite society and distracts them from better things to do. And how many men have I known in my time made as stupid as beasts by an indiscreet hunger for knowledge! Carneades was turned so mad by it that he could not find time to tend to his hair or his nails.56

  [A] Nor do I wish to have his noble manners ruined by the uncouthness or barbarity of others. In antiquity French wisdom was proverbially good at the outset, but lacking in staying power.57 And truly, still now, nothing is more gentlemanly than little French children; but they normally deceive the hopes placed in them, being in no ways outstanding once they are grown up. I have heard men of wisdom maintain that it is those colleges which parents send children to – and we have them in abundance – which make them so stupid.

  For our boy any place and any time can be used to study: his room, a garden; his table, his bed; when alone or in company; morning and evening. His chief study will be philosophy, that Former of good judgement and character who is privileged to be concerned with everything.

  It was an orator Isocrates who, being begged to talk about his art at a feast, replied (rightly we all think): ‘What I can do, this is no time for: what this is time for, I cannot do!’58 To present harangues and rhetorical debates to a company gathered for laughter and good cheer would be to mix together things too discordant.

  You can say the same of all the other disciplines, but not of that part of Philosophy which treats of Man, his tasks and his duties: by the common consent of all the wise, she should not be barred from sports nor feastings seeing that commerce with her is sweet. And Plato having invited her to his Banquet, we can see how she entertained the guests in a relaxed manner appropriate to time and place even when treating one of her most sublime and most salutary themes:59

  Æque pauperibus prodest, locupletibus æque;

  Et, neglecta, æque pueris senibüsque nocebit.

  [She is equally helpful to the poor and the rich: neglect her, and she equally harms the young and the old.]60

  In this way he will certainly lie fallow much less than do others. Now we can take three times as many steps strolling about a long-gallery and still feel less tired than on a walk to a definite goal: so too our lessons will slip by unnoticed if we apparently happen upon them, as, restricted to neither time or place, they intermingle with all our activities. The games and sports themselves will form a good part of his studies: racing, wrestling, [C] music-making, [A] dancing, hunting and the handling of arms and horses. I want his outward graces, his social ease [C] and his physical dexterity [A] to be moulded step by step with his soul. We are not bringing up a soul; we are not bringing up a body: we are bringing up a man. We must not split him into two. We must not bring up one without the other but, as Plato said, lead them abreast like a pair of horses harnessed together to the same shaft. [C] And does not Plato when you listen to him appear to devote more time and care to exercising the body, convinced that the mind may be exercised with the body but not vice versa?

  [A] This education is to be conducted, moreover, with a severe gentleness, not as it usually is.61 Instead of children being invited to letters as guests, all they are shown in truth are cruelty and horror. Get rid of violence and force: as I see it, nothing so fundamentally stultifies and bastardizes a well-born nature.

  If you want the boy to loathe disgrace and punishment do not harden him to them. Harden him to sweltering heat and to cold, to wind and sun and to such dangers as he must learn to treat with contempt. Rid him of all softness and delicacy about dress and about sleeping, eating and drinking. Get him used to anything. Do not turn him into a pretty boy or a ladies’ boy but into a boy who is fresh and vigorous. [C] Boy, man and now old man, I have always thought this. But I have always disliked, among other things, the way our colleges are governed. Their failure would have been less harmful, perhaps, if they had leant towards indulgence. They are a veritable gaol for captive youth. By punishing boys for depravity before they are depraved, you make them so.

  Go there during lesson time: you will hear nothing but the screaming of tortured children and of masters drunk with rage. What a way to awaken a taste for learning in those tender timorous souls, driving them to it with terrifying scowls and fists armed with canes! An iniquitous and pernicious system. And besides (as Quintilian justly remarked)62 such imperious authority can lead to dreadful consequences – especially given our form of flogging.

  How much more appropriate to strew their classrooms with leaf and flower than with blood-stained birch-rods. I would have portraits of Happiness there and Joy, with Flora and the Graces, as Speucippus the philosopher did in his school.63

  When they have something to gain, make it enjoyable. Health-giving foods should be sweetened for a child: harmful ones made to taste nasty.

  It is amazing how concerned Plato is in his Laws with the amusements and pastimes of the youths of his City and how he dwells on their races, sports, singing, capering and dancing, the control and patronage of which has been entrusted, he said, in antiquity to the gods, to Apollo, the Muses and Minerva. His care extends to over a hundred precepts for his gymnasia, yet he spends little time over book-learning; the only thing he seems specifically to recommend poetry for is the music.64

  [A] In our manners and behaviour any strangeness and oddness are to be avoided as enemies of easy mixing in society – [C] and as monstrosities. Who would not have been deeply disturbed by Alexander’s steward Demophon whose complexion made him sweat in the shade and shiver in the sun? [A] I have known men who fly from the smell of apples rather than from gunfire; others who are terrified of a mouse, who vomit at the sight of cream or when a feather mattress is shaken up (like Germanicus who could not abide cocks or their crowing). Some occult property may be involved in this, but, if you ask me, if you set about it young enough you could stamp it out.

  One victory my education has achieved over me (though not without some trouble, it is true) is that my appetite can be brought to accept without distinction any of the things people eat and drink except beer. While the body is still supple it should, for that very reason, be made pliant to all manners and customs. Provided that he can restrain his appetites and his will, you should not hesitate to make the young man suited to all peoples and companies, even, should the need arise, to immoderation and excess.

  [C] His practice should conform to custom. [A] He should be able to
do anything but want to do only what is good. (The very philosophers do not approve of Calesthenes for falling from grace with his master Alexander the Great, by declining to match drink for drink with him. He will laugh, fool about and be unruly with his Prince.) I would want him to outstrip his fellows in vigour and firmness even during the carousing and that he should refrain from wrongdoing not because he lacks strength or knowledge but because he does not want to do it. [C] ‘Multum interest utrum peccare aliquis nolit aut nesciat.’ [There is a great difference between not wanting to do evil and not knowing how to.]65

  [A] My intention was to honour a nobleman who is as far removed from such excesses as any man in France when I asked him, in the presence of guests, how many times in his life he had had to get drunk while serving the King in Germany. He took it in the right spirit and said he had done it three times; and he told me about them. (I have known people who have run into real difficulties when frequenting that nation because they lacked this ability.)

  I have often noted with great astonishment the extraordinary character of Alcibiades who, without impairing his health, could so readily adapt to diverse manners: at times he could outdo Persians in pomp and luxury; at others, Spartans in austerity and frugal living.66 He was a reformed man in Sparta, yet equally pleasure-seeking in Ionia:

  Omnis Aristippum decuit color, et status, et res.

  [On Aristippus any colour, rank or condition was becoming.]

  Thus would I fashion my pupil:

  quem duplici panno patientia velat