The Complete Essays

by Michel de Montaigne

  So have many others whom, in their actions, I find surpassing the very rules of their doctrines. Witness the Younger Cato. When I see him dying and ripping out his entrails I cannot be satisfied with the belief that he then simply had his soul totally free from trouble and dismay; I cannot believe that he merely remained in that state which the rules of the Stoic School ordained for him: calm, without emotion, impassible. There was, it seems to me, in the virtue of that man too much panache and green sap for it to stop there. I am convinced that he felt voluptuous pleasure in so noble a deed and that he delighted in it more than in anything else he did in his life: [C] ‘Sic abiit e vita ut causam moriendi nactum se esse gauderet.’ [He quitted this life, rejoicing that he had obtained a pretext for dying.]7 [A] I am so convinced by this that I begin to doubt whether he would have wished the opportunity for so fine an exploit to be taken from him. And, if that goodness which led him to embrace public interests rather than his own did not rein me back, I would readily concur with the opinion that he was grateful to Fortune for having put his virtue to so fine a proof and for having favoured that brigand8 who was to trample the ancient freedom of his country underfoot. I seem to read in his action some unutterable joy in his Soul, an access of delight beyond the usual order and a manly pleasure, when she considered the sublime nobility of his deed:

  [B] Deliberata morte ferocior;

  [She was all the more ferocious for having chosen death;]9

  [A] she was not pricked on by any hope of glory (as the base and womanish judgements of some men have opined) for such a consideration is too low to touch so generous a mind, so high and unbending; he did it for the beauty of the thing itself, which he, who could handle such motives better than we can, saw much more clearly in all its perfection.

  [C] It pleases me that philosophy decreed that so beautiful a deed would become no other life than Cato’s and that it was for his life alone to end that way. That is why he rightly ordered his son and the senators who bore him company to provide some other way in their own case: ‘Catoni cum incredibilem natura tribuisset gravitatem, eamque ipse perpetua constantia roboravisset, semperque in proposito consilio permansisset, moriendum potius quam tyranni vultus aspiciendus erat.’ [To Cato Nature had attributed an unbelievable dignity; he himself had strengthened it by his unfailing constancy; he had remained ever loyal to the principles which he had adopted, so he had to die rather than look on the face of a tyrant.]10

  Every man’s death should be one with his life. Just because we are dying we do not become somebody else. I always interpret a man’s death by his life. And if I am given an account of an apparently strong death linked to a weakling life, I maintain that it was produced by some weakling cause in keeping with that life.

  [A] So are we to say that the ease with which Cato died, and that power which he acquired by the strength of his soul to do so without difficulty, should somehow dim the splendour of his virtue? And who among those whose brain is even slightly tinged with true philosophy can be satisfied with imagining a Socrates merely free from fear and anguish when his lot was prison, shackles and a verdict of guilty? And who fails to recognize in him not merely firmness and constancy (that was his ordinary state) but some new joy and a playful rapture in his last words and ways? [C] When he scratched his leg after the shackles were off he trembled with pleasure: does that not suggest a similar sweet joy in his Soul at being unshackled from her past hardships and capable of entering into a knowledge of things to come? [A] Cato must please forgive me: his death is more taut and more tragic but Socrates’ is somehow even more beautiful. [C] To those who deplored it, Aristippus replied: ‘May the gods send me one like it!’11

  In the souls of those two great men and in those who imitated them (for I very much doubt if any were actually like them) you can see such a perfect acquisition of the habit of virtue that it became a matter of their complexion. It was no longer a painful virtue nor a virtue ordained by reason, virtues which they had to stiffen their souls to maintain: it was the very being of their souls, their natural ordinate manner. They rendered them thus by a long practice of the precepts of philosophy encountering beautiful and richly endowed natures. Those vicious passions which are born in us can find no entry into them; the force and rectitude of their souls stifle and snuff out concupiscence as soon as it begins to stir.

  That it is more beautiful to prevent the birth of temptations by a sublime and god-like resolve and to be so fashioned to virtue that even the seeds of vices have been uprooted rather than to prevent their growing by active force and, once having been surprised by the first stirrings of the passions, to arm and tense oneself to halt their progress and to vanquish them; or that this second action is nevertheless more beautiful than to be simply furnished with an easy affable nature which of itself finds indulgence and vice distasteful: cannot I think be doubted. For this third and last manner may seem to produce an innocent man but not a virtuous one; a man exempt from doing evil but not one apt for doing good. Added to which such a mode of being is so close to imperfection and weakness that I cannot easily unravel and distinguish what separates them. That is why the very terms ‘goodness’ and ‘innocence’ are somewhat pejorative. I note that several virtues – chastity, sobriety and temperance – can come to us as our bodies grow weaker. Staunchness in the face of danger (if that is the right name for it), together with contempt for death and patience in affliction, can come to men (and are often found in them) by a defect in their assessment of such misfortunes, by a failure to conceive them as they are. A lack of intelligence or even animal-stupidity can counterfeit virtuous deeds: I have often seen men praised for deeds which deserved blame.

  An Italian nobleman once spoke as follows in my presence at the expense of his nation: the subtlety of the Italians and the vividness of their minds are so great that they can foresee far ahead the dangers and mishaps that may befall them, so that in war we should not consider it strange if we often find them providing for their safety even before reconnoitring the danger; whereas we French and the Spaniards, who were nothing like as subtle, would press on; we had to be made to see danger with our own eyes and to handle it before we took fright: then there was no holding us; whereas the Germans and the Swiss, grosser and stolider men, scarcely had enough sense to change their ideas even when they were being struck down. Perhaps it was said for a laugh. It is nevertheless true that apprentices to the craft of war often leap into dangers more thoughtlessly than they do once they have been mauled:

  [B] haud ignarus quantum nova gloria in armis,

  Et prædulce decus primo certamine possit.

  [I was not unaware of what can be achieved by a man coming fresh to battle seeking glory and by the sweet honour of a first engagement.]12

  [A] That then is why, when we make a judgement of any individual action, we must consider a great many circumstances as well as the man as a whole who performed it before we give it a name.

  Now a word about myself. [B] I have sometimes seen my friends speak of wisdom in me when it was really luck, or attribute something to my courage and endurance when it was really due to my judgement or to my opinion, attributing one quality to me instead of another, sometimes to my advantage, sometimes to my detriment. Meanwhile, [A] so far am I from having reached that first degree of excellence where virtue becomes an acquired habit that I have hardly given any proof of the second. I have not made much of a struggle to bridle any of my pressing desires. My virtue is a virtue – or rather a state of innocence – which is incidental and fortuitous. If I had been born with a more unruly complexion I am afraid my case would have been deserving of pity. Assays of myself have not revealed the presence in my soul of any firmness in resisting the passions whenever they have been even to the slightest degree ecstatic. I do not know how to sustain inner conflicts and debates. So I cannot congratulate myself much if I do find that I am exempt from many of the vices:

  si vitiis mediocribus et mea paucis

  Mendosa est natura, alioqui recta, velu
t si

  Egregio inspersos reprehendas corpore nævos;

  [if, in my nature, which is otherwise straight, there are a few trivial vices, just as you might criticize an otherwise beautiful body for having a few moles;]13

  I owe that more to my Fortune than to my reason.

  Fortune caused me to be born from a stock famous for its honourable conduct and from an excellent father. Did some of his humours flow into me? Was it the examples in the home and the good education I received as a boy which contributed to it without my knowledge? Was it due to some other accident of birth? I cannot tell:

  [B] Seu libra, seu me scorpius aspicit

  Formidolosus, pars violentior

  Natalis horæ, seu tyrannus

  Hesperiæ Capricomus undæ?

  [Was I born under the constellation of the Balance? Or was it dread Scorpio with violent power over the hour of birth? Or was it Capricorn, who rules as tyrant over the Hesperian waves?]14

  [A] it is at all events true that, of my own self, I am horrified by most of the vices. [C] (‘To unlearn evil’, the reply which Antisthenes made to the man who asked him what was the best way to be initiated, seems to centre on that idea.)15 I am, I repeat, horrified by them, [A] out of a native conviction so thoroughly my own that I have retained the impulses and character which I bore away with me when I was weaned; no other factors have made me worsen them – not even my own arguments which, since they have in some things broken ranks and left the common road, would readily license actions in me which my natural inclinations make me loathe. [B] I shall be saying something monstrous but I will say it all the same: I find, [C] because of this, in many cases [B] more rule and order in my morals than in my opinions, and my appetites less debauched than my reason.

  [C] Aristippus laid down opinions about pleasure and riches which were so bold that the whole of philosophy rose and stormed against him. Yet where his morals were concerned, when Dionysius the Tyrant presented him with three beautiful young women to choose from, he said he would choose all three, since things had gone badly for Paris when he preferred one woman to her two companions: but having escorted them to his home he sent them away without laying a finger on them. And when his manservant found the load of coins he was carrying too heavy to manage, he told him to pour out as many of them as he found too heavy.16

  Epicurus too, whose doctrines are free from religious scruple and favour luxury, in fact behaved in real life most devoutly and most industriously. He wrote to a friend of his that he lived on nothing but coarse bread and water, asking him to send him a bit of cheese for when he wanted to give himself an extra special treat.17

  Can it possibly be true that to be good in practice we must needs be so from some inborn, all-pervading property hidden within us, without law, without reason and without example?

  [A] By God’s mercy any excesses in which I have found myself implicated have not been of the worst. In my own case, I have condemned them at their true value, since my judgement was never infected by them. I have made the case for the prosecution against myself more rigorously than against anyone else. But that is not the whole story: despite all this, I bring too little resistance to bear on them, letting myself readily come down on the opposite side of the scales, except that I do control my vices, preventing them from being contaminated by others: for unless you are on your guard one vice leads to another; and most support each other. I prune my own vices and train them to be as isolated and as uncomplicated as possible.

  [B] Nec ultra

  Errorem foveo.

  [Beyond that point I do not indulge my faults.]18

  [A] As for the opinion of the Stoics, who say that when the Wise Man acts he acts through all his virtues together even though there is one virtue which is more in evidence depending on the nature of the action (and a comparison with the human body is of some service to them in that, since choler cannot be exercised in action unless all our humours come to our aid, even though the choler predominates): if they then proceed to draw the parallel consequence that when the bad man does wrong he does so through all his vices together, then I do not believe it to be simple – or else I fail to understand what they mean, for I know the contrary to be true by experience.19

  [C] Such are the insubstantial pin-point subtleties which philosophy occasionally lingers over.

  Some vices I follow: others I flee as much as any saint could do. And the Peripatetics reject the idea of any such indissoluble interconnection and bonding: Aristotle maintains that a man may be wise and just yet intemperate and lacking in restraint.20 [A] Socrates confessed to those who recognized in his physiognomy some inclination towards vice that such was indeed his natural propensity but he had corrected it by discipline. [C] And the intimate friends of Stilpo the philosopher said that he was born subject to wine and women but had trained himself to be most abstemious in both by study.21 [A] Any good that I may have in me I owe on the contrary to the luck of my birth. I do not owe it to law, precept or apprenticeship. [B] Such innocence as there is in me is an unfledged innocence: little vigour, no art.

  [A] Among the vices, both by nature and judgement I have a cruel hatred of cruelty, as the ultimate vice of them all. But I am so soft that I cannot even see anyone lop the head off a chicken without displeasure, and cannot bear to hear a hare squealing when my hounds get their teeth into it, even though I enjoy the hunt enormously.

  Those who have to write against sensual pleasure like to use the following argument to show that it is entirely vicious and irrational: when its force is at its climax it overmasters us to such an extent that reason has no way to come into it; they go on to cite what we know of that from our experience of lying with women –

  cum jam præsagit gaudia corpus,

  Atque in eo est venus ut muliebria conserat arva

  [as when the body already anticipates its joy, and Venus is about to scatter seeds broadcast in the woman’s furrows]22 –

  in which it seems to them that the delight so transports us outside ourselves that our reason could not possibly perform its duty then, being entirely transfixed and enraptured by the pleasure.

  But I know that it can go otherwise and that, if we have the will, we can sometimes manage, at that very instant, to bring our soul back to other thoughts. But we must vigilantly ensure that our soul is taut and erect. I know it is possible to master the force of that pleasure; and [C] I am quite knowledgeable about the subject; I have never found Venus to be as imperious a goddess as several people, chaster than I am, attest her to be. [A] I do not regard it as a miracle, as the Queen of Navarre does in one of the tales in her Heptaméron (which is a noble book for its cloth), nor even as a matter of extreme difficulty, to spend nights at a time with a mistress long yearned for, in complete freedom and with every opportunity, while keeping my promised word to her to content myself with simple kisses and caresses.23

  [C] I think a more appropriate example would be that of hunting (in which there is less pleasure but more ecstasy and rapture by which our reason is stunned, so losing the ability of preparing and bracing itself for the encounter), [A] when,24 after a long chase, our quarry suddenly pops up and reveals itself where we were perhaps least expecting it. The shock of this [C] and the heat of the view-halloo strike us so, that it would be difficult for those who love this sort of hunt to bring their thoughts at this point back to anything else. That is why the poets [A] make Diana25 to triumph over Cupid’s flames and arrows:

  Quis non malarum, quas amor curas habet,

  Haec inter obliviscitur?

  [Is there anyone who, in the joys of the hunt, does not forget the ills which love’s cares bring?]26

  To return to my subject, I feel a most tender compassion for the afflictions of others and would readily weep from fellow-feeling – if, that is, I knew how to weep at anything at all. [C] Nothing tempts my tears like tears – not only real ones but tears of any kind, in feint or paint.

  [A] I scarcely ever lament for the dead: I would be more inclined to e
nvy them; but I do make great lamentations for the dying. Savages do not upset me so much by roasting and eating the bodies of the dead as those persecutors do who torture the bodies of the living. However reasonable lawful public executions may be, I cannot even look fixedly at them. Someone, having to bear witness to the clemency of Caesar, wrote the following:27 ‘He was so mild in his vengeance that, having forced surrender on the pirates who had formerly taken him prisoner and held him to ransom, he did indeed condemn them to be crucified since he had threatened them with that fate, but he first had them strangled. His secretary Philemon, who had tried to poison him, he punished with nothing severer than simple death.’ Without my even naming the author who ventures to allege as evidence of clemency the mere killing of those who have injured us, it is easy enough to guess that he was shocked by the base and horrifying examples of cruelty which the Roman tyrants introduced. As for me, even in the case of Justice itself, anything beyond the straightforward death-penalty seems pure cruelty, and especially in us Christians who ought to be concerned to dispatch men’s souls in a good state, which cannot be so when we have driven them to distraction and despair by unbearable tortures.

  [‘95] A few days ago28 a soldier in prison noticed from the tower in which he was held that a crowd was gathering in the square and that the carpenters were at work constructing something; he concluded that this was for him; he determined to kill himself, but found nothing which could help him to do so save a rusty old cart-nail which Fortune offered to him. He first of all gave himself two big jabs about the throat, but finding that this was not effective he soon afterwards gave himself a third one in his stomach, leaving the nail protruding. The first of his gaolers to come in found him in this state, still alive but lying on the ground weakened by the blows. So as not to waste time before he swooned away, they hastened to pronounce sentence on him. When he had heard it and learned that he was to be decapitated, he seemed to take new heart; he accepted the wine which he had previously refused and thanked his judges for the unhoped for mildness of their sentence, saying that he had made up his mind to appeal personally to death because he had feared a death more cruel and intolerable, having formed the opinion that the preparations which he had seen being made in that square meant that they wanted to torture him with some horrifying torment. This change in the way he was to die seemed to him like a deliverance from death.