The Complete Essays

by Michel de Montaigne

  Yet beasts, like us, are not incapable of instruction. Blackbirds, ravens, magpies and parrots can be taught to speak:73 we recognize in them a capacity for making their voice and their breath subtle and pliant enough for us to mould and restrict them to a definite number of letters and syllables. That capacity witnesses to an inward power of reasoning which makes them teachable – and willing to learn. We have all had our fill I expect of the sort of monkey-tricks which minstrels teach their dogs to do: those dances in which they never miss a note they hear or those varied jumps and movements which they perform on command. But I am much more moved to wonder by the action of the guide-dogs used by the blind in town and country, common enough as they are. I have watched those dogs stop at certain doors where people regularly give alms, and seen how, even when there is room enough to squeeze through themselves, they still avoid encounters with carts and coaches; I have seen one, following the town trench but abandoning a level, even path for a worse one, in order to keep its master away from the ditch. How was that dog brought to realize that it was its duty to neglect its own interests and to serve its master? How does it know that a path might be wide enough for itself but not wide enough for a blind man? Could all that be grasped without thought and reasoning?

  I should not overlook what Plutarch tells us about a dog he saw with the elder Vespasian, the Emperor, in the theatre of Marcellus in Rome. This dog served a juggler who was putting on a play with several scenes and several parts. The dog had its own part: it had to pretend, among other things, to swallow some poison and to lie dead for a while. First it swallowed the supposedly poisoned bread; then it began to shake and tremble as though it were dizzy; finally, it lay down and stiffened as though it were dead. It let itself be pulled about and dragged from one place to another, as the plot required. Then, when it knew the time was right, it began to stir very gently, as though awakening from a deep sleep and raised its head, looking from side to side in a way which made the audience thunderstruck.

  Oxen were used to water the Royal Gardens of Susa: they had to draw up the water by turning large wheels with buckets attached – you can see plenty of them in Languedoc. Each one had been ordered to do one hundred turns of the wheel a day. They grew so used to this number that nothing would force them to do one more; when their alloted task had been done they stopped dead. Yet we have reached adolescence before we can count up to a hundred; and we have just discovered peoples with no knowledge of numbers at all.

  You need still greater powers of reason to teach others than to be taught yourself. Democritus thought, and proved, that we had been taught most of our arts by animals: the spider taught us to weave and to sew and the swallow to build; the swan and nightingale taught us music and many other animals taught us by imitation the practice of medicine. Moreover, Aristotle maintains that nightingales teach their young to sing, spending time and trouble doing so: that explains why the song of nightingales brought up in cages, with no freedom to be schooled by their parents, loses much of its charm. [B] From that we may conclude that any improvement is due to learning and study.

  Even nightingales born free do not all sing one and the same song: each one sings according to its capacity to learn. They make jealous classmates, squabbling and vying with each other so heartily that the vanquished sometimes drops down dead, not from lack of song but lack of breath. The youngest birds ruminate thoughtfully and then begin to imitate snatches of song; the pupils listen to the lessons of their tutors and then give an account of themselves, taking it in turns to stop their singing. You can hear their faults being corrected; some of the criticisms of their tutors are perceptible even to us.

  Arrius74 said that he once saw an elephant with cymbals hanging from each thigh and a third on its trunk; the other elephants danced round in a ring, rising and falling to the cadences of this musical instrument, which was harmonious and pleasant to listen to. [A] In the great spectacles of Rome it was quite usual to see elephants trained to execute dance steps to the sound of the human voice; such performances comported several intricate movements, interlacings, changes of step and cadenzas, all very hard to learn. Some were seen revising their lessons in private, practising and studying so as to avoid being beaten or scolded by their masters.

  But strange indeed is the account of a female magpie vouched for by Plutarch, no less. It lived in a barber’s shop in Rome and was wonderfully clever at imitating any sounds it heard. It happened one day that some musicians stopped quite a while in front of the shop, blasting away on their trumpets. Immediately the magpie fell pensive, mute and melancholic, remaining so all the following day. Everyone marvelled, thinking that the blare of the trumpets had frightened and confused it, making it lose both hearing and song at the same time. But they eventually found that it had been deeply meditating and had withdrawn into itself; it had been inwardly practising, preparing its voice to imitate the noise of those trumpeters. The first sound it did make was a perfect imitation of their changes, repetitions and stops; after this new apprenticeship it quit with disdain all that it was able to do before.

  I do not want to leave out another example of a dog, also seen by Plutarch. (I realize I am digressing, showing no sense of order, but I can no more observe order when arranging these examples than I can in the rest of my work.) Plutarch was on board ship when he saw a dog which wanted to lap up some oil in the bottom of a jar; it could not get its tongue right down into the vessel because the neck was too narrow, so it went in search of pebbles which it dropped into the jar until the oil rose near to the top where it could get at it. What is that if not the actions of a very subtle intelligence? It is said that Barbary ravens do the same when the water they want to drink is too low to get at.

  The above action is somewhat akin to what is related by Juba (a king in elephant country): hunters cunningly prepare deep pits hidden beneath a cover of undergrowth; when an elephant is trapped in one, its fellows promptly bring a great many sticks and stones to help it clamber out.

  But so many of their actions bring elephants close to human capacities that if I wanted to relate in detail everything that experience has shown us about them, I would easily win one of my regular arguments: that there is a greater difference between one man and another than between some men and some beasts.

  An elephant-driver in a private household in Syria used to steal half the allotted rations at every feed. One day the master himself wanted to attend to things; he tipped into the elephant’s manger the right measure of barley, as prescribed. The elephant glared at its driver and, with its trunk, set half the ration aside, to reveal the wrong done to it. Another elephant, whose driver used to adulterate its feed with stones, went up to the pot where he was stewing meat for his own dinner and filled it with ashes. Those are special cases, but we all know from eye-witnesses that the strongest elements in the armies based in the Levant were elephants; their effectiveness surpassed what we can obtain nowadays from our artillery, which more or less replaces elephants in line of battle (as can be easily judged by those who know their ancient history).

  [B] siquidem Tirio servire solebant

  Annibali, et nostris ducibus, regique Molosso,

  Horum majores, et dorso ferre cohortes,

  Partem aliquam belli et euntem in praelia turmam.

  [Their sires served Hannibal of Carthage, as well as our generals and the Molossian King, bearing on their backs into the fray cohorts and squadrons, and taking part in the battle themselves.]75

  [A] To make over to them like this the vanguard of their army soldiers must have seriously relied on the trustworthiness of these beasts and on their powers of reason; because of their size and bulk the slightest stoppage on their part or else the slightest panic making them head back towards their own side would be enough to undo everything. There are fewer examples of their turning and charging their own troops than of us men charging back on each other in rout. They were entrusted not with one simple manoeuvre but with several different roles in combat.

 
[B] The Spaniards, likewise, employed dogs in their recent conquest of the American Indies; they paid them like, soldiers and gave them a share in the booty. Those animals displayed eagerness and fierceness but no less skill and judgement, whether in pursuing victory or in knowing when to stop, in charging or withdrawing as appropriate, and in telling friend from foe.76

  [A] Much more than everyday things, far-off things move us to wonder; they impress us more; otherwise I would not have spent so much time over this long catalogue; for, in my opinion, anyone who took careful note of the everyday animals we see living among us would find them doing things just as astonishing as the examples we gather from far-off times and places.77 [C] Nature is One and constant in her course. Anybody who could adequately understand her present state could draw reliable conclusions about all the future and all the past.

  [A] I once saw men brought to us from distant lands overseas. We could understand nothing of their language; their manners and even their features and clothing were far different from ours. Which of us did not take them for brutes and savages? Which of us did not attribute their silence to dullness and brutish ignorance? After all, they knew no French, were unaware of our hand-kissings and our low and complex bows, our bearing and our behaviour – such things must, of course, serve as a pattern for the whole human race…

  Everything which seems strange we condemn, as well as everything we do not understand; that applies to our judgements on animals. Many of their characteristics are related to ours; that enables us to draw conjectures from comparisons. But they also have qualities peculiar to themselves: what can we know about that? Horses, dogs, cattle, sheep, birds and most other animals living among men recognize our voices and are prepared to obey them. Why, Crassus even had a lamprey which came to him when he called it, and there are eels in the fountain of Arethusa which do the same. [B] I have seen stews in plenty where the fish, on hearing a particular cry from those who tend them, all rush to be fed.

  [A] nomen habent, et ad magistri

  Vocem quisque sui venit citatus.

  [They have a name and each comes to its master when he calls them.]78

  Such evidence we can judge.

  We can also go on to say that elephants have some notion of religion since, after ablutions and purifications, they can be seen waving their trunks like arms upraised, while gazing intently at the rising sun; for long periods at fixed times in the day (by instinct, not from teaching or precept) they stand rooted in meditation and contemplation; there may be no obvious similarities in other animals, but that does not allow us to make judgements about their total lack of religion. When matters are hidden from us, we cannot in any way conceive them.

  We can partly do so in the case of an activity noticed by Cleanthes the philosopher, because it resembles our own. He saw, he said, ants leave their own ant-hill for another one, bearing the body of a dead ant. Several others came out to meet them, as if to parley. They remained together for some time; then the second group of ants went back to consult, it was thought, their fellow-citizens. They made two or three such journeys, because of hard bargaining. In the end, the newcomers brought a worm out from their heap, apparently as a ransom for the dead ant. The first lot loaded it on their shoulders and carried it back, leaving the body of the dead ant with the others.

  That is the interpretation given by Cleanthes; it witnesses to the fact that voiceless creatures are not deprived of mutual contact and communication; if we cannot share in it, that is because of a defect in us; we would be very stupid indeed to have any meddlesome opinions on the matter.

  Animals do many actions which surpass our understanding; far from being able to imitate them we cannot even conceive them in our thoughts. Many hold that in that last great sea-fight which Antony lost against Augustus, the flag-galley was stopped dead in its course by the fish which is called Remora (‘Hindrance’) since it has the property of hindering any ship it clings to. When the Emperor Caligula was sailing along the coast of Romania with a large fleet, his galley alone was pulled up short by this very fish. Attached as it was to the bottom of his vessel, he caused it to be seized, angry that so small a creature – it is a shellfish – could just cling by its mouth to his galley and outdo the combined might of the sea, the winds and all his oarsmen. Understandably, he was even more amazed to learn that, once it was brought aboard ship, it no longer had the power it had had in the water.

  A citizen of Cyzicum once acquired a reputation as a good mathematical astrologer from noticing the practice of the hedgehog: its den is open in various places to various winds; it can foretell from which direction the wind will blow and plugs up the hole on the windward side. Observing that, he supplied the town with reliable forecasts about the direction of the winds.

  The chameleon takes on the colour of its surroundings, but the octopus assumes whatever colour it likes to suit the occasion, hiding, say, from something fearful or lurking for its prey. The chameleon changes passively, the octopus actively. We change hue as well, from fear, anger, shame and other emotions which affect the colour of our faces. That happens to us, as to the chameleon, passively. Jaundice, not our will, has the power to turn us yellow.

  Such characteristics in other animals which we realize to surpass our own show that they have, to an outstanding degree, a faculty which we classify as ‘occult’. Similarly, animals probably have many other characteristics and powers [C] which are in no way apparent to us.

  [A] Of all the omens of former times, the most ancient and the most certain were those drawn from the flight of birds. We have nothing corresponding to that, nothing as wonderful. The beatings of the birds’ wings, from which consequences were drawn about the future, show rule and order: only some very special means could produce so noble an activity: to attribute so great an effect entirely to some ordinance of Nature, without any understanding, agreement and thought on the part of the creatures which perform it, is to be taken in by words; such an opinion is evidently false. Here is proof of that: the torpedo is a fish with the property of benumbing the limbs of anyone who directly touches it; in addition it can even send a numbing torpor into the hands of anyone touching it or handling it indirectly through a net or something similar. They even say that, if you pour water on to it, you can feel this effect working upwards, numbing your sense of touch through the water. This force is worth marvelling at, but is not without its usefulness to the torpedo; that fish knows it has it and uses it to trap its prey when hunting; it snuggles down into the mud: other fish gliding overhead, struck by its cold torpor, are benumbed and fall into its power.

  Cranes, swallows and other birds of passage which change dwellings with the seasons, clearly show that they are aware of their ability to foretell and put it to good use.

  Hunters assure us that the way to choose from a litter the puppy which will turn out best is simply to make the bitch choose it herself: take the puppies out of their kennel and the first one she brings back will always prove the best; or else make a show of putting a ring of fire around their kennel; then take the first puppy she dashes in to rescue. From that it is obvious that either bitches have powers of foresight which we lack or else that they have a capacity for judging their young which is more lively than our own.79

  Beasts are born, reproduce, feed, move, live and die in ways so closely related to our own that, if we seek to lower their motivations or to raise our own status above theirs, that cannot arise from any reasoned argument on our part. Doctors recommend us to live and behave as animals do – and ordinary people have ever said:

  Tenez chauts les pieds et la teste;

  Au demeurant, vivez en beste.

  [Keep feet and head warm:

  Then live like the beasts.]

  Sexual generation is the principal natural action. Our human members are rather more conveniently arranged for that purpose; and yet we are told that if we want to be really effective we should adopt the position and posture of the animals:

  more ferarum

  Quadrup
edumque magis ritu, plerumque putantur

  Concipere uxores; quia sic loca sumere possunt,

  Pectoribus positis, sublatis semina lumbis.

  [Most think that wives conceive more readily in the posture of wild animals and four-footed beasts; that is because the semen can find its way better when the breasts are low down and the loins up-raised.]

  [AI] All those immodest and shameless movements that women have invented out of their own heads are condemned as positively harmful; women are advised to return to the more modest and poised comportment of animals of their sex.

  Nam mulier prohibet se concipere atque repugnat,

  Clunibus ipsa viri Venerem si laeta retractet,

  Atque exossato ciet omni pectore fluctus.

  Ejicit enim sulci recta regione viaque