The Complete Essays

by Michel de Montaigne

  It lachrymans, guttisque humectat grandibus ora.

  [Then comes Aethon, the war-horse, stripped of its insignia, weeping and drenching its face in mighty tears.]93

  Some peoples hold their wives in common while in others each man has a wife of his own; can we not see the same among the beasts? Do they not have marriages better kept than our own?

  [A] As touching the confederations and alliances which animals make to league themselves together for mutual succour, oxen, pigs and other animals can be seen rushing in to help when one of their number is being attacked and rallying round in its defence. If a scar-fish swallows a fisherman’s hook, its fellows swarm around and bite through the line; if one of them happens to get caught in a wicker trap, the others dangle their tails down into it from outside while it holds on grimly with its teeth. In this way they drag it right out. When a barbel-fish is hooked, the others stiffen the spine which projects from their backs; it is notched like a saw; they rub it against the line and saw it through.

  As for the special duties we render to each other in the service of life, there are several similar examples amongst the animals. The whale, it is said, never travels without a tiny fish like a sea-gudgeon swimming ahead of it (for this reason it is called a ‘guide-fish’). The whale follows it everywhere, allowing itself to be directed and steered as easily as a rudder turns a boat. Everything else – beast or ship – which falls into the swirling chaos of that creature’s mouth is straightway lost and swallowed up: yet that little fish can retire there and sleep in its mouth in complete safety. While it is asleep, the whale never budges, but as soon as it swims out, the whale constantly follows it; if it should chance to lose its guide-fish it flounders about all over the place, often dashing itself to pieces against the rocks like a rudderless ship. Plutarch testifies to having seen this happen on the island of Anticyra.

  There is a similar companionship between the tiny wren and the crocodile: the wren stands guard over that big creature; when the crocodile’s enemy, the ichneumon, closes in for a fight, this little bird is afraid that its companion may be caught napping, so it pecks it awake and sings to warn it of danger. The wren lives on the leftovers of that monstrous crocodile, which welcomes it into its jaws and lets it pick at the meat stuck between its teeth. If it wants to shut its mouth it warns the wren to fly out by gradually closing its jaws a little, without squashing it or harming it in any way.

  The shellfish called a nacre lives in similar company with the pinnothere, a kind of small crab which serves it as tout and doorkeeper; squatting by the orifice which the nacre always keeps half-open, it waits until some little fish worth catching swims into it. The crab then slips into the nacre, pinching its living flesh to make it close its shell. Having imprisoned the fish they both set about eating it.

  Three parts of Mathematics are particularly well known to tunny-fish: the way they live shows that.

  First, Astrology; it is they who teach it to men: wherever they may be when surprised by the winter solstice, there they remain until the following equinox (which explains why even Aristotle readily allows them a knowledge of that science).

  Next Geometry and Arithmetic: tunny-fish always form up in the shape of a cube, equally square on all sides. Drawing themselves up into a solid battalion, a corps enclosed and protected all round by six faces of equal size, they swim about in this order, square before, square behind – so that if you count one line of them you have the count of the whole school, since the same figure applies to their depth, breadth and length.

  As for greatness of spirit, it would be hard to express it more clearly than that great dog did which was sent to King Alexander from India. It was first presented with a stag, next with a boar, then with a bear: it did not deign to come out and fight them, but as soon as it saw a lion it leaped to its feet, clearly showing that it thought such an animal was indeed worthy of the privilege of fighting against it.

  [B] Touching repentance and the acknowledging of error, they tell of an elephant which killed its master in a fit of anger; its grief was so intense that it refused to eat and starved itself to death.

  [A] As for clemency, they tell of a tiger – the most inhuman of all beasts – which was given a goat to eat. It fasted for two days before being even tempted to harm it; by the third day, it considered the goat as a familiar guest, so, rather than attack it, it broke out of its cage and sought food elsewhere.

  As for rights bred of familiarity and friendly converse, it is quite normal to train cats, dogs and hares to live tamely together.

  But surpassing all human imagination is what experience has taught travellers by sea – especially those in the sea of Sicily – about the halcyons. Has Nature ever honoured any creature as she has honoured these kingfishers in their procreation, lying-in and birth? The poets feign that one single island, Delos, was a floating land before being anchored so that Latona might give birth upon it. But God himself has wished the entire sea to be settled, smooth and calm, free from wave and wind and rain, on those halcyon days when these creatures produce their young. (This befalls, precisely, about the shortest day of the year, the solstice: this privilege of theirs gives us seven days and nights at the very heart of the winter, when, without danger, we can sail the seas.) Each female knows no male but its own; it helps it all its life and never forsakes it. If the male is weak or crippled the female carries it everywhere on her back, serving it till death.

  But no ingenuity has ever fathomed the miraculous artifice by which the halcyons build their nest for their young nor divined its fabric. Plutarch saw several of them and handled them. He thinks they may be composed of the bones of certain fish, joined, bound and interwoven together, some lengthwise, some crosswise; bent and rounded struts are then added, eventually forming a coracle ready to float upon the water. The female halcyon then brings them where they can be lapped around by the waves of the sea. The salt water gently beats upon them, showing her where ill-fitting joints need daubing and where she needs to strengthen the sections where her construction is coming loose or pulling apart at the beating of the sea. On the other hand this battering by the waves binds all the good joints up tight and knits them so close that they can only with difficulty be smashed, broken or even damaged by blows with stone or iron. Most wonderful of all are the shape and proportions of the concave hold, for it is shaped and proportioned to admit only one creature snugly: the one who made it. To everything else it is closed, barred and impenetrable. Nothing can get in, not even sea water.

  That is a fine description of this construction, taken from a fine book. Yet even that, it seems to me, fails to enlighten us adequately about the difficulty of such architecture. What silly vanity leads us to take products we can neither imitate nor understand, range them beneath us and treat them with disdain.94

  Let us go further into such equalities and correspondences between us and the beasts. The human soul takes pride in its privilege of bringing all its conceptions into harmony with its own condition: everything it conceives is stripped of its mortal and physical qualities; it compels everything which it judges worthy of notice to divest itself completely of such of its own conditions as are corruptible – of all physical accidents such as depth, length, breadth, weight, colour, smell, roughness, smoothness, hardness, softness; it casts them aside like old garments; it clothes everything in its own condition, spiritual and immortal: the Rome or the Paris which exists in my soul – the Paris imagined in thought – is conceived in my imagination without size, without place, without stone, without plaster, without wood. Well, that self-same privilege seems evidently shared with the beasts; for, asleep on its litter, a war-horse accustomed to trumpet, harquebus and combat can be seen twitching and trembling as though in the thick of battle: clearly its mind is conceiving a drum without drum-beats, an army without arms, without physical body.

  Quippe videbis equos fortes, cum membra jacebunt

  In somnis, sudare tamen, spirareque saepe,

  Et quasi de palma summas
contendere vires.

  [You can, indeed, see vigorous racehorses, resting their limbs in sleep, yet often sweating and panting as though disputing the prize with all their might.]

  The greyhound imagines a hare in a dream: we can see it panting after it in its sleep as it stretches out its tail, twitches its thighs and exactly imitates its movements in the chase: that hare has no coat and no bones.

  Venantumque canes in molli saepe quiete

  Jactant crura tamen subito, vocesque repente

  Mittunt, et crebras reducunt naribus auras,

  Ut vestigia si teneant inventa ferarum.

  Expergefactique sequuntur inania saepe

  Cervorum simulachra, fugae quasi dedita cernant:

  Donec discussis redeant erroribus ad se.

  [Often hunting dogs lying quietly asleep, suddenly paw about, bark out loud and sharply draw their breath as if they were on the track of their prey. Even after they have started out of their sleep they still pursue that empty ghost of a stag as though they could see it fleeing before them, until the error fades and they come back to themselves.]

  Guard dogs can be found growling in their sleep, then yapping and finally waking with a start as though they saw some stranger coming: that stranger which their souls can see is a spiritual man, not perceptible to the senses, without dimensions, without colour and without being.

  consueta domi catulorum blanda propago

  Degere, saepe levem ex oculis volucremque soporem

  Discutere, et corpus de terra corripere instant,

  Proinde quasi ignotas facies atque ora tueantur.

  [The dog, that fawning creature at home in our houses, often quivers its eyelids in winged sleep and starts to its feet as if it saw the faces and features of strangers.]95

  As for physical beauty, before I can go any further I need to know if we can agree over its description. It seems we have little knowledge of natural beauty or of beauty in general, since we humans give so many diverse forms to our own beauty; [C] if it had been prescribed by Nature, we would all hold common views about it, just as we all agree that fire is hot. We give human beauty any form we fancy:

  [B] Turpis Romano Belgicus ore color.

  [On the face of a Roman. Belgian’s colour is ugly.]96

  [A] For a painter in the Indies beauty is black and sunburnt, with thick swollen lips and broad flat noses; [B] there, they load the cartilage between the nostrils with great rings of gold, so that it hangs right down to the lips; the lower lip is similarly weighed down to the chin with great hoops studded with precious jewels; for them it is elegant to lay their teeth bare [C] exposing the gum below their roots. [B] In Peru, big ears are beautiful: they stretch them as far as they can, artificially. [C] A man still alive today says that he saw in the East a country where this custom of stretching ears and loading them with jewels is held in such esteem that he was often able to thrust his arm, clothes and all, through the holes women pierced in their lobes. [B] Elsewhere there are whole nations who carefully blacken their teeth and loathe seeing white ones. Elsewhere they dye them red. [C] Not only in the Basque country do they prefer beautiful women to have shaven heads; the same applies elsewhere – even, according to Pliny, in certain icy lands. [B] The women of Mexico count low foreheads as a sign of beauty: so, while they pluck hair from the rest of their body, there they encourage it to grow thick and propagate it artificially. They hold large breasts in such high esteem that they affect giving suck to their children over their shoulders.97

  [A] We would fashion ugliness that way.

  Italians make beauty fat and heavy; Spaniards gaunt and skinny; some of us French make it fair, others dark; some soft and delicate; others strong and robust; some desire grace and delicacy; others proud bearing and majesty. [C] Similarly, while Plato considered the sphere to be the perfection of beauty98 the Epicureans preferred the pyramid or the square, finding it hard to swallow a god who was shaped like a ball!

  [A] Anyway, Nature has no more given man privileges in beauty than in any other of her common laws. If we judge ourselves fairly we will find some animals less favoured than we are, others (more numerous) which are more so: [C] ‘a multis animalibus decore vincimur’ [we are surpassed in beauty by many of the beasts]99 – especially among our fellow-citizens, the denizens of dry land. As for the creatures of the sea, we can leave their beauty of form aside, since it has no point of comparison with ours; we are thoroughly beaten by them in colour, brightness, sheen and the general disposition of our members; beaten by the birds of the air, too, in all qualities. And [A] then there is that privilege the poets stress – the fact that we hold ourselves erect, gazing up to heaven, from whence we came:

  Pronaque cum spectent animalia caetera terram,

  Os homini sublime dedit, coelumque videre

  Jussit, et erectos ad sydera tollere vultus.

  [The other animals look downwards to the ground; God gave Man a face held high and ordered him to look towards heaven and raise his eyes towards the sun, moon and stars.]100

  That privilege is well and truly poetic! Some quite small animals gaze up to heaven all the time; camels and ostriches seem to me to have necks straighter than ours and more erect. [C] And which are these animals which are supposed not to have faces in front and on top, not to look straight ahead as we do nor, in their normal posture, to see as much of heaven and earth as we do? What characteristics of man’s body as described by Plato and Cicero do not equally apply to a thousand other animals!101 [A] The animals most like us are the worst and the ugliest of the bunch: the one with an outward appearance and face closest to ours is the baboon;

  [C] Simia quam similis, turpissima bestia, nobis!

  [That vilest of beast, the monkey – how like us!]102

  [A] the one with inwards and vital organs closest to ours is the pig.103

  When a think of the human animal, stark naked, with all its blemishes, natural weaknesses and flaws, I find that we have more cause to cover ourselves up than any other animal. (That even applies to the female sex which seems to have a greater share of beauty.) We could be excused for having borrowed from those which Nature has favoured more than us, decking ourselves in their beauty,104 hiding ourselves in their coats: wool, feathers, hide or silk.

  We may note en passant that we are the only animals whose physical defects are offensive to our fellows; we are also the only ones to hide from others of our species when answering the calls of Nature. Also worth considering is the fact that those who know prescribe for lovesickness a good look at the totally naked body which is so much desired. To cool amorous passion, all you need to do is to be free to look at the one you love!

  Ille quod obscoenas in aperto corpore partes

  Viderat, in cursu qui fuit, haesit amor.

  [It has been known for a man to see his mistress’s private parts and to find his ardour pulled up short.]105

  It is true that this prescription may result from a cool and delicate humour in Man; nevertheless it is a striking sign of our weakness that it is enough for us to frequent and know each other for us to feel disgust. [B] Ladies are circumspect and keep us out of their dressing-rooms before they have put on their paint and decked themselves out for public show: that is not so much modesty as skill and foresight.

  [A1] Nec veneres nostras hoc fallit: quo magis ipsae

  Omnia summopere hos vitae post scenia celant,

  Quos retinere volunt adstrictoque esse in amore.

  [Fair women know this: they are all the more careful to hide the changing-rooms of their lives from those lovers they wish to hold and bind to them.]106

  Yet we like all the parts of some animals, finding them so pleasing to our tastes that from their very droppings, discharges and excreta we make dainty things to eat as well as ornaments and perfumes.

  Such arguments apply only to the common order of men; they are not sacrilegious enough to want to include those beauties, supernatural and beyond the common order, which can sometimes be seen shining among us like st
ars beneath a bodily and earthly veil.

  Now even that share in Nature’s favour which we do concede to the animals is much to their advantage. To ourselves we attribute goods which are purely imaginary and fantastical; future, absent goods, which it exceeds our human capacity, of itself, to vouch for; or else they are goods which our unruly opinions attribute to ourselves quite wrongly, such as knowledge, rationality or pre-eminence. We abandon to animals a share in solid, palpable goods which really do exist: peace, repose, security, innocence, health… Health! the fairest and finest gift that Nature can bestow. That is why even Stoic Philosophy dares to assert that Heraclitus (who had dropsy) and Pherecydes (who had been infected by lice) would have been right, if they could, to barter their wisdom against a cure. By weighing and comparing wisdom against health they make it even more splendid than in another of their assertions. Supposing Circe (they say) had presented Ulysses with two different potions, one to make a madman wise, the other a wise man mad: rather than allow her to transform him from human to beast, he ought to have accepted the one that would make him mad. Wisdom herself, they say, would have argued like this: ‘Leave me, forsake me, rather than lodge me in the bodily shape of an ass.’ What? Will philosophers forsake Wisdom, great and divine, to cleave to the veil of this earthy body?107 So we do not, after all, excel over beasts by wit and our power of reason but merely by our physical beauty, our beautiful colour, the beautiful way our members are arranged! For things like that we must forsake our intellect, our moral wisdom and what not!

  Well, that is a frank and artless admission and I accept it. At least philosophers have admitted that all those qualities they make such a fuss about are fantastic and vain: even if beasts had all the virtue, knowledge, wisdom and contentment of the Stoic [C] they would still be beasts, [A] in no way to be compared to any man, however wretched, wicked or daft! [C] In fine, nothing is worth anything if it does not look like us. Even God has to become like us, to be appreciated – I shall go into that later.108 It is clear from this that [A] we do not place ourselves above other animals and reject their condition and companionship by right reason but out of stubbornness and insane arrogance.