The Complete Essays

by Michel de Montaigne

  [B] Should what the Epicureans say be true (namely, that if the senses play us false we have no knowledge at all);434 and should what the Stoics say be equally true (that sensible appearances are so deceptive that they can give rise in us to no knowledge whatever); then we are forced to conclude, at the expense of the two great schools of Dogmatists, that there is no such thing as knowledge.

  [A] Anybody can provide as many examples as he pleases of the ways our senses deceive or cheat us, since so many of their faults or deceptions are quite banal: a trumpet sounds a league behind us, but an echo in a valley may make it seem to come from in front:

  [B] Extantesque procul medio de gurgite montes

  Iidem apparent longe diversi licet

  Et fugere ad puppim colles campique videntur

  Quos agimus propter navim

  ubi in medio nobis equus acer obhaesit

  Flumine, equi corpus transversum ferre videtur

  Vis, et in adversum flumen contrudere raptim.

  [Distant mountains beetling over the sea may appear as one, yet are in fact many; as we sail along, hills and plains appear to be rushing towards our prow; if we look down when our horse stops in mid-stream, the river seems to be forcing it to go up-stream against the current.]435

  [A] Hold a musket-ball beneath your second finger, with your middle finger entwined over it: you will have to force yourself to admit that there is only one ball, so decidedly do you sense it to be two. We can see every day that our senses have mastery over our reason, forcing it to receive impressions which it knows to be false and judges to be false.

  I will not go into the sense of touch. Its effects are immediate, lively and concrete; many a time, as a result of the pain which it causes the body, it overthrows all those fine Stoic axioms. It takes a man who has resolutely made up his mind that colic paroxysms are a thing indifferent (like any other pain or disease) and that they have no power to affect the blessed state of supreme felicity in which the Sage has been lodged by his Stoic Virtue – and makes him yell about his belly.

  No heart is so flabby that the sounds of our drums and trumpets do not set it ablaze, nor so hard that sweet music does not tickle it and enliven it; no soul is so sour that it does not feel touched by some feeling of reverence436 when it contemplates the sombre vastness of our Churches, the great variety of their decorations and our ordered liturgy, or when it hears the enchantment of the organ and the poised religious harmony of men’s voices. Even those who come to scoff are brought to distrust their opinion by a shiver in their heart and a sense of dread.

  [B] As for me, I do not think I would be strong enough to remain unmoved even by verses of Horace or Catullus, if well sung by a good voice coming from a fair young mouth! [C] Zeno was right to claim that the voice is Beauty’s flower.437 Some people have even tried to make me believe that a famous man known to all Frenchmen had impressed me unduly with a recital of some of his verses, which seem very different seen on paper than heard in the air, and that my eyes would contradict my ears, so great is the power of eloquent delivery to endow any work which accepts its sway with value and style.

  While on the topic, Philoxenus’ reaction was not without charm: he heard a piece he had composed being sung badly, so he jumped on some of the singer’s tiles and smashed them. ‘I spoil your things,’ (he said) ‘you despoil mine!’438

  [A] Why did even those who had firmly decided to die avert their gaze from the very blow which they ordered to be struck? Why do those who have freely agreed to cauterizations and incisions for the sake of their health find that they cannot stand the sight of all the preparations, of the surgical instruments or of the actual operation? Sight does not share in the pain.

  Are not these appropriate examples for demonstrating the authority of our senses over our powers of reason? – Even though we know that a lady’s tresses are borrowed from a page or a lackey; that her rosy colour comes from Spain and her smooth whiteness from the ocean, we still find her person more attractive and agreeable – quite unreasonably, though, for in all that nothing is her own:

  Auferimur cultu; gemmis auroque teguntur

  Crimina: pars minima est ipsa puella sui.

  Saepe ubi sit quod ames inter tam multa requiras:

  Decipit hac oculos Aegide, dives amor.

  [We are carried away by clothing; ugliness is hidden behind gems and gold; the smallest part of herself is the actual girl! You can often look in vain for the girl you love under all these gewgaws. This is the shield with which the rich deceive a lover’s eyes.]439

  What great power our poets attribute to the senses, when they make Narcissus enamoured of his own reflection:

  Cunctaque miratur, quibus est mirabilis ipse;

  Se cupit imprudens; et qui probat, ipse probatur;

  Dumque petit, petitur; pariterque accendit et ardet.

  [He is enchanted by his own enchantments; unawares, he loves himself; he both praises and is praised; he yearns and is yearned for; the passion he kindles enflames himself]

  Similarly, Pygmalion’s mind was disturbed by the visual impact of his ivory statue: he fell in love with it and sighed for it:

  Oscula dat reddique putat, sequiturque tenetque,

  Et credit tactis digitos insidere membris;

  Et metuit pressos veniat ne livor in artus.

  [He kisses her, and believes his kisses are returned; he waits on her, embraces her; he believes her limbs respond to the touch of his fingers; he fears that in his ardour he may bruise her.]440

  Take a philosopher, put him in a cage made from thin wires set wide apart; hang him from one of the towers of Notre Dame de Paris. It is evident to his reason that he cannot fall; yet (unless he were trained as a steeplejack) when he looks down from that height he is bound to be terrified and beside himself. It is hard enough to feel safe at the top of a church tower, even behind open-work ramparts of stone: some people cannot even bear thinking about it.

  Take a beam wide enough to walk along: suspend it between two towers: there is no philosophical wisdom, however firm, which could make us walk along it just as we would if we were on the ground.

  I am not particularly afraid of heights, but when I was on the French side of the Italian Alps I made an assay and found that I could not suffer the sight of those boundless depths without a shiver of horror; I was at least my own height away from the edge and could not have fallen over unless I deliberately exposed myself to danger: yet my knees and thighs were trembling. I also noticed that, whatever the height, it was comforting and reassuring if there happened to be some tree or rock jutting out on the slope which could hold our gaze and interrupt our vision: it was as though they could have helped us if we fell. But when the precipices were sheer and smooth we could not even look at them without feeling giddy, [C] ‘ut despici sine vertigine simul oculorum animique non possit’ [such that no one could look down without vertigo in eyes and mind].441

  Which shows how sight can deceive us.

  One fine philosopher even poked out his eyes so as to free his mind from visual debauchery; he could then go on philosophizing in freedom. But by the same standard he ought to have blocked up his ears442 – [B] which Theophrastus says are the most dangerous of all our organs when it comes to receiving violent impressions capable of changing and disturbing us.443 [A] Eventually he would have to deprive himself of every other sense (tantamount to life and being), for all the senses can have this dominant power over our reason and our soul: [C] ‘Fit etiam saepe specie quadam, saepe vocum gravitate et cantibus, ut pellantur animi vehementius; saepe etiam cura et timore’ [Some visual feature, some grave voice or incantations may often strike the mind most vehemently: worry and care may often do that too].444

  [A] Doctors maintain that people with some complexions can be driven mad by certain sounds or instruments. I have known people who could not even hear a bone being gnawed under their table without losing control; and there is hardly a person who is not upset by the sharp rasping sound of a file against iron. Some
people are moved to anger or even hatred by hearing somebody chewing nearby or talking with some obstruction of their throat or nose.

  Gracchus had a prompter who was a flautist; he conducted the voice of his master, softening it or making it firm:445 what use was he if the rhythm and quality of the sounds did not have the power of moving and swaying the judgement of the listeners? We have good enough reason to make a fuss about this judgement of ours: it lets itself be affected and managed by the modulations and properties of so light a breath of wind!

  The senses deceive our intellect; it deceives them in their turn. Our soul sometimes gets her own back: [C] they both vie with each other in lying and deceiving. [A] When we are moved to anger, we do not hear things as they are:

  Et solem geminum, et duplices se ostendere Thebas.

  [We see twin suns: two Thebes.]446

  Love someone and she appears more beautiful than she is:

  [B] Multimodis igitur pravas turpesque videmus

  Esse in delitiis, summoque in honore vigere.

  [Many ugly and deformed women are deeply loved, enjoying, as we see, the highest favour.]447

  [A] And anyone we dislike appears more ugly. When a man is in pain and affliction, the very light of day seems sombre and dark. Our senses are not only changed for the worse, they are knocked quite stupid by the passions of the soul. How many things do we see which we do not even notice when our minds are preoccupied with other matters?

  In rebus quoque apertis noscere possis,

  Si non advertas animum, proinde esse, quasi omni

  Tenmpore semotaefuerint, longeque remotae.

  [Even in the case of things which are clearly visible, you know that if you do not turn your mind to them, it is as though they had never been there or were far away.]448

  It seems, then, that the soul draws the powers of the senses right into herself and makes them waste their time.

  And so, both within and without, man is full of weakness and of lies.

  [B] Those who have compared our lives to a dream are right – perhaps more right than they realized. When we are dreaming our soul lives, acts and exercises all her faculties neither more nor less than when she is awake, but she does it much more slackly and darkly; the difference is definitely not so great as between night and the living day: more like that between night and twilight. In one case the soul is sleeping, in the other more or less slumbering; but there is always darkness, perpetual Cimmerian darkness.

  [C] We wake asleep: we sleep awake. When I am asleep I do see things less clearly but I never find my waking pure enough or cloudless. Deep sleep can sometimes even put dreams to sleep; but our waking is never so wide awake that it can cure and purge those raving lunacies, those waking dreams that are worse than the real ones.

  Our rational souls accept notions and opinions produced during sleep, conferring on activities in our dreams the same approbation and authority as on our waking dreams: why should we therefore not doubt whether our thinking and acting are but another dream; our waking, some other species of sleep?

  [A] If the senses are our basic judges, we should not merely call upon our own for counsel: where this faculty is concerned, the animals have as much right as we do, or even more. Some certainly have better hearing, sight, smell, touch or taste. Democritus said that the gods and the beasts have faculties of sense far more perfect than Man does.

  Now there are extreme differences between the action of their senses and ours: our saliva cleanses and dries up our wounds: it kills snakes.449

  Tantaque in his rebus distantia differitasque est,

  Ut quod aliis cibus est, aliis fuat acre venenum.

  Saepe etenim serpens, hominis contacta saliva,

  Disperit, ac sese mandendo confict ipsa.

  [There are so many differences and variations: one man’s food is another man’s bitter poison. Indeed if a snake comes into contact with human saliva, it begins to bite its own tail and dies.]450

  So what quality are we to give to saliva? Do we follow our own senses or the snake’s? We are trying to discover the truth about its true essence: which of the two will tell us? Pliny says that there are certain ‘sea-hares’ in the Indies which are poison to us and we to them: a touch kills them.451 Which is truly poisonous, the fish or the man? Which should we believe: the effect of the fish on the man or the man on the fish? [B] The quality of one kind of air is infectious to Man but not to cattle; another has the quality of being infectious to cattle but harmless to men. Which of the two has truly and naturally the quality of being infectious? [A] Sufferers from jaundice see everything paler and yellower than we do:

  [B] Lurida praeterea fiunt quaecunque tuentur Arquati.

  [Those ill from ‘rainbow-yellow’ see everything in sallow colours.]452

  [A] There is a suffusion of blood under the skin around the eye which doctors call Hyposphragma – those who suffer from it see everything blood-red.453 How do we know that these humours, which can affect the workings of Man’s eyesight, are not the dominant norm among beasts? Some animals, as we know, have yellow eyes exactly like sufferers from jaundice and others have eyes which are blood-red. It is probable that the colours of objects appear different to them and to us. Who judges them right? Nobody claims that the essence of anything relates only to its effect on Man. Hardness, whiteness, depth, bitterness – such qualities are of service to animals and are known to them as to ourselves: Nature has granted that they be useful to animals as well as to us men.

  If we squeeze one of our eyes, the objects we look at appear thinner and elongated: many beasts have eyes which are always squeezed up like that. For all we know, that elongated form is the true one, not what our eyes see in their normal state. [B] If we press up our eyes from the bottom, we see double:

  Bina lucernarum florentia lumina flammis,

  Et duplices hominum facies, et corpora bina.

  [The lamp has twin flowerings of light, men have twin faces and twin bodies.]454

  [A] If our ears are blocked up or if the auricular passage is constricted we hear sounds differently from normal: animals have hairy ears or, in some cases, merely a little hole instead of an ear: consequently, they do not hear what we hear and the sound is perceived differently.455

  At banquets or in the theatre, when various shades of coloured glass are placed in front of the torches, we know that they can make everything appear green, yellow or violet:

  [B] Et vulgo faciunt id lutea russaque vela

  Et ferruginea, cum magnis intenta theatris

  Per malos volgata trabesque trementia pendent:

  Namque ibi consessum caveai subter, et omnem

  Scenai speciem, patrum, matrumque, deorumque

  Inficiunt, coguntque suo volitare colore.

  [When yellow, red or rust-brown awnings are stretched over our vast theatres, flapping about in the wind on their poles and their frames, it is quite usual for them to impart their colours to the stage and to the whole assembly seated in their seats, to senators and matrons and to the statues of the gods, as their colours dance about.]456

  [A] It seems likely that the different coloured eyes which we can notice in some animals may impart corresponding colours to what the animals see.

  If we want to judge the activities of the senses we should agree with the animals and then among ourselves. We are far from doing that. Quarrels are constantly arising because one person hears, sees or tastes something differently from another. As much as anything, we quarrel over, the diversity of the images conveyed to us by our senses.457

  A child, a man of thirty, a sexagenarian, each hears and sees things differently: that is a normal law of Nature. Similarly for taste. Some people’s senses are dullish and dimmer: others are more open and acute. We perceive objects to be like this or that in accordance with our own state and how they seem to us.458 But seeming, for human beings, is so uncertain and so controvertible that it is no miracle if we are told that we may acknowledge that snow seems white to us but cannot guarantee to est
ablish that it is truly so in essence. And once you shake that first principle, all the knowledge in the world is inevitably swept away.

  What about our very senses hampering each other? A painting may seem to have depth, but feels flat. Musk is pleasant to the smell but offensive to the taste: should we call it pleasant or not? There are herbs and ointments suitable to one part of the body but injurious to another; honey is pleasant to taste, unpleasant to look at.459 Take those rings wrought in the shape of plumes which are called in heraldry Feathers without Ends. Can any eye ever be sure how wide they are and avoid being taken in by the optical illusion? For they seem to get wider on one side, narrower and more pointed on the other, especially if you turn them round your finger; yet to your touch they all appear to have the same width all the way round.

  – [C] (In the ancient world some men increased their lust by the use of distorting mirrors which enlarged whatever was put before them, so that the organs used on the job pleased them more, because they looked as though they had grown bigger. But which sense did they allow to win? Was it their sight, which showed them their members as thick and big as they liked, or was it their touch, which showed the same members to be tiny and despicable?) –460

  [A] Is it our senses which endow the object with these diverse attributes, whereas, in reality, objects only have one? Rather like bread when we eat it; it is one thing, bread, but we turn it into several: bones, blood, flesh, hair and nails.