The Complete Essays

by Michel de Montaigne

  As for me, I can desire to be entirely different, I can condemn my universal form and grieve at it and beg God to form me again entirely and to pardon my natural frailty. But it seems to me that that should not be called repenting any more than my grieving at not being an angel or Cato.17 My doings are ruled by what I am and are in harmony with how I was made. I cannot do better: and the act of repenting does not properly touch such things as are not within our power – that is touched by regretting. I can imagine countless natures more sublime and better ruled than my own: by doing that I do not emend my own capacities, any more than my arm or my intelligence become more strong because I can imagine others which are. If imagining and desiring actions nobler than ours made us repent of our own we would have to go repenting of our most innocent doings, since we can rightly judge that they would have been brought to greater perfection and grandeur in a nature far excelling our own. When I reflect on my behaviour as a young man and as an old one I find that I have mainly behaved ordinately secundum me.18 My power of resistance can do no more. I do not flatter myself: in like circumstances I would still be thus. It is no spot but a universal stain which soils me. I do not know any surface repentance, mediocre and a matter of ceremony. Before I call it repentance it must touch me everywhere, grip my bowels and make them yearn – as deeply and as universally as God does see me.19

  In my business dealings several good opportunities have escaped me for want of the happy knack of conducting them: yet my decisions were well chosen secundum quid (that is, according to the events which they ran up against); my decisions are so fashioned as always to take the easiest and the surest side. I find that I proceeded wisely, according to my rule, in my previous deliberations given the state of the subject as set before me: and in the same circumstances I would do the same a thousand years from hence. I pay no regard to what it looks like now but to how it was when I was examining it.

  [C] The force of any advice depends upon the time: circumstances endlessly alter and matters endlessly change. I have made some grievous mistakes in my life – important ones – for want of good luck not for want of good thought. In the subjects which we handle, and especially in the natures of men, there are hidden parts which cannot be divined, silent characteristics which are never revealed and which are sometimes unknown even to the one who has them but which are awakened and brought out by subsequent events. If my wisdom was unable to penetrate through to them and foresee them I bear it no grudge: there are limits to its obligations. What defeats me is the outcome, and [B] if it favours the side I rejected, that cannot be helped. I do not find fault with myself: I blame not what I did but my fortune. And that is not to be called repenting.

  Phocion gave a certain piece of advice to the Athenians which was not acted upon. When the affair turned out successfully against his advice somebody asked him, ‘Well now, Phocion, are you pleased that things are going so well?’ ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘I am happy that it has turned out this way, but I do not repent of the advice that I gave.’20 When my friends come to me for advice I give it freely and clearly, without (as nearly everyone does) dwelling on the fact that, since the matter is chancy, things can turn out contrary to what I think, so that they may well have cause to reproach me for my advice. That never bothers me, for they will be in the wrong: I ought not to have refused them such service.

  [C] I have hardly any cause to blame anyone but myself for my failures or misfortunes, for in practice I rarely ask anyone for advice save to honour them formally; the exception is when I need learned instruction or knowledge of the facts. But in matters where only my judgement is involved, the arguments of others rarely serve to deflect me though they may well support me; I listen to them graciously and courteously – to all of them. But as far as I can recall I have never yet trusted any but my own. According to my standards they are but flies and midges buzzing over my will. I set little store by my own opinions but just as little by other people’s. And Fortune has treated me worthily. I receive little counsel: I give even less. I am very rarely asked for it: I am even less believed, and I know of no public or private undertaking which has been set right or halted on my advice. Even such persons as chance to be somewhat dependent on my advice have readily allowed themselves to be swayed by some completely different mind. Since I am just as jealous of my right to peace and quiet as of my right to authority, I prefer it that way. By leaving me out they are acting on my own principles, which consist in being settled and contained entirely within myself: it is a joy for me to be detached from others’ affairs and relieved of protecting them.

  I have few regrets for affairs of any sort, no matter how they have turned out, once they are past. I am always comforted by the thought that they had to happen that way: there they are in the vast march of the universe and in the concatenation of Stoic causes; no idea of yours, by wish or by thought, can change one jot without overturning the whole order of Nature, both past and future.21

  Meanwhile I loathe that consequential repenting which old age brings. That Ancient who said that he was obliged to the passing years for freeing him from sensual pleasures held quite a different opinion from mine: I could never be grateful to infirmity for any good it might do me. [C] ‘Nec tam aversa unquam videbitur ab opere suo providentia, ut debilitas inter optima inventa sit.’ [And Providence will never be found so hostile to her work as to rank debility among the best of things.]22 [B] Our appetites are few when we are old: and once they are over we are seized by a profound disgust. I can see nothing of conscience in that: chagrin and feebleness imprint on us a lax and snotty virtue. We must not allow ourselves to be so borne away by natural degeneration that it bastardizes our judgement. In former days youth and pleasure never made me fail to recognize the face of vice within the sensuality: nor does the distaste which the years have brought me make me fail to recognize now the face of pleasure within the vice.

  I have nothing to do with it now, but I judge it as though I did. [C] Personally, when I give my reason a lively and attentive shake, I find that [B] it is just the same as in my more licentious years, except that it has perhaps grown more feeble and much worse with age; [C] and I find that, although it declines to stoke up such pleasures out of consideration for the interests of my physical health, it would not do that, even now, any more than it once did, for the sake of my spiritual health. [B] I do not think it any braver for seeing it drop out of the battle. My temptations are so crippled and enfeebled that they are not worth opposing. I can conjure them away by merely stretching out my hands. Confront my reason with my former longings and I fear that that it will show less power of resistance than once it did. I cannot see that, of itself, it judges in any way differently now than it did before, nor that it is freshly enlightened. So if it has recovered it is a botched recovery. [C] A wretched sort of cure, to owe one’s health to sickliness.

  It is not for our wretchedness to do us that service: it is for the happy outcome of our judgement. As for whacks and afflictions, you can make me do nothing but curse them: they are meant for men whose desires are aroused only by a good whipping. Indeed my reason runs freer when things go well: it is far more distracted and occupied when digesting misfortunes than pleasures. I can see much more clearly when the weather is serene. Health counsels me both more actively and usefully than illness does. I had progressed as far as I could towards right-rule and reformation when I had health to enjoy. I would be ashamed and jealous if the wretched lot of my decrepitude were to be preferred above the years when I was healthy, aroused and vigorous, and if men had to esteem me not for what I was but for ceasing to be like that. It is my conviction that what makes for human happiness is not, as Antisthenes said, dying happily but living happily.23 I have never striven to make a monster by sticking a philosopher’s tail on to the head and trunk of a forlorn man, nor to make my wretched end disavow and disclaim the more beautiful, more wholesome and longer part of my life. I want to show myself to have been uniform and to be seen as such. If I had to live again, I wou
ld live as I have done; I neither regret the past nor fear the future. And unless I deceive myself, things within have gone much the same as those without. One of my greatest obligations to my lot is that the course of my physical state has brought each thing in due season. I have known the blade, the blossom and the fruit; and I now know their withering. Happily so, since naturally so. I can bear more patiently the ills that I have since they come in due season, and since they also make me recall with more gratitude the long-lasting happiness of my former life.

  My wisdom may well have had the same stature in both my seasons, but it was far more brilliant and graceful then, green-sprouting, gay and naïve; now it is bent double, querulous and wearisome.

  I disclaim those incidental reformations based on pain. [B] God must touch our hearts.24 Our conscience must emend itself by itself, by the strengthening of our reason not by the enfeebling of our appetites. Sensual pleasure, of itself, is neither so pale nor so wan as to be perceived by bleared and troubled eyes. We must love temperance for its own sake and out of respect for God who has commanded it to us; and chastity too: what we are presented with by rheum, and what I owe to the grace of my colic paroxysms, are neither chastity nor temperance.25

  You cannot boast of despising and of fighting pleasure if you cannot see her and if you do not know her grace and power, or her beauty at its most attractive. I know them both: and I am the one to say so. But it seems to me that our souls are subject in old age to ills and imperfections more insolent than those of youth. I said so when I was young, and they cast my beardless chin in my teeth. And I still say so now that my [C] grey [B] hair lends me credit. What we call wisdom is the moroseness of our humours and our distaste for things as they are now. But in truth we do not so much give up our vices as change them – for the worse, if you ask me. Apart from silly tottering pride, boring babble, prickly unsociable humours, superstition and a ridiculous concern for wealth when we have lost the use of it, I find that there are more envy and unfairness and malice; age sets more wrinkles on our minds than on our faces. You can find no souls – or very few – which as they grow old do not stink of rankness and of rot. It is the man as a whole that marches towards his flower and his fading.

  [C] When I see the wisdom of Socrates and several of the circumstances surrounding his condemnation, I would venture to conclude that to some degree he connived at it and deliberately put up a sham defence, since at seventy years of age he soon had to suffer the benumbing of his splendid endowments and the clouding over of his habitual clarity.

  [B] What transformations do I daily see wrought by old age in those I know. It is a powerful illness which flows on naturally and imperceptibly. You must have a great store of study and foresight to avoid the imperfections which it loads upon us – or at least to weaken their progress. I know that, despite all my entrenchments, it is gaining on me foot by foot. I put up such resistance as I can. But I do not know where it will take me in the end. Yet come what may, I should like people to know from what I shall have declined.

  3. On three kinds of social intercourse

  [One of the most personal of the chapters so far. The ‘trois commerces’ examined by Montaigne are the three forms of social intercourse which enrich his private life and make it worth living: 1) loving-friendship – even though ordinary friendships become rather insipid when judged against his perfect friendship with La Boëtie; 2) loving relationships with ‘ladies’, beautiful and, if possible, intelligent; 3) reading books. The one adjective common to the friends, women and books discussed here and in ‘On books’ is honnête (honourable and decent). Montaigne’s ideal social intercourse would engage the whole man, body and soul. By themselves none of these three fully does so, and the first two engage the body and the soul in widely differing proportions, while books hardly engage the body at all.

  Montaigne speaks of women in a gruffly humorous way, but it will be noted that the reading he would concede to them corresponds closely to what he says of his own reading in the chapter ‘On books’.

  There is an important insistence that sexual intercourse is more than a physical ‘necessity’ and so not merely a hunger to be satisfied physically without the involvement of the higher faculties.

  The disease Montaigne caught from prostitutes was syphilis.]

  [B] We should not nail ourselves so strongly to our humours and complexions. Our main talent lies in knowing how to adapt ourselves to a variety of customs. To keep ourselves bound by the bonds of necessity to one single way of life is to be, but not to live. Souls are most beautiful when they show most variety and flexibility. [C] Here is a testimony which honours Cato the Elder: ‘Huic versatile ingenium sic pariter ad omnia fuit, ut natum ad id unum diceres, quodcumque ageret.’ [His mind was so versatile, and so ready for anything, that whatever he did you could say he was born for that alone].1

  [B] If it was for me to train myself my way, there would be no mould in which I would wish to be set without being able to throw it off. Life is a rough, irregular progress with a multitude of forms. It is to be no friend of yourself – and even less master of yourself – to be a slave endlessly following yourself, so beholden to your predispositions that you cannot stray from them nor bend them. I am saying this now because I cannot easily escape from the state of my own Soul, which is distressing in so far as she does not usually know how to spend her time without getting bogged down nor how to apply herself to anything except fully and intensely. No matter how trivial the subject you give her she likes to magnify it and to amplify it until she has to work at it with all her might. For this reason her idleness is an activity which is painful to me and which damages my health. Most minds have need of extraneous matter to make them limber up and do their exercises: mine needs rather to sojorn and to settle down: ‘Vitia otii negotio discutienda sunt’ [We must dispel the vices of leisure by our work];2 my own mind’s principal and most difficult study is the study of itself. [C] For it, books are the sort of occupation which seduces it from such study. [B] With the first thoughts which occur to it it becomes agitated and makes a trial of its strength in all directions, practising its control, sometimes in the direction of force, sometimes in the direction of order and gracefulness, [C] controlling, moderating and fortifying itself. [B] It has the wherewithal to awaken its faculties by itself: Nature has given it (as she has given them all) enough matter of its own for its use and enough subjects for it to discover and pass judgement upon.

  [C] For anyone who knows how to probe himself and to do so vigorously, reflection is a mighty endeavour and a full one: I would rather forge my soul than stock it up. No occupation is more powerful, or more feeble, than entertaining one’s own thoughts – depending on what kind of soul it is. The greatest of souls make it their vocation, ‘quibus vivere est cogitare’ [for them, to think is to live];3 there is nothing we can do longer than think, no activity to which we can devote ourselves more regularly nor more easily: Nature has granted the soul that prerogative. It is the work of the gods, says Aristotle, from which springs their beatitude and our own.4 Reading, by its various subjects, particularly serves to arouse my discursive reason: it sets not my memory to work but my judgement. [B] So, for me, few conversations are arresting unless they are vigorous and powerful. It is true that grace and beauty occupy me and fulfil me as much or more as weight and profundity. And since I doze off during any sort of converse and lend it only the outer bark of my attention, it often happens that during polite conversation (with its flat, well-trodden sort of topics) I say stupid things unworthy of a child, or make silly, ridiculous answers, or else I remain stubbornly silent which is even more inept and rude. I have a mad way of withdrawing into myself as well as a heavy, puerile ignorance of everyday matters. To those two qualities I owe the fact that five or six true anecdotes can be told about me as absurd as about any man whatsoever.

  Now to get on with what I was saying: this awkward complexion of mine renders me fastidious about mixing with people: I need to handpick my companions; and
it also renders me awkward for ordinary activities. We live and deal with the common people; if their commerce wearies us, if we disdain to apply ourselves to their humble, common souls – and the humble, common ones are often as well-governed as the most refined [C] (all wisdom being insipid which does not adapt to the common silliness) – [B] then we must stop dealing with our own affairs and anyone else’s: both public and personal business involves us with such people. The most beautiful motions of our soul are those which are least tense and most natural: and the best of its occupations are the least forced. O God! What good offices does Wisdom do for those whose desires she ranges within their powers! No knowledge is more useful. ‘According as you can’ was the refrain and favourite saying of Socrates, a saying of great substance.5 We must direct our desires and settle them on the things which are easiest and nearest. Is it not an absurd humour for me to be out of harmony with the hundreds of men to whom my destiny joins me and whom I cannot manage without, in order to restrict myself to one or two people who are beyond my ken? Or is it not rather a mad desire for something I cannot get?

  My mild manners, which are the enemies of all sharpness and contentiousness, may easily have freed me from the burden of envy and unfriendliness: never did man give more occasion – I do not say to be loved but certainly not to be hated? But the lack of warmth in my converse has rightly robbed me of the good-will of many, who can be excused for interpreting it differently, in a worse sense.

  Most of all I am able to make and keep exceptional and considered friendships, especially since I seize hungrily upon any acquaintanceship which corresponds to my tastes. I put myself forward and throw myself into them so eagerly that I can hardly fail to make attachments and to leave my mark wherever I go. I have often had a happy experience of this. In commonplace friendships I am rather barren and cold, for it is not natural to me to proceed except under full sail. Besides, the fact that as a young man I was brought to appreciate the delicious savour of one single perfect friendship has genuinely made the others insipid to me and impressed on my faculty of perception that (as one ancient writer said) friendship is a companiable, not a gregarious, beast.6 I also, by nature, find it hard to impart myself by halves, with limitations and with that suspicious vassal-like prudence prescribed to us for our commerce with those multiple and imperfect friendships7 – prescribed in our time above all, when you cannot talk to the world in general except dangerously or falsely.