The Complete Essays

by Michel de Montaigne

  Whether it is art or nature which stamps on us that characteristic of living by what others say, it does us much more harm than good. We cheat ourselves of what is rightly useful to us in order to conform our appearances to the common opinion. We are not so much concerned with what the actual nature of our being is within us, as with how it is perceived by the public. Even wisdom and the good things of the mind seem fruitless to us if we enjoy them by ourselves, if they are not paraded before the approving eyes of others. Men there are whose gold flows unnoticed, swishing through great caverns underground: others spread theirs widely –all sheets of gold-leaf – so that the pennies of some are worth the guineas of others and vice versa, the world judging worth and expenditure by their show.

  All attentive care for riches reeks of covetousness, as do spending when too ordinate and generosity when too contrived. They are not worth anxious attention and worry. Anyone who wants to make his expenditure just right makes it constricted and confined. Keeping and spending are in themselves indifferent: they take on the colour of good or evil depending upon how we apply our wills to them.35

  The other cause which invites me to travel is my incompatibility with our present political morality. So far as the public interest is concerned I could reconcile myself easily enough to that corrupt condition:

  pejoraque sœcula ferri

  Temporibus, quorum sceleri non invenit ipsa

  Nomen, et a nullo posuit natura metallo;

  [worse than that Age of Iron in which crimes lacked a name, an age which Nature could find no metal to describe;]36

  where my own interests are concerned, I cannot. It presses too hard upon me individually. For in my neighbourhood the prolonged licence of our Civil Wars has already hardened us to a form of government so overflowing with evil –

  Quippe ubi fas versum atque nefas

  [Where right and wrong are all confounded]37

  – that It is a miracle that it can endure.

  Armati terram exercent, semperque recentes

  Convectare juvat prœdas et vivere rapto.

  [Men bear arms while ploughing the fields, thinking only of grabbing fresh plunder and living by rapine.]

  In short I learn from our example that, whatever the cost, human society remains cobbled and held together. No matter what position you place them in, men will jostle into heaps and arrange themselves in piles, just as odd objects thrust any-old-how into a sack find their own way of fitting together better than art could ever arrange them. King Philip made just such a pile from the most wicked and depraved men he could find. He built them a city which bore their name and sent them there.38 I reckon that out of their very vices they wove for themselves a political fabric and an advantageous lawful society.

  It is not one deed that I see, not three, not a hundred, but morals, now commonly accepted, so monstrous in their inhumanity and above all in their disloyalty (which are for me the worst species of vice), that my mind cannot conceive of them without horror. Almost as much as with loathing they strike me with amazement. The practice of such remarkable wickedness is as much a sign of vigour and power in the soul as of error and unruliness. Necessity associates men and brings them together: afterwards that fortuitous bond is codified into laws; for there have been societies as ferocious as any that human opinion can spawn which have nevertheless kept their structures as sound and as durable as any which Plato or Aristotle could ever have founded. And indeed such descriptions of fictional and artificial polities are ridiculous and silly when it comes to putting them into practice.39 All those solemn long debates about the best form of society and the laws most suitable for bonding us together are appropriate only for exercising our minds. Among our arts disciplines there are several subjects, the essence of which consists in disputing and arguing and which, apart from that, have no existence.

  Such political theories might be applied in some new-made world, but we have to take men already fashioned and bound to particular customs: we are not begetting them anew like Pyrrha and Cadmus.40 We may have the right to use any means to arrange them and to set them up afresh, but we can hardly ever wrench them out of their acquired bent without destroying everything. Solon was asked whether he had drawn up the very best laws which he could for the Athenians: ‘Yes, indeed’; he replied, ‘the best that they would accept.’41

  [C] Varro pleaded a similar excuse: if he had to write on religion as something new he would tell us what he believed, but since it is already fashioned and accepted, he will talk about it following custom rather than its nature.

  [B] Not as a matter of opinion but of truth, the best and most excellent polity for each nation is the one under which it has been sustained. Its form and its essential advantages depend upon custom. It is easy for us to be displeased with its present condition; I nevertheless hold that to yearn for an oligarchy in a democracy or for another form of government in a monarchy is wrong and insane.

  Ayme l’estat tel que tu le vois estre:

  S’il est royal, ayme la royauté;

  S’il est de peu, ou bien communauté,

  Ayme l’aussi, car Dieu t’y a faict naistre.

  [Love the constitution of your State as you find it; if a kingdom, love kingship; if the rule of the few or of the many, love them too: for God caused you to be born under it.]

  Those verses are by that good man Monsieur de Pibrac42 whom we have just lost, a man of so noble a mind, so sound opinions, so gentle in his ways. His loss, and that of Monsieur de Foix which we suffered at the same time, are losses which matter to our Crown. I do not know whether there remains in France another pair of gentlemen who, for integrity and ability, could take the place of those two Gascons as counsellors to our Kings. Their souls were beautiful in different ways, each, in a time like ours, not only beautiful but rare in its own form. But whoever lodged in this age souls so unsuited to our corruption and so disproportionate to our tempestuous times?

  Nothing crushes. State save novelty. Change alone provides the mould for injustice and tyranny. When some part works loose we can prop it up; we can resist being swept away from our original principles by the corruption and degradation natural to all things. But to undertake to recast such a huge [C] lump, [B] to shift43 the foundations of so great an edifice, is a task for those [C] for whom cleaning means effacing, [B] who seek to emend individual defects by universal disorder and to cure illnesses by death, [C] ‘non tam commutandarum quam evertendarum rerum cupidi’ [yearning not so much to change as to overthrow the constitution].44

  [B] The world is not good at curing itself: it is so impatient of pressure that it can think of nothing but breaking loose from it without counting the cost. We know from hundreds of examples that it normally cures itself at the expense of itself. To throw off the burden of a present evil is no cure unless the general condition is improved. [C] The surgeon’s aim is not to cause the death of foetid flesh: that is merely the means which lead to the cure. He looks beyond that, to making natural flesh grow back again and to restoring the limb to its proper state. Anyone who proposes merely to remove what is irking him falls short, for good does not necessarily succeed evil. Another evil can succeed it – as befell Caesar’s killers who threw the Republic into such a crisis that they had cause to regret their intervention. The same has happened to many others down to our own times. My own contemporaries here in France could tell you a thing or two about that! All great revolutions convulse the State and cause disorder. Anyone who was aiming straight for a cure, and would reflect about it before anything was done, would soon cool his ardour for setting his hand to it.

  Pacuvius Calavius corrected that defective procedure, so providing a memorable example.45 His fellow-citizens had revolted against their magistrates. He was an important man with great authority in his city of Capua. One day he found the means of locking the Senate in their palace; calling the citizens together in the marketplace he told them that the time had come when they were fully at liberty to take their revenge on the tyrants who had so long
oppressed them. He had those tyrants in his power, disarmed and isolated. His advice was that they should summon them out one at a time by lots, decide what should be done to each of them and immediately carry out the sentence, provided that they should at the same time decide to put some honourable man in the place of the man they had condemned, so that the office should not remain unfilled. No sooner had they heard the name of the first Senator than there arose shouts of universal disapproval. ‘Yes, I can see,’ said Pacuvius, ‘that we shall have to get rid of that one. he is a wicked man. Let us put a good man in his place.’ An immediate silence fell, everyone being embarrassed over whom to choose. When the first man was rash enough to name his choice there was an even greater consensus of voices yelling out a hundred defects, and just causes for rejecting him. As those opposing humours became inflamed, the second and third senators fared even worse, with as much discord over the elections as agreement over the rejections. Having uselessly exhausted themselves in this quarrel they gradually began to slip this way and that out of the meeting, each going off convinced in his mind that an older, better-known evil is more bearable than a new and untried one. [B] I see we are in pitiful disarray – for what have we not done?

  Eheu cicatricum et sceleris pudet,

  Fratrumque: quid nos dura refugimus

  Ætas? quid intactum nefasti

  Liquimus? unde manus Juventus

  Metu Deorum continuit? quibus

  Pepercit aris?

  [We are alas disgraced by scars and crimes and fratricide. In this cruel age what atrocities have we not committed? Have our young men ever stayed their hand for fear of the gods? What altar have they spared?]46

  Yet I do not immediately conclude that

  ipsa si velit salus,

  Servare prorsus non potest hanc familiam.

  [even the goddess Deliverance could not save this family if she tried.]

  For all that, we may perhaps not yet have reached our own final period. The preservation of states is probably something which surpasses our understanding. [C] As Plato says, civic polities are strong, and difficult to break asunder.47 They can endure mortal illnesses in their guts and survive the injury of unjust laws, despite tyranny and despite the immorality and ignorance of their governors and the seditious licence of their peoples. [B] In all our misfortunes we compare ourselves with whatever is above us, looking towards those who are better off. Let us take our measure from what is below: there is no one so ill-fated as not to find hundreds of examples to console him. [C] Our crime is to be ever less willing to see people get ahead of us than trailing behind us. [B] Yet Solon48 said that if you were to gather all ills into a pile, there is nobody who would not rather bear away from that pile the ills he now has than to arrange to divide them equally between all other men, each taking his fair share.

  Our polity is sick: yet some have been sicker still without dying. The gods use us for games of tennis, knocking us about in numerous ways.

  Enimvero Dii nos homines quasi pilas habent.

  [To the gods we are indeed like balls to play with.]49

  The stars fatally decreed that the Roman State should be the example of what they can achieve in this category, comprising every sort of fortune which can befall a State, all that order can do to it and chaos, every chance and mischance. Seeing the shocks and revolutions which shook it and which it survived, what State should despair of its condition? If the well-being of. State depends upon the extent of its dominions – which I in no wise accept, [C] liking as I do what Isocrates taught Nicocles, not to envy rulers who held sway over wide dominions but those who know how to look after those which they have inherited50 – [B] then Rome was never more flourishing than when its malady was greatest. You can scarcely recognize the ghost of a polity under the first few emperors: it was the densest and most dreadful confusion that man can conceive. Yet Rome endured it and survived it, preserving, not one single kingdom driven back to its frontiers, but such a great number of peoples, so diverse, so far scattered, so disaffected, so chaotically governed and so unjustly conquered.

  Nec gentibus ullis

  Commodat in populum terrœ pelagique potentem,

  lnvidiam fortuna suam.

  [Fortune allows no nation to pay off some private score against a people who rule both land and sea.]51

  All that totters does not collapse. More than one nail holds up the framework of so mighty a structure. Its very antiquity can hold it up, like old buildings which, without cement or cladding, are propped up by their own mass:

  nec jam validis radicibus hœrens,

  Pondere tuta suo est.

  [No longer does it cling to the earth with its mighty roots: it is saved by its own weight.]

  Besides it is not good practice to reconnoitre only your flank and trench: to judge the security of a fort you must note where the enemy can break through and what is the condition of your attackers. Few ships founder by their own weight without outside violence.

  Now let us gaze all round us: all about us is collapsing; take all the great States which we know, in Christendom and elsewhere, and look at them: you will find a manifest threat of change and collapse:

  Et sua sunt illis incommoda, parque per omnes

  Tempestas.

  [They too have their misfortunes and a similar tempest threatening them all.]52

  The astrologers have an easy time warning us as they do of great changes and mutations soon to come; what they foretell is present and palpable: no need to turn to the heavens for that! We should not only derive consolation from this universal fellowship in evil and menace: we should derive some hope that our State will endure, since in nature, when everything falls in unison, nothing falls. Universal illness means individual health. Uniformity is a quality hostile to disintegration. Personally I am not reduced to despair and it seems to me that there are ways of saving us:

  Deus hœc fortasse benigna

  Reducet in sedem vice.

  [Perhaps God of his kindness will restore things to their former state.]53

  Who knows whether God’s will may not be that the same should happen to us as to bodies which are purged and restored to a better state by those long and grievous maladies which bring to them a fuller purer health than what they took away?

  What depresses me most is that when I run through the symptoms of our malady I find as many natural ones and as many sent by the heavens and proper to that malady as ones attributable to our disorder and unwisdom. [C] It seems that the very stars ordain that we have lasted beyond the normal limits. And what also depresses me is that the most immediate evil which threatens us is not change within the whole solid lump, but our ultimate dread: disintegration and tearing asunder.

  [B] In these ravings of mine, what I fear is that my treacherous memory should make me inadvertently record the same thing twice. I hate going over my writings and only unwillingly probe a topic again once it has got away. I have no freshly learned doctrines; these are my normal ideas. Having doubtless conceived them a hundred times I am afraid that I may have mentioned them already. Repetition is always a bore, even if it were in Homer, but it is disastrous in works which only make a superficial and passing impression. I hate persistent admonition even when it serves a purpose as in Seneca, [C] and I dislike the practice of the Stoic School of repeating copiously and at length, for each individual subject, the principles and postulates which apply over all, ever citing afresh their general arguments and universal reasons.

  [B] My memory is growing cruelly worse every day:

  Pocula Lethœos ut si ducentia somnos

  Arente fauce traxerim.

  [As though my parched throat had drunk long draughts of the forgetful waters of Lethe.]54

  Now – for thank God nothing has gone wrong up till now – whereas others seek time and occasion to think over what they have to say, I avoid preparation for fear of assuming an obligation from which I then have to extricate myself. I get lost when I am under an obligation, as I do when I depend on an instrumen
t as feeble as my memory.

  I never read the following account without being struck by a proper and natural resentment. Lyncestes was accused of conspiring against Alexander. On the day that he was brought to appear before the army, as was customary, to be heard in his defence, he, having learned off by heart a prepared speech, stammered out a few hesitant words. As he became more and more confused, fumbling and struggling with his memory, he was suddenly struck dead by blows from the pikes of the nearest soldiers who believed he had convicted himself. His dazed silence served them as a confession. Since he had time in prison to prepare himself, it was not his memory that was defective, they thought, but a case of guilt bridling his tongue and making him so feeble.55 What a good argument! Even when you merely aim to speak well you can be dazed by the place, the audience and their expectations. What can happen when you have to make an harangue on which your life depends!

  For me the very fact of being tied down to what I have to say is enough to make me forget it. Once I have wholly committed and entrusted myself to my memory, I lean on it so heavily that I overwhelm it and it becomes afraid of its burden. As long as I rely upon it I lose control of myself, so much so that my very coherence is assayed. There was one day when I was hard put it to hide the servitude in which I was entangled, whereas my intention is always to suggest a deep indifference when speaking, making apparently fortuitous and unprepared gestures arising from the actual circumstances, preferring to say nothing at all of consequence rather than to show that I have come prepared to make a fine speech – something especially unbecoming in a man like me, a professed soldier, [C] and too much of an obligation for one who cannot retain much: preparation arouses greater hopes than it can satisfy. You often stupidly don your doublet, only to leap no better than in your smock. ‘Nihil est his qui placere volunt tam adversarium quam expectatio.’ [Nothing is more adverse to those who would please than aroused expectation.]56