The Complete Essays

by Michel de Montaigne

  Even he who would not show me gratitude for the gentle and muted calm which accompanied my administration cannot at least deprive me of that share which does belong to me by title of my good fortune. And I am so made that I would as soon be fortunate as wise, owing my success simply to God’s grace rather than to the intervention of my labours. I had proclaimed most eloquently to the whole world my inadequacy for handling such public affairs. And I have something worse than that inadequacy: the fact that I hardly find it displeasing and, given the kind of life that I have sketched out for myself, that I hardly even attempt to cure it.

  Now I was not satisfied, either, with my conduct of affairs: but I did achieve – more or less – what I promised myself I would, and I far exceeded what I promised to those whom I was dealing with, since I prefer to promise rather less than I can do and hope to do. I am sure I left no injury or hatred behind me: as for leaving any regret or desire for me, I do at least know that I never much [C] cared [B] for that.70

  Mene huic confidere monstro,

  Mene salis placidi vultum fluctusque quietos

  Ignorare?

  [Me! put faith in such a monster! Me! not realize that the sea simply happens to be calm and to look peaceful!]71

  11. On the lame

  [The human mind is capable of great self-deception. It can find reasons for anything – even for non-existent phenomena and unreal ‘facts’. Experience is no guard against error: it can be conditioned by prior expectations. That is one of the considerations which led Montaigne never to discuss alleged miracles and to remain unimpressed by judicial certainties.

  For us today Montaigne’s scepticism about the reality of the powers of male and female witches is arresting. (He was not alone in holding such views, though he remained in the minority.) But he is determined to subordinate his own opinions to the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. For him the value of his opinions is that they are opinions and that they are his: they tell us of his forma mentis. But since men’s opinions are never certainties, should we ever bum people on account of them, unless God directly intervenes to order us to do so?]

  [B] In France, some two or three years ago now, they shortened the year by ten days.1 What changes were supposed to result from that reform! It was, quite literally, to move both the heavens and the earth at the same time. Yet nothing has been shoved out of place. My neighbours find that seed-time and harvest, auspicious times for business, as well as ill-omened or propitious days, come at precisely the same second to which they have ever been assigned. The error of our practices was never felt beforehand: no amendment is felt there now, so much uncertainty is there everywhere, so gross is our faculty of perception, [C] so darkened and so blunt.

  [B] They say that this adjustment could have been made less awkwardly by following the example of Augustus and omitting the extra day over a period of several leap-years – it is a source of trouble and confusion anyway – until we had paid back the missing time (something which we have not even achieved by this correction: we are still a day or two in arrears). By this means we could also have provided for the future, declaring that after a specified number of years had rolled by that extra day would be banished for ever, with the result that our miscalculation from then on could not exceed twenty-four hours.

  Years are the only measure we have for time. The world has been using ‘years’ for many centuries, yet it is a unit which we have never succeeded in standardizing, so that we live in daily uncertainty about the incompatible forms given to it by other nations, and about how they apply them.

  And what if (as some say) the heavens as they grow old are contracting downwards towards us, thereby casting our very hours and days into confusion? And what of our months too, since Plutarch says that even in his period the science of the heavens had yet to fix the motions of the moon?2

  A fine position we are in to keep chronicles of past events!

  I was recently letting my mind range wildly (as I often do) over our human reason and what a rambling and roving instrument it is. I realize that if you ask people to account for ‘facts’, they usually spend more time finding reasons for them than finding out whether they are true. They ignore the whats and expatiate on the whys. [C] Wiseacres!

  To know causes belongs only to Him who governs things, not to us who are patients of such things and who, without penetrating their origin or essences, have complete enjoyment of them in terms of our own nature. Wine is no more delightful to the man who knows its primary qualities. Quite the reverse: by bringing in pretensions to knowledge the body infringes, and the soul encroaches upon, the rights which both of them have to enjoy the things of this world. To define, to know and to allow belong to professors and schoolmasters: to enjoy and to accept belong to inferiors, subordinates and apprentices.

  Let us get back to that custom of ours.

  [B] They skip over the facts but carefully deduce inferences. They normally begin thus: ‘How does this come about?’ But does it do so? That is what they ought to be asking. Our reason has capacity enough to provide the stuff for a hundred other worlds, and then to discover their principles and construction! It needs neither matter nor foundation; let it run free: it can build as well upon the void as upon the plenum, upon space as upon matter:

  dare pondus idonea fumo.

  [meet to give heaviness even to smoke.]3

  I find that we should be saying virtually all the time, ‘It is not at all like that!’ I would frequently make that reply but I dare not, since folk bellow that it is a dodge produced by ignorance and by weakness of intellect; so I am usually obliged to be a mountebank for the sake of good company, and to discuss trivial subjects and tales which I totally disbelieve. Moreover it is rather rude and aggressive flatly to deny a statement of fact; and (especially in matters where it is difficult to convince others) few people fail to assert that ‘they have seen it themselves’ or to cite witnesses whose authority puts a stop to our contradictions. By following this practice we know the bases and causes of hundreds of things which never were; the world is involved in duels about hundreds of questions where both the for and the against are false: [C] ‘Ita finitima sunt falsa veris, ut in prœcipitem locum non debeat se sapiens committere.’ [The false and the true are in such close proximity that the wise man should not trust himself to so steep a slope.]4 [B] Truth and falsehood are both alike in form of face and have identical stances, tastes and demeanours. We look on them with the same eye. I find that we are not merely slack about guarding ourselves from dupery, but we actually want to fall on its sword. We love to be entangled with vanity, since it corresponds in form to our own being.

  I have seen in my time the birth of several miracles. Even if they are smothered at birth, that does not stop us from predicting the course they would have taken if they had grown up! We only need to get hold of the end of the thread: we then reel off whatever we want. Yet the distance is greater from nothing to the minutest thing in the world than it is from the minutest thing to the biggest. Now when the first people who drank their fill of the original oddity come to spread their tale abroad, they can tell by the opposition which they arouse what it is that others find difficult to accept; they then stop up the chinks with some false piece of oakum. [C] Moreover, ‘insita hominibus libidine alendi de industria rumores’ [by man’s inborn tendency to work hard at feeding rumours]5 we naturally feel embarrassed if what was lent to us we pass on to others without some exorbitant interest of our own. At first the individual error creates the public one: then, in its turn, the public error creates the individual one. [B] And so, as it passes from hand to hand, the whole fabric is padded out and reshaped, so that the most far-off witness is better informed about it than the closest one, and the last to be told more convinced than the first. It is a natural progression. For whoever believes anything reckons that it is a work of charity to convince someone else of it; and to do this he is not at all afraid to add, out of his own invention, whatever his story needs to overcome the resistance and the de
fects which he thinks there are in the other man’s ability to grasp it. I myself am particularly scrupulous about lying and can scarcely be bothered to quote authority for what I say in order to make it believable: yet even I notice that when I get heated about a matter I have in hand, [C] either because of another’s resistance to it or else because of the excitement of the actual telling, [B] I increase the importance of my subject and puff it up by tone of voice, gestures, powerful and vigorous words – and also by stretching it a bit and exaggerating it, not without some damage to native truth. But I do so with the proviso that I immediately give up the attempt for the first man who summons me back and demands the truth, bare and bold, which I then give to him without exaggeration, without bombast and without embroidery. [C] I loud and lively gab, such as mine habitually is, soon flies off into hyperbole.

  [B] There is nothing over which men usually strain harder than when giving free run to their opinions: should the regular means be lacking, we support them by commands, force, fire and sword. It is wretched to be reduced to the point where the best touchstone of truth has become the multitude of believers, at a time when the fools in the crowd are so much more numerous than the wise: [C] ‘quasi vero quidquam sit tam valde quam nil sapere vulgare’ [as though anything whatsoever were more common than lack of wisdom].6‘Sanitatis patrocinium est, insanientium turba.’ [A mob of lunatics now form the authority for sane truth.]

  [B] It is hard to stiffen your judgement against widely held opinions. At first simple folk are convinced by the event itself: it sweeps over them. From them it spreads to the more intelligent folk by the authority of the number and the antiquity of the testimonies. Personally, what I would not believe when one person says it, I would not believe if a hundred times one said it. And I do not judge opinions by their age.

  Not long ago one of our princes, whose excellent natural endowments and lively constitution had been undermined by the gout, allowed himself to be so strongly convinced by the reports which were circulating about the wonderful treatments of a priest who, by means of words and gestures, cured all illnesses, that he made a long journey to go and consult him. By the force of his imagination he convinced his legs for a few hours to feel no pain, so that he made them serve him as they had long since forgotten how to do. If Fortune had allowed some five or six such events to happen one on top of the other, they would have sufficed to give birth to a miracle. Afterwards, there was found such simplemindedness and such little artifice in the inventor of this treatment that he was not judged worthy of any punishment. We would do the same for most such things if we examined them back in their burrows. [C] ‘Miramur ex intervallo fallentia.’ [We are astounded by things which deceive us by their remoteness.]7 [B] Thus does our sight often produce strange visions in the distance which vanish as we draw near. ‘Nunquam ad liquidum fama perducitur.’ [Rumour never stops at what is crystal-clear.]

  It is wonderful how such celebrated opinions are born of such vain beginnings and trivial causes. It is precisely that which makes it hard to inquire into them: for while we are looking for powerful causes and weighty ends worthy of such great fame we lose the real ones: they are so tiny that they escape our view. And indeed for such investigations we need a very wise, diligent and subtle investigator, who is neither partial nor prejudiced.

  To this hour all such miracles and strange happenings hide away when I am about. I have not seen anywhere in the world a prodigy more expressly miraculous than I am. Time and custom condition us to anything strange: nevertheless, the more I haunt myself and know myself the more my misshapenness amazes me and the less I understand myself.

  The right to promulgate and to publish such phenomena is mainly reserved to Fortune. The day before yesterday I was on my way through a village two leagues from home when I found the market-place still hot and excited about a miracle which had just come to grief there. All the neighbourhood had been preoccupied with it for months; the excitement had spread to the neighbouring provinces and great troops of people of all classes came pouring in. One night a local youth had larked about at home, imitating the voice of a ghost; he intended no trickery beyond enjoying the immediate play-acting. He succeeded somewhat beyond his hopes, so, to heighten the farce and thicken the plot, he brought in a village maiden who was absolutely stupid and simple. Eventually there were three of them, all of the same age, all equally stupid. From sermons in people’s homes they progressed to sermons in public, hiding under the altar in church, delivering them only at night and forbidding any lights to be brought in. They started with talk directed towards the conversion of the world and the imminence of the Day of Judgement (for imposture can more readily crouch behind our reverence for the authority of such subjects) and then progressed on to several visions and actions so silly and laughable there is hardly anything more crude in the games of little children. Yet if Fortune had chosen to lend them a little of her favour, who knows what that play-acting might have grown into? Those poor devils are even now in gaol and may easily have to pay the penalty for the public’s gullibility. And who knows whether some judge or other may not revenge his own upon them?

  This incident has been uncovered: we can see clearly into it this time; but in many similar kinds of case which surpass our knowledge I consider that we should suspend our judgement, neither believing nor rejecting. Many of this world’s abuses are engendered – [C] or to put it more rashly, all of this world’s abuses are engendered – [B] by our being schooled to fear to admit our ignorance [C] and because we are required to accept anything which we cannot refute. [B] Everything is proclaimed by injunction and assertion. In Rome, the legal style required that even the testimony of an eye-witness or the sentence of a judge based on his most certain knowledge had to be couched in the formula, ‘It seems to me that…’8

  You make me hate things probable when you thrust them on me as things infallible. I love terms which soften and tone down the rashness of what we put forward, terms such as ‘perhaps’, ‘somewhat’, ‘some’, ‘they say’, ‘I think’ and so on. And if I had had sons to bring up I would have trained their lips to answer with [C] inquiring and undecided [B] expressions such as, ‘What does this mean?’ ‘I do not understand that’, ‘It might be so’, ‘Is that true?’ so that they would have been more likely to retain the manners of an apprentice at sixty than, as boys do, to act like learned doctors at ten. Anyone who wishes to be cured of ignorance must first admit to it: [C] Iris is the daughter of Thaumantis: amazement is the foundation of all philosophy; inquiry, its way of advancing; and ignorance is its end.9

  [B] Yes indeed: there is a kind of ignorance, strong and magnanimous, which in honour and courage is in no wise inferior to knowledge; [C] you need no less knowledge to beget such ignorance than to beget knowledge itself.

  [B] When I was a boy I saw the account of a trial of a strange event printed by Coras, a learned counsel in Toulouse, concerning two men who each passed himself off for the other. What I remember of it (and I remember nothing else) is that it seemed to me at the time that Coras had made the impersonation on the part of the one he deemed guilty to be so miraculous and so far exceeding our own experience and his own as judge, that I found a great deal of boldness in the verdict which condemned the man to be hanged.10 Let us (more frankly and more simply than the judges of the Areopagus, who when they found themselves hemmed in by a case which they could not unravel decreed that the parties should appear before them again a hundred years later) accept for a verdict a formula which declares, ‘The Court does not understand anything whatever about this case.’11

  My local witches go in risk of their lives, depending on the testimony of each new authority who comes and gives substance to their delusions. The Word of God offers us absolutely certain and irrefragable examples of such phenomena,12 but to adapt and apply them to things happening in our own times because we cannot understand what caused them or how they were done needs a greater intelligence than we possess. It may perhaps be the property of that almighty Witness
13 alone to say to us: ‘This is an example of it; so is that; this is not.’ We must believe God – that really is right – but not, for all that, one of ourselves who is amazed by his own narration – necessarily amazed if he is not out of his senses – whether testifying about others or against himself. I am a lumpish fellow and hold somewhat to solid probable things, avoiding those ancient reproaches: ‘Majorent fidem homines adhibent iis quae non intelligunt’ [Men place more trust in whatever they do not understand] and, ‘Cupidine humani ingenii libentius obscura creduntur.’ [There is a desire in the mind of Man which makes it more ready to believe whatever is obscure.]14 I am well aware that folk get angry and forbid me to have any doubts about witches on pain of fearsome retribution. A new form of persuasion! Thanks be to God my credo is not to be managed by thumps from anyone’s fists. Let them bring out the cane for those who maintain that their opinions are wrong; I merely maintain that their opinions are bold and hard to believe, and I condemn a denial as much as they do, though less imperiously. [C] ‘Videantur sane: ne affirmentur modo.’ [Let us grant that things so appear, provided they be not affirmed.]15