The Complete Essays

by Michel de Montaigne

  Our opinions graft themselves on to each other. The first serves as stock for the second, the second for a third. And so we climb up, step by step. It thus transpires that the one who has climbed highest often has more honour than he deserves, since he has only climbed one speck higher on the shoulders of his predecessor.

  [B] How often and perhaps stupidly have I extended my book to make it talk about itself: [C] stupidly, if only because I ought to have remembered what I say about other men who do the same: namely that those all-too-pleasant tender glances at their books witness that their hearts are a-tremble with love for them, and that even those contemptuous drubbings with which they belabour them are in fact only the pretty little rebukes of motherly love (following Aristotle for whom praise and dispraise of oneself often spring from the same type of pride).23 For I am not sure that everyone will understand what entitles me to do so: that I must have more freedom in this than others do since I am specifically writing about myself and (as in the case of my other activities) about my writings.

  [B] I note that Luther has left behind in Germany as many – indeed more – discords and disagreements because of doubts about his opinions than he himself ever raised about Holy Scripture.24 Our controversies are verbal ones. I ask what is nature, pleasure, circle or substitution. The question is about words: it is paid in the same coin. – ‘A stone is a body.’ – But if you argue more closely: ‘And what is a body?’ – ‘Substance.’ – ‘And what is substance?’ And so on; you will eventually corner your opponent on the last page of his lexicon. We change one word for another, often for one less known. I know what ‘Man’ is better than I know what is animal, mortal or reasonable.25 In order to satisfy one doubt they give me three; it is a Hydra’s head.26 Socrates asked Meno what virtue is. ‘There is,’ said Meno, ‘the virtue of a man, a woman, a statesman, a private citizen, a boy and an old man.’ That’s a good start,’ said Socrates. ‘We were looking for a single virtue and here is a swarm of them.’27 We give men one question and they hand us back a hive-full.

  Just as no event and no form completely resembles another, neither does any completely differ. [C] What an ingenious medley is Nature’s: if our faces were not alike we could not tell man from beast: if they were not unalike we could not tell man from man.28 [B] All things are connected by some similarity; yet every example limps and any correspondence which we draw from experience is always feeble and imperfect;29 we can nevertheless find some corner or other by which to link our comparisons. And that is how laws serve us: they can be adapted to each one of our concerns by means of some [C] twisted, [B] forced30 or oblique interpretation.

  Since the moral laws which apply to the private duties of all individuals are so difficult to establish (as we see that they are), not surprisingly those laws which govern collections of all those individuals are even more so. Consider the form of justice which has ruled over us: it is a true witness to the imbecility of Man, so full it is of contradiction and error. Wherever we find favouritism or undue severity in our justice – and we can find so much that I doubt whether the Mean between them is to be found as frequently – they constitute diseased organs and corrupt members of the very body and essence of Justice. Some peasants have just rushed in to tell me that they have, at this very moment, left behind in a wood of mine a man with dozens of stab-wounds; he was still breathing and begged them of their mercy for some water and for help to lift him up. They say that they ran away fearing that they might be caught by an officer of the law and (as does happen to those who are found near a man who has been killed) required to explain this incident; that would have ruined them, since they had neither the skill nor the money to prove their innocence. What ought I to have said to them? It is certain that such an act of humanity would have got them into difficulties.

  How many innocent parties have been discovered to have been punished – I mean with no blame attached to their judges? And how many have never been discovered? Here is something which has happened in my time: some men had been condemned to death for murder; the sentence, if not pronounced, was at least settled and determined. At this juncture the judges were advised by the officials of a nearby lower court that they were holding some prisoners who had made a clean confession to that murder and thrown an undeniable light on to the facts. The Court deliberated whether it ought to intervene to postpone the execution of the sentence already given against the first group. The judges considered the novelty of the situation; the precedent it would constitute for granting stays of execution, and the fact that once the sentence had been duly passed according to law they had no powers to change their minds. In short those poor devils were sacrificed to judicial procedures. Philip or somebody provided for a similar absurdity in the following manner.31 He had condemned a man to pay heavy damages to another and the sentence had been pronounced. Some time afterwards the truth was discovered and he realized that he had made an unjust judgement. On one side there were the interests of the case as now proven: on the other, the interests of judicial procedure. To some extent he satisfied both, allowing the sentence to stand while reimbursing from his own resources the expenses of the condemned man. But he was dealing with a reparable situation: those men of mine were irreparably hanged. [C] How many sentences have I seen more criminal than the crime…

  [B] All this recalls to my mind certain opinions of the Ancients: that a man is obliged to do retail wrong if he wants to achieve wholesale right, committing injustices in little things if he wants to achieve justice in great things; that human justice is formed on the analogy of medicine, by which anything which is effective is just and honourable;32 that, as the Stoics held, Nature herself acts against justice in most of her works;33 [C] or, what the Cyrenaics hold, that nothing is just per se, justice being a creation of custom and law; and what the Theodorians hold: that the wise man, if it is useful to him, may justifiably commit larceny, sacrilege and any sort of lechery.34

  [B] It cannot be helped. My stand is that of Alcibiades: never, if I can help it, will I submit to be judged by any man on a capital charge, during which my life or honour depend more on the skill and care of my barrister than on my innocence.35

  I would risk the kind of justice which would take cognizance of good actions as well as bad and give me as much to hope for as to fear: not to be fined is an inadequate reward to bestow on a man who [C] has achieved better than simply doing no wrong. [B] Our justice36 offers us only one of her hands, and her left one at that. No matter who the man may be, the damages are against him. [C] In China (a kingdom whose polity and sciences surpass our own exemplars in many kinds of excellence without having had any contact with them or knowledge of them and whose history teaches me that the world is more abundant and diverse than either the ancients or we ever realized), the officials dispatched by the prince to inspect the condition of his provinces do punish those who act corruptly in their posts but also make ex gratia rewards to those who have behaved above the common norm and beyond the obligations of duty. You appear before them not simply to defend yourself but to gain something, and not simply to receive your pay but to be granted bounties.37

  [B] Thank God no judge has ever addressed me qua judge in any case whatsoever, my own or a third party’s, criminal or civil. No prison has had me inside it, not even to stroll through it. Thinking about it makes the very sight of a prison even from the outside distressing to me. I so hunger after freedom that if anyone were to forbid me access to some corner of the Indies I would to some extent live less at ease. And as long as I can find earth or sky open to me elsewhere I will never remain anywhere cowering in hiding. My God, how badly would I endure the conditions of those many people I know of who, for having had an altercation with our laws, are pinned to one region of this Kingdom, banned from entering our main cities or our courts or from using the public highways. If the laws that I obey were to threaten me only by their finger-tips I would be off like a shot looking for other laws, no matter where they might be. All my petty little wisdom during these civ
il wars of ours is applied to stop laws from interfering with my freedom to come and go.

  Now laws remain respected not because they are just but because they are laws. That is the mystical basis of their authority. They have no other. [C] It serves them well, too. Laws are often made by fools, and even more often by men who fail in equity because they hate equality:38 but always by men, vain authorities who can resolve nothing.

  No person commits crimes more grossly, widely or regularly than do our laws. If anyone obeys them only when they are just, then he fails to obey them for just the reason he must!39 [B] Our French laws, by their chaotic deformity, contribute not a little to the confused way they are applied and the corrupt way in which they are executed. The fact that their authority is so vague and inconsistent to some extent justifies our disobeying them and our faulty interpretation, application and enforcement of them.

  Whatever we may in fact get from experience, such benefit as we derive from other people’s examples will hardly provide us with an elementary education if we make so poor a use of such experience as we have presumably enjoyed ourselves; that is more familiar to us and certainly enough to instruct us in what we need.

  I study myself more than any other subject. That is my metaphysics; that is my physics.40

  Qua Deus hanc mundi temperet arte domum,

  Qua venit exoriens, qua deficit, unde coactis

  Cornibus in plenum menstrua luna redit;

  Unde salo superant venti, quid flamine captet

  Eurus, et in nubes unde perennis aqua?

  [By what artifice God governs this world, our home; where the moon comes from, where she does go and how she does bring her horns together month after month and so grow full; whence the gales spring which rule the salty sea, and what dominion does the South Wind enjoy; whence come those waters which are ever in the clouds?]41

  [C] Sit Ventura dies mundi quœ subruat arces?

  [And will there come a day when our hills shall be made low?]

  [B] Quaerite quos agitat mundi labor.

  [It is for those who are worried by problems about how the world works to inquire into that.]

  I, unconcerned and ignorant within this universe, allow myself to be governed by this world’s general law, which I shall know sufficiently when I feel it. No knowledge of mine will bring it to change its course: it will not take a different road for my sake. It is madness to wish it to; greater madness to be upset by that fact, since such law is, of necessity, unvarying, generic and applied to all. The goodness and sway of the Ruler should purely and utterly free us from any weight of anxiety about His rule. Scientific investigations and inquiries serve merely to feed our curiosity. They have nothing to do with knowledge so sublime: the philosophers are very right to refer us to the laws of Nature, but they pervert them and present Nature’s face too sophistically, painted in colours which are far too exalted, from which arise so many diverse portraits of so uniform a subject. As Nature has furnished us with feet to walk with, so has she furnished us with wisdom to guide us in our lives. That wisdom is not as clever, strong and formal as the one which they have invented, but it is becomingly easy and beneficial; in the case of the man who is lucky enough to know how to use it simply and ordinately (that is, naturally) it does – very well – what the other says it will. The more simply we entrust ourself to Nature the more wisely we do so. Oh what a soft and delightful pillow, and what a sane one on which to rest a well-schooled head, are ignorance and unconcern. [B] I would rather be an expert on me than on [C] Cicero.42

  [B] Were I a good pupil there is enough, I find, in my own experience to make me wise. Whoever recalls to mind his last bout of choler and the excesses to which that fevered passion brought him sees the ugliness of that distemper better than in Aristotle and conceives even more just a loathing for it. Anyone who recalls the ills he has undergone, those which have threatened him and the trivial incidents which have moved him from one condition to another, makes himself thereby ready for future mutations and the exploring of his condition. (Even the life of Caesar is less exemplary for us than our own; a life whether imperial or plebeian is always a life affected by everything that can happen to a man.) We tell ourselves all that we chiefly need: let us listen to it. Is a man not stupid if he remembers having been so often wrong in his judgement yet does not become deeply distrustful of it thereafter?

  When I find that I have been convicted of an erroneous opinion by another’s argument, it is not so much a case of my learning something new he has told me nor how ignorant I was of some particular matter – there is not much profit in that – but of learning of my infirmity in general and of the treacherous ways of my intellect. From that I can reform the whole lump.

  With all my other mistakes I do the same, and I think this rule is of great use to me in my life. I regard neither a class of error nor an example of it as one stone which has made me stumble: I learn to distrust my trot in general and set about improving it. [C] To learn that we have said or done a stupid thing is nothing: we must learn a more ample and important lesson: that we are but blockheads.

  [B] The slips by which my memory so often trips me up precisely when I am most sure of it are not vainly lost: it is no use after that its swearing me oaths and telling me to trust it: I shake my head. The first opposition given to its testimony makes me suspend judgement and I would not dare then to trust it over any weighty matter nor to stand warrant for it when another is involved. Were it not that43 others do even more frequently from lack of integrity what I do from lack of memory, I would on matters of fact as readily accept that truth is to be found on another’s lips not mine.

  If each man closely spied upon the effects and attributes of the passions which have rule over him as I do upon those which hold sway over me, he would see them coming and slow down a little the violence of their assault. They do not always make straight for our throat: there are warnings and degrees:

  Fluctus uti primo cœpit cum albescere ponto,

  Paulatim sese tollit mare, et altius undas

  Erigit, inde imo consurgit ad æthera fundo.

  [At first the gale whips up the foam-topped wavelets, then little by little the sea begins to heave, the billows roll and the sea surges from the deep to the very heavens.]44

  Within me judgement holds the rector’s chair, or at least it anxiously strives to do so. It permits my inclinations to go their own way, including hatred and love (even self-love) without itself being worsened or corrupted. Though it cannot reform those other qualities so as to bring them into harmony with itself, at least it does not let itself be deformed by them: it plays its role apart.

  It must be important to put into effect the counsel that each man should know himself, since that god of light and learning had it placed on the tympanum of his temple as comprising the totality of the advice which he had to give us.45 [C] Plato too says that wisdom is but the executing of that command, and Socrates in Xenophon proves in detail that it is true.46 [B] The difficulties and obscurities of any branch of learning can be perceived only by those who have been able to go into it; for we always need some degree of intelligence to become aware that we do not know: if we are to learn that a door is shut against us we must first give it a shove. [C] From which springs that Platonic paradox: those who know do not have to inquire since they know already: neither do those who do not know, since to find out you need to know what you are inquiring into.47 [B] And so it is with this knowing about oneself: the fact that each man sees himself as satisfactorily analysed and as sufficiently expert on the subject are signs that nobody understands anything whatever about it – [C] as Socrates demonstrates to Euthydemus in Xenophon.48 [B] I who make no other profession but getting to know myself find in me such boundless depths and variety that my apprenticeship bears no other fruit than to make me know how much there remains to learn.

  It is to my inadequacy (so often avowed) that I owe my tendency to moderation, to obeying such beliefs as are laid down for me and a constant cooling and tem
pering of my opinions as well as a loathing for that distressing and combative arrogance which has complete faith and trust in itself: it is a mortal enemy of finding out the truth. Just listen to them acting the professor: the very first idiocies which they put forward are couched in the style by which religion and laws are founded: [C] ‘Nil hoc est turpius quam cognitioni et perceptioni assertionem approbationemque praecurrere.’ [There is nothing more shocking than to see assertion and approval dashing ahead of cognition and perception.]49

  [B] Aristarchus said that in olden days there were scarcely seven wise men to be found in the whole world whereas in his own days there were scarcely seven ignoramuses.50 Have we not more reason to say that than he did? Assertion and stubbornness are express signs of animal-stupidity. This man over here has bitten the ground a hundred times a day: but there he is strutting about crowing ergo, as decided and as sound as before: you would say that some new soul, some new mental vigour has been infused into him, and that he was like that Son of Earth of old who, when thrown down, found fresh resolve and strength:

  cui, cum tetigere parentem,

  Jam defecta vigent renovato robore membra.

  [whose failing limbs, when they touched the earth, his Mother, took on new strength and vigour.]51

  The unteachable, stubborn fool! Does he believe that he assumes a new mind with each new dispute? It is from my own experience that I emphasize human ignorance which is, in my judgement, the most certain faction in the school of the world. Those who will not be convinced of their ignorance by so vain an example as me – or themselves – let them acknowledge it through Socrates. [C] He is the Master of masters; the philosopher Antisthenes said to his pupils, ‘Let us all go to hear Socrates: you and I will all be pupils there.’ And when he was asserting the doctrine of his Stoic school that, to make a life fully happy, virtue sufficed without need of anything else, he added, ‘except the strength of Socrates’.52