The Complete Essays

by Michel de Montaigne

  I think it less risky to write about the past than the present, since the author has only to account for borrowed truth. Some have invited me to write about contemporary events, reckoning that I see them with eyes less vitiated by passion than others do and that I have a closer view than they, since Fortune has given me access to the various leaders of the contending parties. What they do not say is that I would not inflict such pain upon myself for all the fame of Sallust (being as I am the sworn enemy of binding obligations, continuous toil and perseverance), nor that nothing is so foreign to my mode of writing than extended narration. I have to break off so often from shortness of wind that neither the structure of my works nor their development is worth anything at all; and I have a more-than-childish ignorance of the words and phrases used in the most ordinary affairs. That is why I have undertaken to talk about only what I know how to talk about, fitting the subject-matter to my capacities. Were I to choose a subject where I had to be led, my capacities might prove inadequate to it. They do not say either that, since my freedom is so very free, I could have published judgements which even I would reasonably and readily hold to be unlawful and deserving of punishment. Of his own achievement Plutarch would be the first to admit that if his exempla are wholly and entirely true that is the work of his sources: his own work consisted in making them useful to posterity, presenting them with a splendour which lightens our path towards virtue.

  An ancient account is not like a doctor’s prescription, every item in it being tother or which.

  22. One man’s profit is another man’s loss

  [Montaigne’s principal source in this short chapter is Seneca’s treatise De beneficiis.]

  [A] Demades condemned a fellow Athenian whose trade was to sell funeral requisites on the grounds that he wanted too much profit from it and that this profit could only be made out of the deaths of a great many people.1

  That judgement seems ill-founded since no profit is ever made except at somebody else’s loss: by his reckoning you would have to condemn earnings of every sort. The merchant can only thrive by tempting youth to extravagance; the husbandman, by the high price of grain; the architect, by the collapse of buildings; legal officials, by lawsuits and quarrels between men; the very honorariums and the fees of the clergy are drawn from our deaths and our vices. ‘No doctor derives any pleasure from the good health even of his friends’ (as was said by an ancient author of Greek comedies);2 ‘neither does the soldier from peace in his city’: and so on for all the others. And what is worse, if each of us were to sound our inner depths he would find that most of our desires are born and nurtured at other people’s expense.

  When I reflected on this the thought came to me that Nature here was not belying her general polity, for natural philosophers hold that the birth, nurture and increase of each thing is at the expense and corruption of another.

  Nam quodcunque suis mutatum finibus exit,

  Continuo hoc mors est illius, quod fuit ante.

  [For when anything is changed and sallies forth from its confines, it is at once the death of something which previously existed.]3

  23. On habit: and on never easily changing a traditional law

  [Montaigne called this chapter De la coustume… ‘Custom’ for him has essentially the same sense as θος (ěthos) for Aristotle (which is not our word ēthos but means custom, usage, manners, habit). No one English word now covers all these senses. Here any of the above may be used, especially habit and custom. Similarly law for Montaigne embraces not only legislation but religious and moral traditions.

  ‘On habit’ (or custom) was much expanded in later editions; some of the themes are further developed in II, 12, ‘An apology for Raymond Sebond’. The fresh discovery of new and old cultures overseas reinforced Montaigne’s sceptical conservatism: habit and custom, however arbitrary, may be the cement of society.]

  [A] The power of habit was very well understood, it seems to me, by the man who first forged that tale of a village woman who had grown used to cuddling a calf and carrying it about from the time it was born: she grew so accustomed to doing so that she was able to carry it when a fully grown bull.1 For, in truth, Habit is a violent and treacherous schoolteacher. Gradually and stealthily she slides her authoritative foot into us; then, having by this gentle and humble beginning planted it firmly within us, helped by time she later discloses an angry tyrannous countenance, against which we are no longer allowed even to lift up our eyes.

  At every turn we find habit infringing the rules of Nature: [C] ‘Usus efficacissimus rerum omnium magister.’ [Custom, in all things, is a most effectual schoolmaster.]2 I trust here the Cave in Plato’s Republic.3 [A] I trust the doctors who often yield to the authority of habit the reasonings of their Art; I trust that king who, by means of habit, brought his stomach to draw nourishment from poison,4 and that maiden who, as Albertus relates, accustomed herself to live on spiders. [B] Why, in the new world of the Indies great nations were discovered in widely different climates who lived on spiders; they kept them and fed them, as they also did grasshoppers, ants, lizards and bats: when food was short a toad sold for six crowns. They cook them and serve them up in various sauces. Other peoples were found for whom our meats and viands were deadly poisonous.5 [C] ‘Consuetudinis magna vis est. Pemoctant venatores in nive; in montibus uri se patiuntur. Pugiles coestibus contusi ne ingemiscunt quidem.’ [Great is the power of habit: huntsmen spend nights in the snow and endure sunburn in the mountains; boxers, bruised by their studded gloves, do not even groan.]6

  These examples are from strange lands, but there is nothing strange about them, if only we consider what we assay by experience every day: how habit stuns our senses. There is no need to go in search of what is said about those who dwell near the cataracts of the Nile; nor what the philosophers deduce about the music of the spheres: that those solid material circles rub and lightly play against each other and so cannot fail to produce a wondrous harmony (by the modulations and mutations of which are conducted the revolutions and variations of the dance of the stars) yet none of the creatures in the whole Universe can hear it, loud though it is, since (as in the case of those Egyptians) our sense of hearing has been dulled by the continuity of the sound.7 Blacksmiths, millers and armourers could not put up with the noise impinging upon their ears if they were stunned by it as we are. My scented waistcoat is at first scented for me: if I wear it for three days, only other people notice the scent.

  What is stranger still is that habit can combine and stabilize the effects of its impressions on our senses despite long gaps and intervals: that has been assayed by those who live near belfries. At home I live in a tower where, at daybreak and sundown, a great bell tolls out the Ave Maria every day. My very tower is a-tremble at the din. At first I found it unbearable; a brief time was enough to break me in so that I can now hear it without annoyance and often without even being roused from sleep.

  Plato chided a boy for playing knuckle-bones; he replied, ‘You are chiding me for something unimportant.’ ‘Habit,’ said Plato, ‘is not unimportant.’8 I find that our greatest vices do acquire their bent during our most tender infancy, so that our formation is chiefly in the hands of our wet-nurses. Mothers think their boys are playing when they see them wring the neck of a chicken or find sport in wounding a dog or a cat. Some fathers are so stupid as to think that it augurs well for a martial spirit if they see their son outrageously striking a peasant or a lackey who cannot defend himself, or for cleverness when they see him cheat a playmate by some cunning deceit or a trick. Yet those are the true seeds by which cruelty, tyranny and treachery take root; they germinate there and then shoot up and flourish, thriving in the grip of habit. And it is a most dangerous start to education to make excuses for such low tendencies because of the weakness of childhood or the unimportance of the subject. In the first place, it is Nature speaking, whose voice is then all the more loud and clear for being yet unbroken. Secondly, the ugliness of cheating does not depend on the difference between
money and counters: it depends on the cheating.

  ‘If he cheats over counters, why should he not cheat over money?’ I find it more just to argue that way than the way others do: ‘They are only counters: he would not do that with money.’

  We must carefully teach children to detest vices for what they consist in; we must teach them their natural ugliness, so that they flee them not only in their deeds but in their minds: the very thought of them should be hateful, whatever mask they hide behind.

  I was trained from boyhood always to stride along the open highway and to find it repugnant to introduce cunning and deceit into my childish games. I am well aware that (since we should note that games are not games for children but are to be judged as the most serious things they do) there is no pastime so trivial that I do not bring to it (from an inner, natural and unstudied propensity) an extreme repugnance against cheating. If I am playing cards I treat pennies like double-doubloons, just as much when playing with my wife and daughter (when winning or losing hardly matters to me) as when I am gambling in earnest. Everywhere and in everything my own eyes suffice to keep me to my duty; no eyes watch me more closely: there are none I regard more highly.

  [A] I have recently seen in my home a native of Nantes, a man small and born without arms: he has so fashioned his feet to serve him as hands should do that they have, in truth, half forgotten their natural duties. He calls them his hands moreover; he cuts his food with them, loads a pistol and fires it with them; he threads a needle, sews, writes, doffs his hat, combs his hair, plays cards and plays dice (shaking them as skilfully as anyone else could). I gave him some money (for he earns his living by showing what he can do): he carried it away in his foot, just as we do in our hand. When I was a boy I saw another such who had no hands but wielded a two-handed sword and a halberd by hunching his neck: he tossed them up in the air, caught them again, threw a dagger – and cracked a whip as well as any carter in France.

  But we can discover the effects of habit far better from the impressions which she imprints on our souls, in which she encounters less resistance. Where our judgements and beliefs are concerned, what can she not do? Is there any opinion so [C] bizarre [A] – (and9 I am leaving aside that coarse deceit of religions which, as we can see, has intoxicated so many great nations and so many learned men: since that concern lies beyond human reason a man may be excused if he goes astray over that, whenever he is not by divine favour enlightened above the natural order)10 – but in other opinions, are there any so strange that habit has not planted them and established them by laws, anywhere she likes, at her good pleasure? [C] And that ancient exclamation is totally right: ‘Non pudet physicum, id est speculatorem venatoremque naturæ, ab animis consuetudine imbutis quærere testimonium veritatis!’ [Is it not a disgrace that the natural philosopher, that observer and tracker of Nature, should seek evidence of the truth from minds stupefied by habit!]11

  [B] I reckon that there is no notion, however mad, which can occur to the imagination of men of which we do not meet an example in some public practice or other and which, as a consequence, is not propped up on its foundations by our discursive reason. There are nations where you greet people by turning your backs on them and where you never look at anyone you wish to honour. There are nations where, when the king spits, the court favourite holds out her hand; in another nation the most eminent of those about him stoop down and gather up his faeces in a linen cloth.12

  [C] Let us steal a little room here for a story. A certain French nobleman always used to blow his nose with his fingers, something quite opposed to our customs. Defending his action (and he was famous for his repartee) he asked me why that filthy mucus should be so privileged that we should prepare fine linen to receive it and then, going even further, should wrap it up and carry it carefully about on our persons; that practice ought to excite more loathing and nausea than seeing him simply excrete it (wherever it might be) as we do all our other droppings. I considered that what he said was not totally unreasonable, but habit had prevented me from noticing just that strangeness which we find so hideous in similar customs in another country.

  Miraculous wonders depend on our ignorance of Nature not on the essence of Nature. Our judgement’s power to see things is lulled to sleep once we grow accustomed to anything. The Barbarians are in no wise more of a wonder to us than we are to them, nor with better reason – as anyone would admit if, after running through examples from the New World, he concentrated on his own and then with good sense compared them. Human reason is a dye spread more or less equally through all the opinions and all the manners of us humans, which are infinite in matter and infinite in diversity.

  I now return to the subject. There are peoples [B] where no one but his wife and his children can address the king except through an intermediary: in one and the same country virgins openly display their private parts whilst the married women carefully cover them and hide them; and there is another custom somewhat related to it: in this case chastity is only valued in the service of matrimony: girls can give themselves to whom they wish and, once pregnant, can openly abort themselves with special drugs. Elsewhere, if the bridegroom is, say, a merchant, all the merchants invited to the wedding lie with the bride before he does: the more numerous they are the greater the honour for her and the greater her reputation for staying-power and sexual capacity. The same applies if it is an official who is getting married; the same, too, if it is a nobleman, and so on; but if it is a peasant or anyone of low estate, the duty falls to his lord; and yet they continue to urge strict fidelity during the marriage. There are countries where there are public brothels of men and where men can marry each other; where women accompany their husbands to the wars and play a role not merely in the fighting but in the high command; where not only rings are worn through the nose, lips, cheeks and toes, but heavy golden rods are worn through bosoms and buttocks; where they wipe their fingers when eating on their thighs, on their balls or on the soles of their feet; where children do not inherit, but brothers and nephews do; (elsewhere only nephews do, except for the royal succession;) where, to oversee the community of goods observed there, certain sovereign magistrates have entire control over the cultivation of the land and the distribution of crops, every man according to his need; where they bewail the death of children and rejoice at the death of the elderly; where ten or a dozen men and their wives share the same bed; where wives who lose their husbands by a violent death may remarry but not the others; where womanhood is rated so low that they kill the girls who are born there and buy women from their neighbours when they need them; where husbands can repudiate wives without stating the cause, but wives cannot do so whatever the cause; where husbands can sell their wives if they are barren; where they boil their dead and pound them into a sort of gruel which they then mix with wine and drink down; where the most desirable form of sepulture is to be eaten by dogs or birds; where they believe that the souls of the blessed dwell in pleasant pastures in complete freedom, furnished with all good things (they it is who make the echoes that we hear); where men fight in the water and aim their bows accurately while swimming; where they shrug their shoulders and bow their heads as a sign of subjection, taking off their shoes when they enter the king’s apartments; where the eunuchs who guard the women who are vowed to religion lack noses and lips to make them unlovable and where the priests poke out their eyes to seek the acquaintance of their demons and to consult the oracles; where each makes a god of whatever he likes – the huntsman of a lion or a fox, the fisherman of a particular fish – and make idols of everything that humans do and have done to them (the Sun, Moon and the Earth are their principal gods: their form of oath is to touch the ground whilst looking at the Sun); where they eat fish and flesh raw; [C] where the greatest oath is to swear by the name of a dead man who had a great reputation in that country while touching his tomb;13 where the New Year’s gift sent from the king to his vassal princes is fire: when the ambassador arrives bearing it, the old fires are doused throughout t
he habitation and the people subject to that vassal must each come and bear away new fire for himself upon pain of lèse-majesté; where whenever a king lays down his charge for reasons of devotion (as he often does), his immediate heir is obliged to do the same, the right to rule in the kingdom passing to the third in line; where they change their form of polity as affairs require: they depose their king whenever it pleases them, appointing elders to govern the state and sometimes leaving it in the hands of the general public; where both men and women receive like baptism and are circumcised; where the warrior who manages to present his king with the heads of seven enemies killed in one or more battles is granted nobility; [B] where they live with that opinion, [C] so rare and so uncouth, [B] that souls14 are mortal; where women give birth without groans and without fear; [C] where the women wear copper shin-guards on both their legs; where it is a sign of high breeding to bite the louse that has bitten them and where girls dare not marry until they have asked the king if he wants to take their maidenhead; [B] where greetings consist in putting one finger on the ground and then raising it heavenwards; where it is the men who carry things on their heads and the women who carry them on their shoulders; where the women stand up to piss and the men squat down; where they send each other their blood as an act of affection and burn incense to the men they would honour as they do to their gods; where the forbidden affinities in marriage extend not merely to the fourth degree but to the most distant relationships; where children are suckled for four years and often for twelve, yet where it is held to be fatal to give a child suck on its very first day; where fathers have the responsibility of punishing male children and the mothers the female, quite apart (the punishment consisting in hanging them by the feet over smoke); where they circumcise females; where they eat herbs of every kind, simply rejecting the ones which seem to them to smell badly; where everything is open and where the houses, however fair and opulent they may be, are without doors, windows or strong-boxes, and where thieves are punished twice as severely as elsewhere; where they kill lice as monkeys do, with their teeth and find it horrible to see them crushed between fingernails; where neither hair nor nails are cut for the whole of one’s life; elsewhere they only cut the nails on their right hand, cultivating those on the left as a proof of gentility; [C] where they let all their hair grow on the left of their body and keep all the other side clean-shaven – and in one of the neighbouring provinces they let the hair grow in front and in another behind, shaving the other side; [B] where, in return for money, fathers let guests have sexual enjoyment of their children, and husbands of their wives; where it is honourable to have children by one’s mother, for fathers to have sexual intercourse with their daughters and with their sons, [C] and where, when they gather for a festival, all can lie with each other’s children.