The Complete Essays

by Michel de Montaigne

  [B] Ut cibus, in membra atque artus cum diditur omnes,

  Disperit, atque aliam naturam sufficit ex se.

  [Like food, which spreads to all our limbs and joints, destroys itself and produces another substance.]461

  [A] Moisture is sucked up by the roots of a tree: it becomes trunk, leaf and fruit; air is one, but when applied to a trumpet it is diversified into a thousand kinds of sound: is it our senses (I say) which similarly fashion such objects with diverse qualities or do they really have such qualities? Then, given that doubt, what conclusion can we reach about their true essence?

  And then, to go further still: the attributes of illness, madness or sleep make things appear different from what they do to the healthy, the sane and the waking man:462 is it not likely therefore that our rightful state and our natural humours also have attributes which can endow an object with a mode of being corresponding to their own characteristics, making it conform to themselves, just as our disordered humours do? [C] Why should a temperate complexion not endow objects with a form corresponding to itself just as our distempers can, stamping its own imprint upon them?463 On to his wine the queasy man loads tastelessness; the healthy man, a bouquet; the thirsty man, sheer delight.

  [A] Now, since our state makes things correspond to itself and transforms them in conformity with itself, we can no longer claim to know what anything truly is: nothing reaches us except as altered and falsified by our senses. When the compasses, the set-square and the ruler are askew, all the calculations made with them and all the structures raised according to their measurements, are necessarily out of true and ready to collapse.

  The unreliability of our senses renders unreliable everything which they put forward:

  Denique ut in fabrica, si prava est regula prima,

  Normaque si fallax rectis regionibus exit,

  Et libella aliqua si exparte claudicat hilum,

  Omnia mendose fieri atque obstipa necessum est,

  Prava, cubantia, prona, supina, atque absona tecta,

  Jam ruere ut quaedam videantur velle, ruantque

  Prodita judiciis fallacibus omnia primis.

  Hic igitur ratio tibi rerum prava necesse est

  Falsaque sit, falsis quaecumque a sensibus orta est.

  [It is as when a building is erected: if the ruler is false from the outset, or the set-square deceptive and out of true, if the level limps a bit to one side, then the building is necessarily wrong and crooked; it is deformed, pot-bellied, toppling forwards or backwards and quite disjointed; some parts seem about to fall down now: all will fall down soon, betrayed by the original mistakes of calculation; similarly every argument that you base on facts will prove wrong and false, if the facts themselves are based on senses which prove false.]464

  And meanwhile who will be a proper judge of such differences? It is like saying that we could do with a judge who is not bound to either party in our religious strife, who is dispassionate and without prejudice. Among Christians that cannot be.465 The same applies here: if the judge is old, he cannot judge the sense-impressions of old age, since he is a party to the dispute; so too if he is young; so too if he is well; so too if he is unwell, asleep or awake.466 We would need a man exempt from all these qualities, so that, without preconception, he could judge those propositions as matters indifferent to him.

  On this reckoning we would need such a judge as never was.

  We register the appearance of objects; to judge them we need an instrument of judgement; to test the veracity of that instrument we need practical proof; to test that proof we need an instrument. We are going round in circles.467

  The senses themselves being full of uncertainty cannot decide the issue of our dispute. It will have to be Reason, then. But no Reason can be established except by another Reason. We retreat into infinity.468 Our mental faculty of perception is never directly in touch with outside objects – which are perceived via the senses, and the senses do not embrace an outside object but only their own impressions of it; therefore the thought and the appearance are not properties of the object but only the impressions and feelings of the senses. Those impressions and that object are different things. So whoever judges from appearances judges from something quite different from the object itself.

  If you say that these sense-impressions convey the quality of outside objects to our souls by means of resemblances, how can our rational soul make sure that they are resemblances, since it has no direct contact of its own with the outside objects? It is like a man who does not know Socrates; if he sees a portrait of him he cannot say whether it resembles him or not.469

  But supposing, nevertheless, that anyone did wish to judge from appearances, he cannot do so from all of them, since (as we know from experience) they all mutually impede each other because of contradictions and discrepancies. Will he select only some appearances to control the others? But the first one selected will have to be tested for truth against another one selected, and that one against a third: the end will therefore never be reached.470

  To conclude: there is no permanent existence either in our being or in that of objects. We ourselves, our faculty of judgement and all mortal things are flowing and rolling ceaselessly: nothing certain can be established about one from the other, since both judged and judging are ever shifting and changing.471

  ‘We have no communication with Being;472 as human nature is wholly ‘situated, for ever, between birth and death, it shows itself only as a dark ‘shadowy appearance, an unstable weak opinion. And if you should ‘determine to try and grasp what Man’s being is, it would be exactly like ‘trying to hold a fistful of water: the more tightly you squeeze anything the ‘nature of which is always to flow, the more you will lose what you try to ‘retain in your grasp. So, because all things are subject to pass from change ‘to change, Reason is baffled if it looks for a substantial existence in them, ‘since it cannot apprehend a single thing which subsists permanently, ‘because everything is either coming into existence (and so not fully ‘existing yet) or beginning to die before it is born.’ Plato said that bodies never have existence, though they certainly have birth, [C] believing that Homer made Oceanus Father of the Gods and Thetis their Mother, to show that all things are in a state of never-ending inconstancy, change and flux (an opinion, as he says, common to all the philosophers before his time, with the sole exception of Parmenides, who denied that anything has motion – attaching great importance to the force of that idea).473

  [A] Pythagoras taught that all matter is labile and flowing;474 the Stoics, that there is no such thing as the present (which is but the joining and the coupling together of the future and past);475 ‘Heraclitus, that no man ever stepped twice into the same river’ –([B] Epicharmus, that a man who borrowed money in the past does not owe it now, and that a man invited to breakfast yesterday evening turns up this morning uninvited, both having become different people).476 – [A] Heraclitus ‘that no ‘mortal substance can ever be found twice in an identical state because the ‘rapidity and ease of its changes make it constantly disperse and reassemble; ‘it is coming and going, so that whatever begins to be born never achieves ‘perfect existence, since its delivery is never complete and never stops as ‘though it had come to the end; but, ever since the seeds of it were sown, it ‘is continually modifying and changing from one thing to another; just as ‘from the human seed there first springs a shapeless embryo in the mother’s ‘womb, then a human shape, then, once out of the womb, a suckling child, ‘then a boy, then, in due course, a youth, a mature man, an elderly and ‘then a decrepit, aged man, so that each subsequent age to which birth is ‘given is for ever undoing and destroying the previous one.’

  [B] Mutat enim mundi naturam totius aetas,

  Ex alioque alius status excipere omnia debet,

  Nec manet ulla sui similis res: omnia migrant,

  Omnia commutat natura et vertere cogit.

  [For Time changes the nature of all things in the world; each stage must be succeeded by anothe
r, nothing remains as it was; all things depart and Nature modifies all things and compels them to change.]477

  [A] ‘And after that we men stupidly fear one species of death, when we ‘have already passed through so many other deaths and do so still; yet, as ‘Heraclitus said, not only is the death of fire the birth of air, and the death ‘of air the birth of water, but we may see it even more clearly in ourselves: ‘the flower of our life withers and dies into old age; but youth ended in that ‘adult flower, as childhood in youth and as that embryonic stage died into ‘childhood; yesterday dies into today, and this day will die into tomorrow. ‘Nothing lasts; nothing remains forever one.’478

  To prove that this is so: ‘if we remained forever one and the same, how ‘is it that we can delight in one thing now and later in another? How can ‘we each be one if we love or hate contradictory things, first praising them, ‘then condemning them?479 How can we have different emotions, no ‘longer retaining the same sentiment within the same thought? For it is not ‘likely that we can experience different reactions unless we ourselves have ‘changed; but whoever suffers change is no longer the same one: he no ‘longer is. For his being, as such, changes when his being one changes, as each ‘personality ever succeeds another. And, consequently, it is of the nature of ‘our senses to be misled and deceived. Because they do not know what being ‘is, they take appears to be for is.

  ‘What is it then which truly IS? That which is eternal – meaning that ‘which has never been born; which will never have an end; to which Time ‘can never bring any change. For Time is a thing of movement, appearing ‘like a shadow in the eternal flow and flux of matter, never remaining stable ‘or’ permanent;480 to Time belong the words before and after; has been and ‘shall be, words that show at a glance that Time is evidently not a thing ‘which IS. For it would be great silliness and manifest falsehood to say that ‘something IS which has not yet come into being or has already ceased to ‘be.

  ‘With the words “Present”, “This instant”, “Now”, we above all appear ‘to support and stabilize our understanding of Time: but Reason strips it ‘bare and at once destroys it: for Reason straightway cleaves Now into two ‘distinct parts, the future and the past, as needing of necessity to see it thus ‘divided into two parts.

  ‘The same applies to Nature (which is measured) as to Time (which ‘measures her): for there is nothing in Nature, either, which lasts or subsists; ‘in her, all things are either born, being born, or dying.481

  ‘It would therefore be a sin to say He was or He will be of God, who is ‘the only ONE who IS. For those terms are transitions, declensions and ‘vicissitudes in things which cannot endure nor remain in Being.

  ‘From which we must conclude that God alone is: not according to any ‘measure known to Time, but according to an unchanging and immortal ‘eternity, not measured by Time, not subject to any declension; before ‘Whom nothing is, neither will there be anything after Him, nor anything ‘newer or more recent; but ONE, existing in reality, He fills Eternity with a ‘single Now; nothing really IS but He alone; of Him you cannot say He ‘was or He will be: He has no beginning and no end.’482

  To that very religious conclusion of a pagan I would merely add one more word from a witness of the same condition, in order to bring to a close this long and tedious discourse which could furnish me with matter for ever. ‘Oh, what a vile and abject thing is Man,’ he said, ‘if he does not rise above humanity.’483

  [C] A pithy saying; a most useful aspiration, but absurd withal. For [A] to make a fistful bigger than the fist, an armful larger than the arm, or to try and make your stride wider than your legs can stretch, are things monstrous and impossible. Nor may a man mount above himself or above humanity: for he can see only with his own eyes, grip only with his own grasp. He will rise if God proffers him – [C] extraordinarily –[A] His hand; he will rise by abandoning and disavowing his own means, letting himself be raised and pulled up by purely heavenly ones.484

  [C] It is for our Christian faith, not that Stoic virtue of his, to aspire to that holy and miraculous metamorphosis.485

  13. On judging someone else’s death

  [After the Christian climax of ‘An apology for Raymond Sebond’ which stresses that Stoic virtue cannot lead to grace and salvation, we are shown how splendid Cato’s glorious suicide was in human, philosophical terms. But, as the closing words quietly recall, Cato’s self-destruction was actually an act of murder.]

  [A] When we judge the assurance shown by a person as he is dying – and dying is without doubt the most noteworthy action in a man’s life – there is one thing we must always take into account: it is hard for anyone to believe that he himself has reached that point. Few die convinced that their last hour has come; nowhere else does deceiving Hope take up more of our time. She never stops making our ears ring with thoughts such as, ‘Others have been much more ill without dying,’ or, ‘My condition is not as hopeless as they think’; and, if the worst comes to the worst, ‘God has performed plenty of other miracles.’

  This happens because we set too much store by ourselves. It appears to us that the whole universe in some way suffers when we are obliterated and that it feels compassion for our predicament, especially since our perception has been affected and sees things accordingly: as our vision fails we think that it is they which are failing: just as for those travelling by sea the mountains, fields, cities, sky and land all go by at the same speed as they do:1

  [B] Provehimur portu, terræque urbesque recedunt.

  [We sail out of harbour and the land and its cities withdraw.]2

  Who has ever seen an old man who did not praise former times and condemn the present, loading on to the world the weight of his own wretchedness and on to the manners of men his own melancholy!

  Jamque caput quassans grandis suspirat arator,

  Et cum tempora temporibus præsentia confert

  Præteritis, laudat fortunas sæpe parentis,

  Et crepat antiquum genus ut pietate repletum.

  [The grand old ploughman shakes his head, contrasting the past with the present; he constantly praises his father’s good fortune and croaks on about folk in former days being overflowing with piety.]3

  We drag everything along with us.

  [A] And so it follows that we reckon our death to be a great event, something which does not happen lightly nor without solemn consultations among the heavenly bodies: [C] ‘tot circa unum caput tumultuantes deos!’ [all those gods in a tumult over one capital punishment!]4 [A] And the higher we rate our worth the more we think that way. [C] What! Should so much learning be lost, should so much harm be done, without the especial concern of the Fates! Can so rare, so model a soul as mine be killed as cheaply as a useless common one! Is such a life as mine, which is the mainstay of so many others, upon which so many others depend, which has activities giving employment to so many people and which occupies so many offices, to be displaced like a life which has no attachments save one single knot! None of us gives enough thought to his being only one.

  [A] Hence those words addressed by Caesar to the captain of his ship, words running prouder than the sea which threatened him:

  Italiam si, cælo authore, recusas,

  Me pete: sola tibi causa hæc est justa timoris,

  Vectorem non nosse tuum; perrumpe procellas,

  Tutela secure mei.

  [If by Heaven’s command you refuse to sail for Italy, then turn to me: this fear of yours is only justified if you do not know who your passenger is! Battle through those waves. Trust in my protection.]5

  And there is this as well:

  credit jam digna pericula Cæsar

  Fatis esse suis: Tantusque evertere, dixit,

  Me superis labor est, parva quem puppe sedentem

  Tam magno petiere mari

  [Caesar now believed the perils to be worthy of his destiny: ‘Is it so great a labour for the gods to topple me, seeking me out where I sit on a huge sea in a tiny boat!’]6

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p; [B] And there was that mad official belief that, for one whole year, the Sun’s face was in mourning out of grief for Caesar’s death:

  Ille etiam, extincto miseratus Cæsare Romam,

  Cum caput obscura nitidum ferrugine texit;

  [And likewise the Sun itself pitied Rome with Caesar’s light put out, veiling its radiant forehead in purple darkness;]7

  and there are hundreds of others by which this world of ours deceives itself, reckoning that our troubles can bring changes to the face of Heaven [C] and that the heavens’ infinity is passionately concerned with our piddling distinctions. ‘Non tanta coelo societas nobiscum est, ut nostro fato mortalis sit ille quoque siderum fulgor!’ [There is not such a fellowship between the heavens and ourselves that when we are fated to perish the splendour of the stars should perish also!]8

  [A] Now to judge the resolution and constancy of a man who does not believe with certainty that the peril is upon him, even though it is, is not reasonable; it is not enough that he did die with such resolute constancy unless he rightly adopted it to perform that action. It happens that most men stiffen their countenance and their words to acquire a reputation which they still hope to live to enjoy. [C] In all the deaths that I have witnessed, it was Fortune which arranged that countenance, not the man’s designs.

  [A] And even among those who killed themselves in ancient times there is a great distinction to be made between a quick death and one which took time. That cruel Roman Emperor who would say of his prisoners that he wanted them to feel death, would comment, if one of them killed himself while in prison, ‘That one got away!’9 He wished to prolong their dying and to make them feel what it is through torture: