The Complete Essays

by Michel de Montaigne

  Besides, by my nature I am neither very suspicious nor distrustful; and that is the truth. I have a strong tendency to find justifications and the kindest interpretation. I judge men according to the common order of Nature; I do not believe in perverted and disnatured tendencies, any more than in portents and miracles, unless I am forced to do so by some major piece of evidence. I am moreover a man inclined to trust myself to Fortune and to allow myself to dash into her arms. Up to the present I have had more reason to congratulate myself on that than to pity myself, and I have found Fortune [C] both better informed and better disposed towards my affairs than I am. [B] There91 have been a few deeds in my life the handling of which could rightly be called difficult or, if you wish, wise. Allow even a third of those to be due to me: but two-thirds, certainly, were abundantly due to her.

  – [C] Where we go wrong, if you ask me, is in not entrusting ourselves enough to Heaven and in expecting more from our own conduct of affairs than rightly belongs to us. That explains why our schemes so often go awry. Heaven is jealous of the scope which we allow to the rights of human wisdom to the prejudice of its own: the more we extend them the more Heaven cuts them back. –

  [B] Those armed men remained mounted in my courtyard, while their leader was with me in my hall; he had not wished his horse to be stabled, saying that he would withdraw as soon as he had news of his men. He saw he was master of the situation and that the moment had come to execute his plan. Subsequently he often told me – for he was not afraid to tell his tale – that what wrenched his treachery from his grasp were my countenance and my frank behaviour. He got back into the saddle; his men, keeping their eyes constantly fixed on him to catch what signal he would give them, were amazed to see him ride out, surrendering his advantage.

  On another occasion, trusting to some truce or other which had just been proclaimed between our forces, I was on the road travelling through some particularly ticklish terrain. As soon as wind of me got about, three or four groups of horsemen set out from different places to trap me. After three days one of them made contact with me and I was charged by fifteen or twenty masked gentlemen92 followed by a wave of mounted bowmen. There I was, captured; having surrendered I was dragged off into the thick of some neighbouring forest, deprived of my horse and luggage, my coffers ransacked, my strong-box seized. Horses and equipment were divided between their new owners. We haggled for some time in that thicket over my ransom, which they had pitched so high that it was obvious that they knew little about me. A great quarrel started between them over whether they would let me live. There were indeed several threatening circumstances which showed what a dangerous situation I was in:

  [C] Tunc animis opus, Aenea, tunc pectore firmo.

  [Now, Aeneas, you need all your courage and a firm mind.]93

  [B] I continued to hold out for the terms of my surrender: that I should give up to them only what they had won by despoiling me (which was not to be despised), with no promise of further ransom. We were there for two or three hours when they set me on a nag unlikely to want to bolt away and committed me, individually, to be brought along under the guard of some fifteen or twenty men armed with harquebuses, while my men were dispersed among other such soldiers, each with orders to escort us as prisoners along different routes. I had already covered the distance of some two or three harquebus shots,

  Jam prece Pollucis, jam Castoris implorata,

  [Having by then prayed to Pollux and implored Castor,]94

  when, all of a sudden, a most unexpected change came upon them. I saw their leader ride over to me, [C] using most gentle words and [B] putting95 himself to the trouble of searching among his troops for my scattered belongings, which, insofar as he could find them, he returned to me, not excluding my strong-box.96 In the end they gave me my best present, my freedom: the rest hardly affected me [C] at the time.

  [B] The true cause of so novel ‘a volte-face, of such second thoughts which derived from no apparent impulsion, of so miraculous a reversal of intent, at such a time and in the course of such an operation which was fully thought through and deliberated upon and which custom had made lawful (for from the outset I openly admitted which side I was on and the road I was taking), I certainly do not really know even now. The most prominent man among them took off his mask and informed me of his name;97 he then told me several times that I owed my liberation to my countenance as well as to my freedom and firmness of speech which made me unworthy of such a misfortune; and he asked me to promise if necessary to return him the compliment.

  It is possible that God in his goodness wished to make use of such trivial means to preserve me. (He protected me again the following day from other and worse [C] ambushes98 [B] which these very men had warned me about.)

  The man in the second of these incidents is still alive to tell the tale: the man in the first was killed a little while ago.

  If my countenance did not vouch for me, if people did not read in my eyes the innocence of my intentions, I would never have endured so long without feud or offence, given my indiscriminate frankness in saying, rightly or wrongly, whatever comes into my mind and in making casual judgements. Such a style may rightly appear discourteous and ill-suited to our manners, but I have never found anyone who considered it abusive or malevolent or who, provided he had it from my own mouth, was stung by my frankness. (Reported words have both a different resonance and a different sense.) Besides I do not hate anybody; and I am such a coward about hurting people that I cannot do it even to serve a rational end: when circumstances have required me to pass sentences on criminals I have preferred not to enforce justice; [C] ‘Ut magis peccari nolim quam satis animi ad vindicanda peccata habeam.’ [I wish the only crimes committed were those which I really had the heart to punish.]99 Aristotle was reproached with being too merciful to a wicked man. ‘True,’ he said. ‘But I was merciful to the man not to the wickedness.’100

  Judgements normally inflame themselves towards revenge out of horror for the crime. That is precisely what tempers mine: my horror for the first murder makes me frightened of committing a second, and my loathing for the original act of cruelty makes me loathe to imitate it. [B] I am only a [C] Jack [B] of Clubs,101 but you can apply to me what was said of Charillus King of Sparta: ‘He cannot be good: he is not bad to the wicked.’ Or (since Plutarch presents it, as he does hundreds of other things, in two opposite and contrasting manners) you can put it thus: ‘He must be good: he is good even to the wicked.’102

  When the deeds are not illegal, and those who do them dislike them, I am loath to act against them: so too if the deeds are illegal, and those who do them delight in them, then (to tell the truth) I am not over-scrupulous when acting against them.

  13. On experience

  [The end of Montaigne’s quest. See the Introduction, pp. xliv ff.]

  [B] No desire is more natural than the desire for knowledge.1 We assay all the means that can lead us to it. When reason fails us we make use of experience –

  [C] Per varios usus artem experientia fecit:

  Exemplo monstrante viam.

  [By repeated practice, and with example showing the way, experience constructs an art.]2

  Experience is a weaker and [C] less dignified means: [B] but truth3 is so great a matter that we must not disdain any method which leads us to it. Reason has so many forms that we do not know which to resort to: experience has no fewer. The induction which we wish to draw from the [C] likeness [B] between events is unsure since they all show unlikenesses.4 When collating objects no quality is so universal as diversity and variety.5 As the most explicit example of likeness the Greeks, Latins and we ourselves allude to that of eggs, yet there was a man of Delphi among others who recognized the signs of difference between eggs and never mistook one for another;6 [C] when there were several hens he could tell which egg came from which. [B] Of itself, unlikeness obtrudes into anything we make. No art can achieve likeness. Neither Perrozet nor anyone else can so carefully blanch and polish the backs of his
playing-cards without at least some players being able to tell them apart simply by watching them pass through another player’s hands. Likeness does not make things ‘one’ as much as unlikeness makes them ‘other’: [C] Nature has bound herself to make nothing ‘other’ which is not unlike.

  [B] That is why I am not pleased by the opinion of that fellow who sought to rein in the authority of the judges with his great many laws, ‘cutting their slices for them’.7 He was quite unaware that there is as much scope and freedom in interpreting laws as in making them. (And those who believe that they can assuage our quarrels and put a stop to them by referring us to the express words of the Bible cannot be serious: our minds do not find the field any less vast when examining the meanings of others than when formulating our own – as though there were less animus and virulence in glossing than inventing!)

  We can see how wrong that fellow was: in France we have more laws than all the rest of the world put together – more than would be required to make rules for all those worlds of Epicurus; [C] ‘ut olim flagitiis, sic nunc legibus laboramus’ [we were once distressed by crimes: now, by laws].8 [B] And, even then, we have left so much to the discretion and opinion of our judges that never was there liberty so licentious and powerful. What have our legislators gained by isolating a hundred thousand categories and specific circumstances, and then making a hundred thousand laws apply to them? That number bears no relationship to the infinite variations in the things which humans do. The multiplicity of our human inventions will never attain to the diversity of our cases. Add a hundred times more: but never will it happen that even one of all the many thousands of cases which you have already isolated and codified will ever meet one future case to which it can be matched and compared so exactly that some detail or some other specific item does not require a specific judgement. There is hardly any relation between our actions (which are perpetually changing) and fixed unchanging laws.

  The most desirable laws are those which are fewest, simplest and most general. I think moreover that it would be better to have none at all than to have them in such profusion as we do now. Nature always gives us happier laws than those we give ourselves. Witness that Golden Age portrayed by the poets9 and the circumstances in which we see those peoples live who have no other laws. There is a nation who take as the judge of their disputes the first traveller who comes journeying across their mountains; another which chooses one of their number on market-days and he judges their cases there and then.10 Where would be the danger if the wisest men among us were to decide our cases for us according to the details which they have seen with their own eyes, without being bound by case-law or by established precedent? For every foot its proper shoe.

  When King Ferdinand sent colonies of immigrants to the Indies he made the wise stipulation that no one should be included who had studied jurisprudence, lest lawsuits should pullulate in the New World – law being of its nature a branch of learning subject to faction and altercation: he judged with Plato that to furnish a country with lawyers and doctors is a bad action.11

  Why is it that our tongue, so simple for other purposes, becomes obscure and unintelligible in wills and contracts? Why is it that a man who expresses himself with clarity in anything else that he says or writes cannot find any means of making declarations in such matters which do not sink into contradictions and obscurity? Is it not that the ‘princes’ of that art,12 striving with a peculiar application to select traditional terms and to use technical language, have so weighed every syllable and perused so minutely every species of conjunction that they end up entangled and bogged down in an infinitude of grammatical functions and tiny sub-clauses which defy all rule and order and any definite interpretation? [C] ‘Confusum est quidquid usque in pulverem sectum est.’ [Cut anything into tiny pieces and it all becomes a mass of confusion.]13

  [B] Have you ever seen children making assays at arranging a pile of quicksilver into a set number of segments? The more they press it and knead it and try to make it do what they want the more they exasperate the taste for liberty in that noble metal: it resists their art and proceeds to scatter and break down into innumerable tiny parts. It is just the same here: for by subdividing those subtle statements lawyers teach people to increase matters of doubt; they start us off extending and varying our difficulties, stretching them out and spreading them about. By sowing doubts and then pruning them back they make the world produce abundant crops of uncertainties and quarrels, [C] just as the soil is made more fertile when it is broken up and deeply dug: ‘difficultatem facit doctrina’ [it is learning which creates the difficulty].14

  [B] We have doubts on reading Ulpian: our doubts are increased by Bartolo and Baldus.15 The traces of that countless diversity of opinion should have been obliterated, not used as ornaments or stuffed into the heads of posterity. All I can say is that you can feel from experience that so many interpretations dissipate the truth and break it up. Aristotle wrote to be understood: if he could not manage it, still less will a less able man (or a third party) manage to do better than Aristotle, who was treating his own concepts. By steeping our material we macerate it and stretch it. Out of one subject we make a thousand and sink into Epicurus’ infinitude of atoms by proliferation and subdivision. Never did two men ever judge identically about anything, and it is impossible to find two opinions which are exactly alike, not only in different men but in the same men at different times. I normally find matter for doubt in what the gloss has not condescended to touch upon. Like certain horses I know which miss their footing on a level path, I stumble more easily on the flat.

  Can anyone deny that glosses increase doubts and ignorance, when there can be found no book which men toil over in either divinity or the humanities whose difficulties have been exhausted by exegesis? The hundredth commentator dispatches it to his successor prickling with more difficulties than the first commentator of all had ever found in it. Do we ever agree among ourselves that ‘this book already has enough glosses: from now on there is no more to be said on it?’ That can be best seen from legal quibbling. We give force of law to an infinite number of legal authorities, an infinite number of decisions and just as many interpretations. Yet do we ever find an end to our need to interpret? Can we see any progress or advance towards serenity? Do we need fewer lawyers and judges than when that lump of legality was in its babyhood?

  On the contrary we obscure and bury the meaning: we can no longer discern it except by courtesy of those many closures and palisades. Men fail to recognize the natural sickness of their mind which does nothing but range and ferret about, ceaselessly twisting and contriving and, like our silkworms, becoming entangled in its own works: ‘Mus in pice.’ [A mouse stuck in pitch.]16 It thinks it can make out in the distance some appearance of light, of conceptual truth: but, while it is charging towards it, so many difficulties, so many obstacles and fresh diversions strew its path that they make it dizzy and it loses its way. The mind is not all that different from those dogs in Aesop which, descrying what appeared to be a corpse floating on the sea yet being unable to get at it, set about lapping up the water so as to dry out a path to it, [C] and suffocated themselves.17 And that coincides with what was said about the writings of Heraclitus by Crates: they required a reader to be a good swimmer, so that the weight of his doctrine should not pull him under nor its depth drown him.18

  [B] It is only our individual weakness which makes us satisfied with what has been discovered by others or by ourselves in this hunt for knowledge: an abler man will not be satisfied with it. There is always room for a successor – [C] yes, even for ourselves – [B] and a different way to proceed. There is no end to our inquiries: our end is in the next world.19

  [C] When the mind is satisfied, that is a sign of diminished faculties or weariness. No powerful mind stops within itself: it is always stretching out and exceeding its capacities. It makes sorties which go beyond what it can achieve: it is only half-alive if it is not advancing, pressing forward, getting driven into a corner and c
oming to blows; [B] its inquiries are shapeless and without limits; its nourishment consists in [C] amazement, the hunt and [B] uncertainty,20 as Apollo made clear enough to us by his speaking (as always) ambiguously, obscurely and obliquely, not glutting us but keeping us wondering and occupied.21 It is an irregular activity, never-ending and without pattern or target. Its discoveries excite each other, follow after each other and between them produce more.

  Ainsi voit l’on, en un ruisseau coulant,

  Sans fin l’une eau apres l’autre roulant,

  Et tout de rang, d’un eternel conduict,

  L’une suit l’autre, et l’une l’autre fuyt.

  Par cette-cy celle-là est poussée,

  Et cette-cy par l’autre est devancée:

  Tousjours l’eau va dans l’eau, et tousjours est-ce

  Mesme ruisseau, et toujours eau diverse.

  [Thus do we see in a flowing stream water rolling endlessly on water, ripple upon ripple, as in its unchanging bed water flees and water pursues, the first water driven by what follows and drawn on by what went before, water eternally driving into water – even the same stream with its waters ever-changing.]22

  It is more of a business to interpret the interpretations than to interpret the texts, and there are more books on books than on any other subject: all we do is gloss each other. [C] All is a-swarm with commentaries: of authors there is a dearth. Is not learning to understand the learned the chief and most celebrated thing that we learn nowadays! Is that not the common goal, the ultimate goal, of all our studies?