picture seems raised and embossed to the
sight, in the handling it seems flat to the
touch: shall we say that musk, which de-
lights the smell and is offensive to the taste,
is agreeable or no? There are herbs and
unguents proper for one part of the body
that are hurtful to another; honey is pleasant
to the taste, but not pleasant to the sight.
Those rings which are cut in the form of
feathers, and which they call in device pennes
sans fin, the eye cannot determine their size,



MONTAIGNE 279

or help being deceived by the imagination
that on one side they are not larger, and on
the other side become gradually narrower,
and this even when you have them round
the finger; yet when the touch comes to test
them, it finds them of equal size and alike
throughout. They who, to assist their lust,
were wont in ancient times to make use of
magnifying glasses to represent the members
they were to employ larger than they were,
and by ocular tumidity to please themselves
the more: to which of the two senses did
they give the prize, whether to the sight, that
represented the members as large and great
as they would desire, or to the touch, which
presented them little and contemptible? Are
they our senses that supply the subject with
these different conditions, and have the sub-
jects themselves nevertheless but one? as we
see in the bread we eat, it is nothing but
bread, but by being eaten it becomes bones,
blood, flesh, hair, and nails:

**As meats diffused through all the mem-
bers lose their former nature, and become a
new substance;"



280 MONTAIGNE

the humidity sucked up by the root of a tree,
becomes trunk, leaf, and fruit; and the air,
being but one, is modulated in a trumpet to
a thousand sorts of sounds: are they our
senses, I would fain know, that in like man-
ner form these subjects into so many divers
qualities, or have they them really such in
themselves; and, in the face of this doubt,
what can we determine of their true essence!
Moreover, since the accidents of disease, de-
lirium, or sleep make things appear other-
wise to us than they do to the healthful, the
sane, and those that are awake, is it not likely
that our right posture of health and under-
standing, and our natural humors, have also
wherewith to give a being to things that have
relation to their own condition, and to ac-
commodate them to themselves, as well as
when these humors are disordered; and our
health as capable of giving them its aspect as
sickness? Why has not the temperate a cer-
tain form of objects relative to it, as well as
the intemperate; and why may it not as well
stamp it with its own character as the other?
He whose mouth is out of taste says the wine
is flat; the healthful man commends its



MONTAIGNE 281

flavor, and the thirsty its briskness. Now,
our condition always accommodating things
to itself, and transforming them according
to itself, we cannot know what things truly
are in themselves, seeing that nothing comes
to us but what is falsified and altered by the
senses. Where the compass, the square, and
the rule are crooked, all proportions drawn
from them, all the buildings erected by those
guides, must of necessity be also defective;
the uncertainty of our senses renders every-
thing uncertain that they produce:

"Denique ut in fabrica, si prava est regula

prima
Normaque si fallax rectis regionibus exit,
Et libella aliqua si ex parti claudicat hilum;
Omnia mendoae fieri atque obstipa necessum

est:
Prava, cubantia, prona, supina, atque absona

tecta:
Jam mere ut quaedam videantur velle,

ruantque
Prodita judiciis fallacibus omnia primis:
Sic igitur ratio tibi rerum prava necesse est,
Falsaque sit, falsis quaecumque a sensibus

ortaest."

And, after all, who can be fit to judge of and



282 MONTAIGNE

to determine these differences? As we say,
in controversies of religion, that we must
have a judge neither inclining to the one side
nor to the other, free from all choice and af-
fection, which cannot be among Christians;
just so it falls out in this; for if he be old,
he cannot judge of the sense of old age, being
himself a party in the case: if young, there
is the same exception; healthful, sick, asleep,
or awake, he is still the same incompetent
judge: we must have some one exempt from
all these qualities, so that without preoccu-
pation of judgment, he may judge of these
propositions as of things indifferent to him;
and, by this rule, we must have a judge that
never was.

To judge of the appearances that we re-
ceive of subjects, we ought to have a judi-
catory instrument; to prove this instrument,
we must have demonstration; to verify this
demonstration, an instrument: and here we
are upon the wheel. Seeing the senses can-
not determine our dispute, being themselves
full of uncertainty, it must be reason that
must do it; but no reason can be established
but upon the foundation of another reason;



MONTAIGNE 283

and so we run back to all infinity. Our fancy
does not apply itself to things that are
foreign, but is conceived by the mediation of
the senses, and the senses do not compre-
hend a foreign subject, but only their own
passions; so that fancy and appearance are
no part of the subject, but only of the pas-
sion and sufferance of the sense; which pas-
sion and subject are several things; where-
fore, whoever judges by appearances, judges
by another thing than the subject. And to
say that the passions of the senses convey to
the soul the quality of external subjects by
resemblance: how can the soul and under-
standing be assured of this resemblance, hav-
ing of itself no communication with the ex-
ternal subjects'? as they who never knew
Socrates cannot, when they see his portrait,
say it is like him. Now, whoever would, not-
withstanding, judge by appearances; if it be
by all, it is impossible, because they hinder
one another by their contrarieties and dis-
crepancies, as we by experience see: shall
some select appearances govern the rest?
You must verify these select by another
select, the second by the third, and, conse-



284 MONTAIGNE

quently, there will never be any end on't.
Finally, there is no constant existence, either
of the objects' being nor of our own: both we
and our judgment, and all mortal things, are
evermore incessantly running and rolling,
and, consequently, nothing certain can be es-
tablished from the one to the other, both the
judging and the judge being in a continual
motion and mutation.

We have no communication with Being, by
reason that all human nature is ever in the
midst, betwixt being bom and dying, giving
but an obscure appearance and shadow, a
weak and uncertain opinion of itself, and if,
peradventure, you fix your thought to appre-
hend your being, it would be like grasping
water; for the more you clutch your hand to
squeeze and hold what is in its own nature
flowing, so much the more you lose what you
would grisp and hold. So, seeing that all
things are subject to pass from one change
to another, reason, that there looks for a real
substance, finds itself deceived, not being
able to apprehend anything that is subsistent
and permanent, because that everything is
either entering into being, and is not yet



MONTAIGNE 285

wholly arrived at it, or begins to die before
it is bom. Plato said, that bodies had never
any existence, not even birth ; conceiving that
Homer had made the ocean and Thetis father
and mother of the gods, to show us that all
things are in a perpetual fluctuation, motion
and variation: the opinion of all the philoso-
phers, as he says, before his time, Parmenides
only excepted, who would not allow things to
have motion, on the power whereof he sets
a mighty value. Pythagoras was of opinion
that all matter was flowing and unstable : the
Stoics, that there is no time present, and that
what we call Present is nothing but the junc-
ture and meeting of the future and the past:
Heraclitus, that never any man entered twice
into the same river: Epicharmus, that he
who borrowed money but an hour ago, does
not owe it now; and that he who was invited
overnight to come the next day to dinner,
comes nevertheless uninvited, considering
that they are no more the same men, but are
become others ; and, ' * that there could not be
found a mortal substance twice in the same
condition: for, by the suddenness and quick-
ness of change, it one while disperses and



286 MONTAIGNE

another reassembles ; it comes and goes, after
such a manner, that what begins to be bom
never arrives to the perfection of being, for-
asmuch as that birth is never finished and
never stays as being at an end, but, from the
seed, is evermore changing and shifting from
one to another: as from human seed is first
made in the mother's womb a formless
embryo, then a formed child, then, in due
course, delivered thence a sucking infant:
afterwards it becomes a boy, then a lad, then
a man, then a middle-aged man, and at last a
decrepid old man ; so that age and subsequent
generation are always destroying and spoil-
ing that which went before:"

"For time changes the nature of the whole
world, and one state gives all things a new
state: nothing remains like itself, but all
things range; nature changes everything."

''And yet we foolishly fear one kind of death,
whereas we have already passed and daily
pass so many others: for not only, as Hera-
clitus said, the death of fire is the generation
of air, and the death of air the generation of
water: but we may still more manifestly dis-



MONTAIGNE 287

cem it in ourselves; the flower of youth dies
and passes away, when age comes on; and
youth is terminated in the flower of age of a
full-grown man, infancy in youth, and the
first age dies in infancy; yesterday died in
to-day, and to-day will die in to-morrow; and
there is nothing that remains in the same
state, or that is always the same thing; and
that it is so let this be the proof; if we are
always one and the same, how comes it then
to pass, that we are now pleased with one
thing, and by and by with another? how
comes it to pass that we love or hate contrary
things, that we praise or condemn them? how
comes it to pass that we have different af-
fections, and no more retain the same senti-
ment in the same thought? For it is not
likely that without mutation we should as-
sume other passions; and that which suffers
mutation does not remain the same, and if
it be not the same, it is not at all: but the
same that the being is, does, like it, unknow-
ingly change and alter, becoming evermore
another from another thing: and, conse-
quently, the natural senses abuse and deceive
themselves, taking that which seems for that



288



MONTAIGNE



which is, for want of well knowing what that
which is, is. But what is it then that tmly
is eternal; that is to say, that never had be-
ginning nor never shall have ending, and to
which time can bring no mutation : for time is
a mobile thing, and that appears as in a
shadow, with a matter evermore flowing and
running, without ever remaining stable and
permanent: and to which those words apper-
tain. Before, and After, Has been, or Shall be :
which, at first sight, evidently show that it
is not a thing that is; and it were a great
folly, and an apparent falsity, to say that
that is, which is not yet in being, or that has
already ceased to be; and as to these words,
Present, Instant, and Now, by which it seems
that we principally support and found the
intelligence of time, reason discovering, pres-
ently destroys it; for it immediately divides
and splits it into the future and past, as, of
necessity, considering it divided in two. The
same happens to nature which is measured, as
to time that measures it: for she has noth-
ing more subsisting and permanent than the
other, but all things are therein either bom,
or being bom, or dying. So that it were a



MONTAIGNE 289

sinful saying to say of God, who is He who
only is, that He was or that He shall be: for
those are terms of declension, passages and
vicissitude of what cannot continue nor re-
main in being: wherefore we are to conclude
that God only is, not according to any
measure of time, but according to an im-
mutable and motionless eternity, not meas-
ured by time, nor subject to any declension;
before whom nothing was, and after whom
nothing shall be, either more new or more re-
cent, but a real Being, that with one sole
Now fills the Forever, and there is nothing
that truly is, but He alone, without one being
able to say. He has been, or shall be, with-
out beginning, and without end.'*

To this so religious conclusion of a pagan,
I shall only add this testimony of one of the
same condition, for the close of this long and
tedious discourse, which would furnish me
with endless matter. *'0 what a vile and
abject thing, ' ' says he, ' * is man, if he do not
raise himself above humanity?" 'Tis a
good word, and a profitable desire, but
equally absurd; for to make the handful
bigger than the hand, and the armful larger



290 MONTAIGNE

than the arm, and to hope to stride further
than our legs can reach, is impossible and
monstrous; or that man should rise above
himself and humanity: for he cannot see but
with his eyes, nor seize but with his power.
He shall rise if God extraordinarily lends him
His hand; he shall rise by abandoning and
renouncing his own proper means, and by
suffering himself to be raised and elevated
by means purely celestial. It belongs to our
Christian faith, and not to his Stoical virtue,
to pretend to that divine and miraculous
metamorphosis.



UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY, LOS ANGELES

COLLEGE LIBRARY

This book is due on the last date stamped below.



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