own interest, than of that of our Creator.
But we must trample under foot this foolish
vanity, and briskly and boldly shake the
ridiculous foundations upon which these
false opinions are based. So long as man
shall believe he has any means and power of
himself, he will never acknowledge what he
owes to his Master; his eggs shall always be
chickens, as the saying is; we must therefore



MONTAIGNE 33

strip him to his shirt. Let us see some notable
example of the effect of his philosophy.
Posidonius, being tormented with a disease so
painful as made him writhe his arms and
gnash his teeth, thought he sufficiently
baffled the pain by crying out against it:
' ' Thou dost exercise thy malice to much pur-
pose; I will not confess that thou art an
evil." He is as sensible of the pain as my
lacquey ; but he mightily values himself upon
bridling his tongue at least, and restraining
it within the laws of his sect:

*'It did not belong to him, vaunting in
words, to give way to the thing itself."

Arcesilaus, being ill of the gout, and Car-
neades coming to see him, was returning,
troubled at his condition; the other calling
back and showing him his feet and then his
breast: ''There is nothing come from these
hither, ' ' said he. This has somewhat a better
grace, for he feels himself in pain, and would
be disengaged from it; but his heart, notwith-
standing, is not conquered or enfeebled by it ;
the other stands more obstinately to his
work, but, I fear, rather verbally than really.



34 MONTAIGNE

And Dionysius Heracleotes, afflicted with a
vehement smarting in his eyes, was reduced
to quit these stoical resolutions. But, though
knowledge could in effect do, as they say,
and could blunt the point and dull the edge of
the misfortunes that attend us, what does
she more than what ignorance does more
simply and evidently? The philosopher
Pyrrho, being at sea in very great danger by
reason of a mighty storm, presented nothing
to those who were with him to imitate in this
extremity but the security of a hog they had
on board, that was looking at the tempest
quite unconcerned. Philosophy, when she
has said all she can, refers us at last to the
example of a wrestler or a muleteer, in which
sort of people we commonly observe much
less apprehension of death or sense of pain
and other infirmities, and more endurance,
than ever knowledge furnished any one with
who was not bom to those infirmities, and of
himself prepared for them by a natural habit.
"What is the cause that we make incisions and
cut the tender limbs of an infant, and those
of a horse, more easily than our own, but
ignorance only I How many has mere force



MONTAIGNE 35

of imagination made ill. We often see men
cause themselves to be let blood, purged,
and physicked, to be cured of diseases they
only feel in opinion. When real infirmities
fail us, knowledge lends us hers: that color,
this complexion, portends some catarrhous
defluxion; this hot season threatens us with
a fever: this breach in the lifeline of your
left hand gives you notice of some near and
notable indisposition: and at last it roundly
attacks health itself, saying, this sprightli-
ness and vigor of youth cannot continue in
this posture, there must be blood taken, and
the fever abated, lest it turn to your preju-
dice. Compare the life of a man subject to
such imaginations with that of a laborer who
suffers himself to be led by his natural ap-
petite, measuring things only by the present
sense, without knowledge and without prog-
nostics who is only ill when he is ill;
whereas the other has the stone in his soul
before he has it in his bladder; as if it were
not time enough to suffer evil when it shall
come, he must anticipate it by fancy and run
to meet it. What I say of physic may gen-
erally serve as example in other sciences: and



36 MONTAIGNE

hence is derived that ancient opinion of the
philosophers, who placed the sovereign good
in discerning the weakness of our judgment.
My ignorance affords me as mnch occasion
of hope as of fear; and having no other rule
of my health than that of the examples of
others, and of events I see elsewhere upon
the like occasion, I find of all sorts, and rely
upon the comparisons that are most favor-
able to me. I receive health with open arms,
free, full, and entire, and by so much the more
whet my appetite to enjoy it, by how much it
is at present less ordinary and more rare: so
far am I from troubling its repose and sweet-
ness, with the bitterness of a new and con-
strained manner of living. Beasts sufficiently
show us how much the agitation of the soul
brings infirmities and diseases upon us. That
which is told us of the people of Brazil, that
they never die but of old age, is attributed
to the serenity and tranquillity of the air
they live in ; but I attribute it to the serenity
and tranquillity of their soul, free from all
passion, thought, or employments, continu-
ous or unpleasing, as people that pass over
their lives in an admirable simplicity and



MONTAIGNE 37

ignorance, without letters, without law, with-
out king, or any manner of religion. Whence
comes this which we find by experience, that
the coarsest and most rough-hewn clowns
are the most able and the most to be desired
in amorous performances, and that the love
of a muleteer often renders itself more ac-
ceptable than that of a gentleman, if it be not
that the agitation of the soul in the latter
disturbs his corporal ability, dissolves and
tires it, as it also troubles and tires itself!
What more usually puts the soul beside her-
self, and throws her into madness, than her
own promptness, vigor, and agility in short,
her own proper force? Of what is the most
subtle folly made, but of the most subtle wis-
dom? As great friendships spring from great
enmities, and vigorous healths from mortal
diseases: so from the rare and quick agita-
tions of our souls proceed the most wonderful
and wildest frenzies; *tis but a half turn of
the toe from the one to the other:



"Great wits to madness, sure, are near

allied.
And thin partitions do their bounds divide. ' ^



38 MONTAIGNE

La the actions of madmen, we see how nearly
madness resembles the most vigorous opera-
tions of the soul. Who does not know how in-
discernible the difference is betwixt madness
and the gay flights of a sprightly soul, and
the effects of a supreme and extraordinary
virtue? Plato says, that melancholic persons
are the most capable of discipline and the
most excellent ; nor, indeed, is there in any so
great a propension to madness. Infinite wits
are ruined by their own proper force
and suppleness: to what a condition,
through his own excitable fancy, has
one of the most judicious, ingenious,
and best-informed to the ancient, and
true poesy, of any of the Italian poets lately
fallen! Has he not great obligation to this
fatal vivacity, to this light that has blinded
him? to this exact and subtle apprehension
of reason, that has put him beside his reason,
to his close and laborious search after the
sciences, that has reduced him to stupidity, to
that rare aptitude to the exercises of the soul,
that has rendered him without exercise
and without soul. I had more chagrin,
if possible, than compassion, to see him at



MONTAIGNE 39

Ferrara in so pitiful a condition surviving
himself, forgetting both himself and his
works, which, without his knowledge, though
before his face, have been published, de-
formed and incorrect.

Would you have a man sound, would you
have him regular, and in a steady and secure
posture? muffle him up in the shades of
stupidity and sloth. We must be made beasts
to be made wise, and hoodwinked before we
can govern ourselves. And if one shall tell
me that the advantage of having a cold and
blunted sense of pain and other evils, brings
this disadvantage along with it, to render us,
consequently, less eager and sensible also in
the fruition of goods and pleasures; this is
true: but the misery of our condition is such
that we have not so much to enjoy as to avoid,
and that the extremest pleasure does not af-
fect us to the degree that a light grief does :

"Men are less sensitive to pleasure than to
pain. ' *

We are not so sensible of the most perfect
health, as we are of the least sickness:

* * The body is vexed with a little sting that



40 MONTAIGNE

scarcely penetrates the skin, while the most
perfect health is not perceived. This only
pleases me, that neither side nor foot is
plagued; except these, scarce any one can
tell, whether he's in health or no."

Our well-being is nothing but the privation
of ill-being; and this is the reason why that
sect of philosophers which sets the greatest
value upon pleasure, has fixed it chiefly in
insensibility of pain. To be free from ill is
the greatest good that man can hope for, as
Ennius says:

*'Nimium boni est, cui nihil est mali;"

for that very tickling and sting which are in
certain pleasures, and that seem to raise us
above simple health and insensibility: that
active, moving, and, I know not how, itching
and biting pleasure, even that very pleasure
itself looks to nothing but apathy as its
mark. The lust, that carries us headlong to
women's embraces, is directed to no other
end but only to cure the torment of our
ardent and furious desires, and only requires
to be glutted and laid at rest, and delivered
from that fever; and so of the rest. I say



MONTAIGNE 41

then that, if simplicity conducts us to a state
free from evil, it leads us to a very happy
one, according to our condition. And yet we
are not to imagine it so leaden an insensi-
bility as to be totally without sense: for
Grantor had very good reason to controvert
the insensibility of Epicurus, if founded so
deep that the very first attack and birth of
evils were not to be perceived. **I do not
approve such an insensibility as is neither
possible nor to be desired: I am well con-
tent not to be sick; but, if I am, I would
know that I am so; and if a caustic be ap-
plied or incisions made in any part, I would
feel them." In truth, whoever would take
away the knowledge and sense of evil, would,
at the same time, eradicate the sense of
pleasure, and, in short, annihilate man him-
self:

"An insensibility, that is not to be pur-
chased but at the price of the humanity of
the soul and of stupidity in the body.'*

Evil appertains to man in its turn; neither is
pain always to be avoided, nor pleasure
always pursued.



42 MONTAIGNE

Tis a great advantage to the honor of
ignorance that knowledge itself throws us
into its arms when she ifinds herself puzzled
to fortify us against the weight of evils; she
is constrained to come to this composition,
to give us the reins, and permit us to fly into
the lap of the other, Mid to shelter ourselves
under her protection from the strokes and
injuries of fortune. For what else is her
meaning when she instructs us to divert our
thoughts from the ills that press upon us,
and entertain them with the meditation of
pleasures past and gone; to comfort ourselves
in present ajfflictions with the remembrance of
fled delights, and to call to our succor a van-
ished satisfaction, to oppose it to what lies
heavy upon usT

**The way to dissipate present grief is to
recall to contemplation past pleasures,'*

if it be not that where power fails her she
will supply it with policy, and make use of a
supple trip, when force of limbs will not serve
the turn? For not only to a philosopher, but
to any man in his right wits, when he has
upon him the thirst of a burning fever, what



MONTAIGNE 43

satisfaction can it be to remember the
pleasure of drinking Greek wine? it would
rather be to make matters worse:

' ' The remembrance of pleasure doubles the
sense of present pain."

Of the same stamp is the other counsel that
philosophy gives; only to remember past
happiness and to forget the troubles we have
xmdergone; as if we had the science of
oblivion in our power: 'tis a counsel for
which we are never a straw the better:

"The memory of past toils is sweet/'

How? Is philosophy, that should arm me to
contend with fortune, and steel my courage
to trample all human adversities under foot,
arrived at this degree of cowardice, to make
me hide my head and save myself by these
pitiful and ridiculous shifts? for the memory
presents to us not what we choose but what
it pleases; nay, there is nothing that so much
imprints anything in our memory as a de-
sire to forget it: and 'tis a sure way to re-
tain and keep anything safe in the soul, to
solicit her to lose it. This is false:



44 MONTAIGNE

**And it is placed in our power to burj, as
it were, in a perpetual oblivion adverse ac-
cidents, and to retain a pleasant and delight-
ful memory of our successes;**

and this is true:

**I even remember what I would not; but I
cannot forget what I would.**

And whose counsel is this ? his :

**Who alone dares to profess himself a wise
man (Epicurus).*'

**Who all mankind surpassed in genius,
effacing them as the rising sun puts out the
stars.**

To empty and disfumish the memory, is not
this the true and proper way to ignorance?

** Ignorance is but a dull remedy for evils.**

We find several other like precepts whereby
we are permitted to borrow from the vulgar
frivolous appearances where reason, in all
her vivacity and vigor, cannot do the feat,
provided they administer satisfaction and



MONTAIGNE 45

comfort; where they cannot cure the wound,
they are content to palliate and benumb it.
I believe they will not deny me this, that if
they could establish order and constancy in
a state of life that could maintain itself in
ease and pleasure by some debility of judg-
ment, they would accept it:

"I will begin to drink and strew flowers,
and will suffer to be thought mad/'

There would be a great many philosophers
of Lycas' mind: this man being otherwise
of very regular manners, living quietly and
contentedly in his family, and not failing in
any office of his duty, either towards his own
people or strangers, and very carefully pre-
serving himself from hurtful things, was
nevertheless, by some distemper in his brain,
possessed with a conceit that he was per-
petually in the theatre, viewing the several
entertainments, and enjoying the amuse-
ments and the shows and the best comedies
in the world; and being cured by the physi-
cians of his frenzy, had much ado to forbear
endeavoring by process of law to compel them



46 MONTAIGNE

to restore him again to his pleasing imagi
nations:

**By heaven! yon have killed me, my
friends, not saved me, he said; my dear de-
lights and pleasing error by my retumin<5
sense are taken from me:'*

with a madness like that of Thrasyllus, son
of Pythodorus, who had grown to believe
that all the ships that weighed anchor from
the port of Piraeus and that came into the
haven, only made their voyages for his profit,
congratulating himself on their Jiappy navi-
gation, and receiving them with the greatest
joy. His brother Crito having caused him to
be restored to his better understanding, he
infinitely regretted that sort of condition
wherein he had lived with so much delight
and free from all anxiety. 'Tis according to
the old Greek verse, ''that there is a great
deal of convenience in not being so
prudent : ' '

And Ecclesiastes, *'In much wisdom is much
grief; and he that increaseth knowledge in-
creaseth sorrow."



MONTAIGNE 47

Even that to which philosophy consents in
general, that last remedy which she applies
to all sorts of necessities, to put an end to
the life we are not able to endure:

**Does it please! bear it. Not please? go
out, how thou wilt. Does grief prick thee?
nay, if it stab thee too: if thou art weapon-
less, present thy throat: if covered with the
arms of Vulcan, that is fortitude, resist it.''

and these words so used in the Greek festi-
vals :

^*Let him drink or go;"

that sound better upon the tongue of a Gas-
con, who naturally changes the b into v, than
upon that of Cicero:

''If thou canst not live right, give place
to those that can; thou hast eaten, drunk,
amused thyself to thy content; 'tis time to
make departure, lest, being overdosed, the
young ones first laugh at thee, and then turn
thee out."

What is it other than a confession of his im-
potency, and a retreating not only to ignor-



48 MONTAIGNE

ance, to be there in safety, but even to stupid-
ity, insensibility, and nonentity?

"So soon as, through age, Democritus
found a manifest decadence in his mind, he
himself went to meet death."

'Tis what Antisthenes said, ''That a man
must either make provision of sense to un-
derstand, or of a halter to hang himself;"
and what Chrysippus alleged upon this say-
ing of the poet Tyrtaeus, ''Or to arrive at
virtue or at death:" and Crates said, "That
love could be cured by hunger, if not by time;
and if a man disliked these two remedies, by
a rope." That Sextius of whom both Seneca
and Plutarch speak with so high an en-
comium, having applied himself (all other
things set aside) to the study of philosophy,
resolved to throw himself into the sea, find-
ing the progress of his studies too tedious
and slow. He ran to find death, since he
could not overtake knowledge. These are
the words of the law upon this subject: "If,
peradventure, some great inconvenience hap-
pen, for which there is no remedy, the haven
is near, and a man may save himself by



MONTAIGNE 49

swimming out of his body, as out of a leaky
skiff; for 'tis tlie fear of dying, and not the
love of life, that ties the fool to his body."

As life renders itself by simplicity more
pleasant, so, also, more innocent and better,
as I was saying before. The simple and
ignorant, says St. Paul, raise themselves up
to heaven, and take possession of it; and we,
with all our knowledge, plunge ourselves into
the infernal abyss. I am neither swayed by
Valentinian, a professed enemy to all knowl-
edge and literature; nor by Licinus, both
Eoman emperors, who called them the poison
and pest of all politic government; nor by
Mahomet, who, as I have heard, interdicted
all manner of learning to his followers, but
the example of the great Lycurgus and his
authority, with the reverence of the divine
Lacedaemonian policy, so great, so admirable,
and so long flourishing in virtue and happi-
ness without any institution or practice of
letters, ought, certainly, to be of very great
weight. Such as return from the new world
discovered by the Spaniards in our fathers*
days can testify to us how much more hon-
estly and regularly those nations live, with-



50 MONTAIGNE

out magistrate and without laws, than ours
do, where there are more officers and laws
than there are other sorts of men, or than
there are lawsuits:

**Her lap was full of writs and of citations,

Of process of actions and arrest.
Of bills, of answers, and of replications.

In Courts of Delegates and of RequeMs,
To grieve the simple with great vexations:
She had resorting to her as her guests,
Attending on her circuits and her journeys,
Scriveners and clerks, and lawyers and at-
torneys.'^

It was what a Roman senator said of the
later ages, that their predecessors' breath
stank of garlic, but their stomachs were per-
fumed with a good conscience; and that on
the contrary, those of his time were all sweet
odor without, but stank within of all sorts
of vices; that is to say, as I interpret it, that
they abounded with learning and eloquence,
but were very defective in moral honesty.
Incivility, ignorance, simplicity, roughness,
are the natural companions of innocence;
curiosity, subtlety, and knowledge bring
malice in their train: humility, fear, obedi-



MONTAIGNE 51

ence, and affability, which are the principal
things that support and maintain human
society, require an empty and docile soul,
and little presuming upon itself. Christians
have a special knowledge how natural and
original an evil curiosity is in man : the thirst
of knowledge, and the desire to become more
wise, was the first ruin of human kind, and
the way by which it precipitated itself into
eternal damnation. Pride is his ruin and cor-
ruption: *tis pride that diverts him from the
common path, and makes him embrace novel-
ties, and rather choose to be head of a troop,
lost and wandering in the path of perdition,
to be tutor and teacher of error and lies, than
to be a disciple in the school of truth, suffer-
ing himself to be led and guided by the hand
of another, in the right and beaten road.
'Tis, peradventure, the meaning of this old
Greek saying: ''That superstition follows
pride and obeys it as if it were a father."
presumption, how much dost thou hinder us!
After that Socrates was told that the god
of wisdom had attributed to him the title of
sage, he was astonished at it, and searching
and examining himself throughout, could find



52 MONTAIGNE

no foundation for this divine decree : lie knew
others as just, temperate, valiant, and learned
as himself, and more eloquent, handsome, and
more profitable to their country than he. At
last, he concluded that he was not distin-
guished from others nor wise, but only be-
cause he did not think himself so, and that
his god considered the self-opinion of knowl-
edge and wisdom as a singular stupidity of
man; and that his best doctrine was the doc-
trine of ignorance, and simplicity his best
wisdom. The sacred word declares those
miserable who have an opinion of themselves :
**Dust and ashes,** says it to such, ''what
hast thou wherein to glorify thyself!'* And
in another place, "God has made man like
unto a shadow,'* of which who can judge,
when by the removing of the light it shall
be vanished? It is nothing but of us.

Our strength is so far from being able to
comprehend the divine height, that of the
works of our Creator those best bear His
mark and are best His which we the least
xmderstand. To meet with an incredible
thing, is an occasion with Christians to be-
lieve. It is all the more reason that it is



MONTAIGNE 53

against human reason; if it were according
to reason, it would no longer be a miracle;
if it had an example, it would be no longer
a singular thing:

**God is better known by not knowing.**

says St. Augustin; and Tacitus:

"It is more holy and reverend to believe
the works of the gods than to know them;'*

and Plato thinks there is something of im-
piety in inquiring too curiously into God,
the world, and the first causes of things :

"To find out the parent of the world, is
very hard : and when found out, to reveal him
in common, is unlawful,"

says Cicero. We pronounce, indeed, power,
truth, justice, which are words that signify
some great thing; but that thing we neither
see nor conceive. We say that God fears,
that God is angry, that God loves:

"Speaking of things immortal in mortal
language,'*



54 MONTAIGNE

which are all agitations and emotions that
cannot be in God, according to our form, nor
can we imagine it, according to His. It only
belongs to God to know Himself, and to in-
terpret His own works; and He does it, in
our language, to stoop and descend to us
who grovel upon the earth. How can Prud-
ence, which is the choice betwixt good and
evil, be properly attributed to Him, whom
no evil can touch? How the reason and in-
telligence, which we make use of, so as by
obscure to arrive at apparent things,
seeing that nothing is obscure to Him!
and justice, which distributes to every
one what appertains to Him, a thing
created by the society and community
of men: how is that in God! how temperance?
how the moderation of corporal pleasures,
that have no place in the divinity ? Fortitude
to support pain, labor, and dangers as little
appertains to Him as the rest, these three
things having no access to Him: for which
reason Aristotle holds Him equally exempt
from grace and anger:

"He can be affected neither with favor



, MONTAIGNE 55

nor indignation, because both those are the
effects of frailty/'

The participation we have in the knowl-
edge of truth, such as it is, is not acquired
by our own force: God has sufficiently given
us to understand that by the testimony He
has chosen out of the common .people, simple
and ignorant men, whom He has been
pleased to employ to instruct us in His ad-
mirable secrets. Our faith is not of our own
acquiring; 'tis purely the gift of another's
bounty; 'tis not by meditation or by virtue
of our own understanding that we have ac-
quired our religion, but by foreign authority
and command ; the weakness of our judgment