more assists us than force, and our blind-
ness more than our clearness of sight; 'tis
rather by the mediation of our ignorance
than of our knowledge that we know anything
of the divine Wisdom. 'Tis no wonder if
our natural and earthly means cannot con-
ceive that supernatural and heavenly knowl-
edge: let us bring nothing of our own, but
obedience and subjection; for, as it is writ-
ten, "I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,
and will bring to nothing the understanding



56 MONTAIGNE

of the prudent. Where is the wise? Where
is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this
worid? Hath not God made foolish the wis-
dom of this worid? For after that in the wis-
dom of God the worid by wisdom knew not
God, it pleased God by the foolishness of
preaching to save them that believe.'*

Should I examine finally, whether it be in
the power of man to find out that which he
seeks, and if that quest wherein he has busied
himself so many ages has enriched him with
any new force or any solid truth: I believe
he will confess, if he speaks from his con-
science, that all he has got by so long an
inquisition is only to have learned to know
his own weakness. We have only by long
study confirmed and verified the natural
ignorance we were in before. The same has
fallen out to men truly wise which befall
ears of com ; they shoot and raise their heads
high and pert, whilst empty; but when full
and swollen with grain in maturity, begin to
flag and droop; so, men having tried and
sounded all things, and having found in that
accumulation of knowledge and provision of
so many various things, nothing massive and



MONTAIGNE 57

firm, nothing but vanity, have quitted their
presumption and acknowledged their natural
condition. 'Tis what Velleius reproaches
Cotta with and Cicero, that what they had
learned of Philo was that they had learned
nothing. Pherecydes, one of the seven sages,
writing to Thales upon his deathbed: "I
have," said he, "given order to my people,
after my interment, to carry my writings to
thee. K they please thee and the other sages,
publish them; if not, suppress them. They
contain no certainty with which I myself am
satisfied. I pretend not to know the truth
or to attain unto it; I rather open than dis-
cover things." The wisest man that ever
was, being asked what he knew, made
answer; he knew this, that he knew nothing.
By which he verified what has been said, that
the greatest part of what we know is the least
of what we do not know, that is to say, that
even what we think we know, is but a piece,
and a very little one, of our ignorance. We
know things in dreams, says Plato, and are
ignorant of them in reality:

"Almost all the ancients declare, that noth-



58 MONTAIGNE

ing is perceived, nothing can be ascertained:
that the senses are narrow, men's minds
weak, the course of life short.'*

And of Cicero himself, who stood indebted
to his learning for all he was, Valerius says,
that in his old age he began to disrelish let-
ters, and when most occupied with them, it
was in independence of any party: following
what he thought probable, now in one sect
and then in another, evermore wavering
under the doubts of the Academy:

'*I am to speak, but so that I affirm noth-
ing: I will inquire into all things, for the most
part in doubt, and distrustful of myself."

I should have too fine a game should I con-
sider man in his common way of living and
in gross: and yet I might do it by his own
rule, who judges truth, not by the weight,
but by the number of votes. Let us leave
there the people :

"Who waking snore! whose life is almost
death, though living and seeing;"

who neither feel nor judge themselves, and



MONTAIGNE 59

let most of their natural faculties lie idle. I
will take man in his highest state. Let us
consider him in that small number of men,
excellent and culled out from the rest, who
having been endowed with a grand and
special natural force, have, moreover, hard-
ened and whetted it by care, study, and art,
and raised it to the highest pitch of wisdom
to which it can possibly arrive. They have
adjusted their souls in all senses and all
biases; have propped and supported them
with all foreign helps proper for them, and
enriched and adorned them with all they
could borrow for their advantage, both within
and without the world: these are they in
whom is placed the supremest height to
which human nature can attain. They have
regulated the world with polities and laws;
they have instructed it with arts and sciences,
and further instructed it by the example of
their admirable conduct. I shall make ac-
count of none but such men as these, their
testimony and experience; let us examine how
far they have proceeded, and on what they
reposed their surest hold; the maladies and
defects that we shall find amongst these men.



60 MONTAIGNE

the rest of the world may very boldly also
declare to be their own.

Whoever goes in search of anything, must
come to this, either to say that he has found
it, or that it is not to be found, or that he is
yet upon the quest. All philosophy is divided
into these three kinds: her design is to seek
out truth, knowledge, and certainty. The
Peripatetics, Epicureans, Stoics, and others,
have thought they had found it: these have
established the sciences that we have, and
have treated of them as of certainties. Clito-
machus, Cameades, and the Academics, have
despaired in their quest, and concluded that
truth could not be conceived by our capacity;
the result with these is all weakness and
human ignorance; this sect has had the most
and most noble followers. Pyrrho and other
sceptics or epichists, whose dogmas were
held by many of the ancients to have been
taken from Homer, the seven sages, Archilo-
cus, Euripides, Zeno, Democritus, and Xeno-
phanes, say, that they are yet upon the search
of truth: these conclude that the others who
think they have found it out are infinitely
deceived; and that it is too daring a vanity in



MONTAIGNE 61

the second sort to determine that human rea-
son is not able to attain unto it; for to estab-
lish the standard of our power, to know and
judge the difficulty of things, is a great and
extreme knowledge, of which they doubt
whether man is capable:

**If any one says that nothing is known, he
also does not know whether it is knowable
that he knows nothing."

The ignorance that knows itself, judges, and
condemns itself, is not an absolute ignorance :
to be this, it must be ignorant of itself; so
that the profession of the Pyrrhonians is to
waver, doubt, and inquire, not to make them-
selves sure of or responsible to themselves for
anything. Of the three actions of the soul,
the imaginative, the appetitive, and the con-
senting, they receive the two first; the last
they hold ambiguous, without inclination or
approbation, one way or the other, however
slight. Zeno represented by motion his imagi-
nation of these divisions of the faculties of
the soul; an open and expanded hand signi-
fied Appearance: a hand half shut and the
fingers a little bent. Consent: a clutched fist,



62 MONTAIGNE

Comprehension: when with the left hand he
yet pressed the fist closer, Knowledge. Now
this situation of their judgment, upright and
inflexible, receiving all objects without appli-
cation or consent, led them to their Ataraxy,
which is a condition of life, peaceable, tem-
perate, and exempt from the agitations we
receive by the impression of the opinion and
knowledge that we think we have of things;
from which spring fear, avarice, envy, im-
moderate desires, ambition, pride, supersti-
tion, 4ove of novelty, rebellion, disobedience,
obstinacy, and the greatest part of bodily
ills ; nay, by this they exempt themselves from
the jealousy of their discipline: for they de-
bate after a very gentle manner; they fear no
rejoinder in their disputes: when they afl&rm
that heavy things descend, they would be
sorry to be believed, and love to be contra-
dicted, to engender doubt and suspense of
judgment, which is their end. They only put
out their propositions to contend with those
they think we have in our belief. If you take
their arguments, they will as readily maintain
the contrary; 'tis all one to them; they have
no choice. If you maintain that snow is black.



MONTAIGNE '63

they will argue, on the contrary, that it is
white ; if you say it is neither the one nor the
other, they will maintain that *tis both. If
you hold, as of certain judgment, that you
know nothing of it, they will maintain that
you do: yet, and if, by an affirmative axiom,
you assure them that you doubt, they will
argue against you that you doubt not, or that
you cannot judge and determine that you
doubt. And by this extremity of doubt, which
jostles itself, they separate and divide them-
selves from many opinions, even of those that
have several ways maintained doubt and
ignorance. Why shall not they be allowed,
say they, as well as the dogmatists, one to
say green, another yellow; why may not they
also doubt? Can anything be proposed to us
to grant or deny which it shall not be per-
mitted to consider as ambiguous! And where
others are carried away, either by the custom
of their country or by the instruction of
parents, or by accident, as by a tempest, with-
out judging and without choice, nay, and for
the most part before the age of discretion, to
such or such an opinion, to the sect of the
Stoics or Epicureans, to which they are en-



64 MONTAIGNE

slaved and fast bound, as to a thing they can-
not shake off:

*'To whatever discipline they are carried,
as by a tempest, they cleave to it as to a
rock;*'

why shall not these likewise be permitted to
maintain their liberty and to consider things
without obligation or slavery?

**In this more unconstrained and free, that
they have the full power of judging."

Is it not of some advantage to be disengaged
from the necessity that curbs others? is it
not better to remain in suspense than to en-
tangle one's self in the innumerable errors
that human fancy has produced? is it not
much better to suspend one's persuasion than
to intermeddle with these wrangling and sedi-
tious divisions ? What shall I choose ? * ' What
you please, provided you do choose." A very
foolish answer, but one, nevertheless, to which
all the dogmatists seem to point; by which we
are not permitted to be ignorant of that of
which we are ignorant. Take the most emi-
nent side, that of the greatest reputation;



MONTAIGNE 65

it will never be so sure, that to defend it yon
will not be forced to attack and contend with
a hundred and a hundred adversaries; is it
not better to keep out of this hurly-burly?
You are permitted to embrace, with as much
zeal as honor and life, Aristotle's opinion of
the immortality of the soul, and to give the
lie to Plato thereupon; and shall they be in-
terdicted from doubting it? If it be lawful
for Panaetius to maintain his opinion about
augury, dreams, oracles, vaticinations, of
which things the Stoics make no doubt at all,
why may not a wise man dare to do the same
in all things which this man dared to do in
those he had learned of his masters, and es-
tablished by the common consent of the school
whereof he is a professor and a member? If
it be a child that judges, he knows not what
it is : if a sage, he is prepossessed. They have
reserved for themselves a marvellous ad-
vantage in battle, having eased them-
selves of the care of defence; if you
strike them, 'tis no matter, provided they
strike too; and they make everything serve
their purpose; if they overcome, your argu-
ment is lame; if you, theirs: if they fail, they



66 MONTAIGNE

verify ignorance; if you fail, you do it: if they
prove that nothing is known, it is well; if they
cannot prove it, 'tis equally well:

**So that, when equal reasons happen, pro
and con in the same matter, the judgment
may, on both sides, be more easily sus-
pended : ' '

and they pretend to find out with much
greater facility why a thing is false than why
it is true; that which is not, than that which
is; and what they do not believe, than what
they do. Their way of speaking is, **I affirm
nothing: it is no more so than so, or than
either one nor t'other: I understand it not.
Appearances are everywhere equal: the law
of speaking, pro or con, is the same: noth-
ing seems true that may not seem false."
Their sacramental word is lein that is to
say, **I sustain, I do not budge." This is the
burden of their song, and others of like sub-
stance. The effect of it is a pure, entire, per-
fect, and absolute suspension of the judg-
ment: they make use of their reason to in-
quire and debate, but not to fix and determine.
Whoever shall imagine a perpetual confes-



MONTAIGNE 67

sion of ignorance, a judgment without bias
or inclination, upon any occasion whatever,
conceives a true idea of Pyrrhonism. I ex-
press this fancy as well as I can, by reason
that many find it hard to conceive; and the
authors themselves represent it somewhat
variously and obscurely.

As to what concerns the actions of life,
they are in this of the common fashion; they
yield and lend themselves to the natural in-
clinations, to the power and impulse of pas-
sions, to the constitutions of laws and cus-
toms, and to the tradition of arts:

**For God chose not to have us know, but
only use, those things. ' '

They suffer their ordinary actions to be
guided by these things without any dispute
or judgment; for which reason I cannot well
reconcile with this argument what is said of
Pyrrho; they represent him stupid and im-
movable, leading a kind of savage and un-
sociable life, getting in the way of the jostle
of carts, going upon the edge of precipices,
and refusing to accommodate himself to the
laws. This is to exaggerate his discipline;
he would never make himself a stick or a



68 MONTAIGNE

stone, he would show himself a living man,
discoursing, reasoning, enjoying all natural
conveniences and pleasures, employing and
making use of all his corporal and
spiritual faculties in rule and reason;
the fantastic, imaginary, and false privi-
leges that man has usurped of lord-
ing it, of ordaining and establishing, be
utterly renounced and quitted. There is no
sect but is constrained to permit its sage to
follow many things not comprehended, per-
ceived, or consented to in its rules, if he
means to live: and if he goes to sea he follows
that design, not knowing whether it will be
useful to him or no, and relies upon the tight-
ness of the vessel, the experience of the pilot,
the fitness of the season: probable circum-
stances only, according to which he is bound
to go, and suffer himself to be governed by
appearances, provided there be no express
and manifest contrariety in them. He has a
body, he has a soul; the senses push him, the
mind spurs him on; and although he does not
find in himself this proper and singular mark
of judging, nor perceive that he ought not to
engage his consent, considering that there



MONTAIGNE 69

may be some false, equal to these true appear-
ances, yet does he not for all that fail of car-
rying on the offices of his life fully, freely,
and conveniently. How many arts are there
that profess to consist more in conjecture
than in knowledge, that decide not upon true
and false, and only follow that which seems
true I There is, say they, true and false, and
we have in us wherewith to seek it, but not
to fix it when we touch it. We are much more
prudent in letting ourselves be carried away
by the swing of the world without inquisition;
a soul clear from prejudice has a marvellous
advance towards tranquillity and repose.
Men who judge and control their judges never
duly submit to them.

How much more docile and easy to be gov-
erned, both in the laws of religion and civil
polity, are simple and incurious minds, than
those over-vigilant and pedagoguish wits that
will still be prating of divine and human
causes? There is nothing in human inven-
tion that carries so great a show of likeli-
hood and utility as this; this presents man,
naked and empty, confessing his natural
weakness, fit to receive some foreign force



70 MONTAIGNE

from above; unfurnished of human, and there-
fore more apt to receive divine knowledge;
setting aside his own judgment to make more
room for faith; not misbelieving, nor estab-
lishing any doctrine against the laws and
common observances; humble, obedient, dis-
ciplinable, studious, a sworn enemy of heresy,
and consequently freeing himself from vain
and irreligious opinions introduced by false
sects; *tis a carte blanche prepared to re-
ceive from the finger of God such forms as
He shall please to write upon it. The more
we resign and commit ourselves to God, and
the more we renounce ourselves, of the
greater value are we. "Take in good part,"
says Ecclesiastes, **the things that present
themselves to thee, as they seem and taste
from hand to mouth; the rest is out of thy
knowledge:**

"The Lord knoweth the thoughts of men,
that they are but vanity."

Thus we see that, of the three general sects
of philosophy, two make open profession of
doubt and ignorance; and in that of the Dog-
matists, which in the third, it is easy to dis-



MONTAIGNE 71

cover that tlie greatest part of them only as-
sume a face of assurance that they may have
the better air; they have not so much thought
to establish any certainty for us, as to show
us how far they have proceeded in their
search of truth:

''Which the learned rather feign than
know. ' '

Timaeus, having to instruct Socrates in what
he knew of the gods, the world, and men,
proposes to speak to him as a man to a man,
and that it is sufficient if his reasons are as
probable as those of another; for that exact
reasons were neither in his nor in any other
mortal hand. Which one of his followers
has thus imitated:

**I will, as well as I am able, explain; yet
not as Pythius Apollo, that what I say should
be fixed and certain, but like an ordinary
man that follows probabilities by conjec-
ture;'*

and this upon the natural and common sub-
ject of the contempt of death: he has else-
where translated from the very words of
Plato:



72 MONTAIGNE

*'If perchance, discoursing of the nature
of gods and the world's original, we cannot
do it quite as we desire, it will be no wonder.
For it is just you should remember that both
I who speak, and you who are to judge, are
men; that if probable things are delivered,
you may require no more."

Aristotle ordinarily heaps up a great number
of other opinions and beliefs, to compare
them with his own, and to let us see how much
he has gone beyond them, and how much
nearer he approaches to probability: for truth
is not to be judged by the authority and testi-
mony of others: which made Epicurus religi-
ously avoid quoting them in his writings.
This is the prince of all dogmatists, and yet
we are told by him that much knowledge ad-
ministers to many occasion of doubting the
more; we see him sometimes purposely so
shroud and muffle up himself in thick and in-
extricable obscurity, that we know not what
use to make of his advice; it is, in fact, a
Pyrrhonism under a resolutive form. Hear
Cicero's protestation, who expounds to us
another's fancy by his own:

**They who desire to know what we think



MONTAIGNE 73

of everything, are more inquisitive than is
necessary. This practice in philosophy, of
disputing against everything, and of abso-
lutely concluding nothing, begun by Socrates,
repeated by Arcesilaus, and confirmed by
Cameades, has continued in use even to our
own time. We are those who declare that
there is a mixture of things false amongst all
that are true, with such a resemblance to one
another, that there is in them no certain mark
to direct us, either to judge or assent. ' '

Why has not Aristotle only, but most of the
philosophers, affected diflficulty, if not to em-
phasize the vanity of the subject and amuse
the curiosity of our mind, by giving it this
bare, hollow bone to pick! Clitomachus
afl&rmed that he could never discover, by
Cameades' writings, what opinion he was of.
This was what made Epicurus affect to be
abstruse, and that procured Heraclitus to be
sumamed Obscure. Difl&culty is a coin the
learned make use of, like jugglers, to con-
ceal the inanity of their art, and which human
sottishness easily takes for current pay:

**He got a great name among the weak-
witted, especially by reason of the obscurity



74 MONTAIGNE

of his language; for fools admire and love
rather such things as are wrapped in dubious
phrase."

Cicero reprehends some of his friends for
giving more of their time to the study of
astrology, law, logic, and geometry, than they
were worth, saying that they were by these
diverted from the duties of life, more profit-
able and more worthy studies; the Cyrenaic
philosophers equally despised natural philo-
sophy and logic. Zeno, in the very beginning
of the Books of the Commonwealth, declared
all the liberal arts of no use. Chrysippus said
that what Plato and Aristotle had written
concerning logic, they had only done in sport
and by way of exercise, and could not be-
lieve that they spoke in earnest of so vain a
thing; Plutarch says the same of metaphysics;
and Epicurus would have said as much of
rhetoric, grammar, poesy, mathematics, and,
natural philosophy excepted, of all the
sciences, and Socrates of them all, excepting
that of manners and of life; whatever any
one required to be instructed in by him, he
would ever, in the first place, demand an
account of the conditions of his life present



MONTAIGNE 75

and past, which he examined and judged,
esteeming all other learning subordinate and
supernumerary to that:

"Parum mihi placeant eae literae quae ad
virtutem doctoribus nihil prof uerunt. ' '

Most of the arts have been, in like manner,
decried by the same knowledge; but these
men did not consider that it was from the
purpose to exercise their wits in those very
matters wherein there was no solid ad-
vantage.

As to the rest, some have looked upon
Plato as a dogmatist, others as a doubter;
others, in some things the one, and in other
things the other. Socrates, the conductor of
his dialogisms,is eternally upon questions and
stirring up disputes, never determining, never
satisfying; and professes to have no other
science but that of opposing himself. Homer,
their author, has equally laid the foundations
of all the sects of philosophy, to show how in-
different it was which way we should choose.
'Tis said that ten several sects sprung from
Plato; and, in my opinion, never did any in-
struction halt or waver, if his does not.



76 MONTAIGNE

Socrates said that wise women, in taking
upon them the trade of helping others to
bring forth, left the trade of bringing forth
themselves ; and that he by the title of a sage
man, which the gods had conferred upon him,
was disabled, in his virile and mental love,
of the faculty of bringing forth: contenting
himself to help and assist those who could,
to open their nature, anoint the passes,
facilitate the birth, judge of the infant, bap-
tize it, nourish it, fortify it, swathe it, circum-
cise it: exercising and employing his under-
standing in the perils and fortunes of others.

It is so with the most part of this third sort
of authors, as the ancients have observed in
the writings of Anaxagoras, Democritus,
Parmenides, Xenophanes, and others: they
have a way of writing doubtful in
substance and design, rather inquiring
than teaching, though they mix their
stjle with some dogmatical periods. Is not
the same thing seen in Seneca and Plutarch!
how many contradictions are there to be
found in these, if a man pry narrowly into
them! The reconcilers of the jurisconsults
ought first to reconcile them, each for him-



MONTAIGNE 77

self. Plato seems to have affected this
method of philosophizing in dialogues, to the
end that he might with greater decency from
several mouths deliver the diversity and
variety of his own fancies. To treat vari-
ously of things is to treat of them as well as
conformably, and better, that is to say, more
copiously and with greater profit. Let us
take example from ourselves: judicial judg-
ments are the highest point of dogmatical and
determinative speaking: and yet those which
our parliaments present to the -people, the
most exemplary, and most proper to nourish
in them the reverence due to that dignity,
principally through the sufficiency of the per-
sons exercising it, derive their beauty, not so