terminations which this fine human reason
produces by its certitude and clear-sighted-
ness in everything it meddles withal, as I
should the opinion of Aristotle upon this sub-
ject of the principles of natural things; which
principles he builds of three pieces, matter,
form, and privation. And what can be more
vain than to make inanity itself the cause
of the production of things? privation is a
negative : by what fancy could he make them
the cause and original of things that are?
And yet all this was not to be controverted,
146 MONTAIGNE
but as an exercise of logic; nothing was to be
discussed to bring it into doubt, but only to
defend the author of the school from foreign
objections: his authority is the non ultra,
beyond which it was not permitted to in-
quire.
It is very easy upon granted foundations to
build whatever we please: for according to
the law and ordering of this beginning, the
other parts of the structure are easily carried
on without any mishap. By this way, we find
our reason well-grounded and discourse at a
venture; for our masters prepossess and
gain beforehand as much room in our
belief as is necessary for them
towards concluding afterwards what they
please, as geometricians do by their
postulates; the consent and approbation we
allow them, giving them power to draw us to
the right and left, and to whirl us about at
their own pleasure. Whoever is believed
upon his presuppositions is our master and
our god : he will take the level of his founda-
tions so ample and so easy that by them he
may mount us up to the clouds, if he so please.
In this practice and conmiunication of science
MONTAIGNE 147
we have taken the saying of Pythagoras,
*'that every expert ought to be believed in
his own art," for currency; the dialectician
refers the signification of words to the gram-
marian; the rhetorician borrows the state of
arguments from the dialectician; the poet his
measures from the musician; the geometri-
cian his proportions from the arithmetician;
the metaphysicians take physical conjectures
as their foundations; for every science has
its principles presupposed, by which human
judgment is everywhere limited. If you drive
against the barrier where the principal error
lies, they have presently this sentence in
their mouths; ''that there is no disputing
with persons who deny principles;" now men
can have no principles, if not revealed to
them by the Divinity; of all the rest, the be-
ginning, the middle and the end are nothing
but dream and vapor. To those who con-
tend upon presupposition, we must, on the
contrary, presuppose to them the same axiom
upon which the dispute is: for every human
presupposition, and every declaration has as
much authority one as another, if reason does
not make the difference. Wherefore they are
148 MONTAIGNE
all to be put into the balance, and first the
general and those that tyrannize over ns. The
persuasion of certainty is a certain testimony
of folly and extreme uncertainty; and there
are not a more foolish sort of men, nor that
are less philosophers, than the Philodoxes of
Plato: we must inquire whether fire be hot,
whether snow be white, if we know of any
such things as hard or soft.
And as to those answers of which they
made old stories; as to him who doubted if
there were any such thing as heat, whom they
bid throw himself into the fire; and to him
who denied the coldness of ice, whom they
bade to put a cake of ice into his bosom; these
are pitiful things, altogether imworthy of the
profession of philosophy. If they had let us
alone in our natural state, to receive the ap-
pearance of things without us according as
they present themselves to us by our senses,
and had permitted us to follow our own
natural appetites, simple and regulated by
the condition of our birth, they might have
had reason to talk at that rate; but 'tis from
them that we have learned to make ourselves
judges of the world; 'tis from them that we
MONTAIGNE 149
derive this fancy, ''that human reason is
controller-general of all that is without and
within the roof of heaven, that comprehends
everything, that can do everything, by the
means of which everything is known and un-
derstood." This answer would be good
amongst cannibals, who enjoy the happiness
of a long, quiet, and peaceable life without
Aristotle's precepts, and without the knowl-
edge of the name of physics; this answer
would, peradventure, be of more value and
greater force than all those they borrow
from their reason and invention; of this all
animals would be capable with us, and all
things where the power of the law of nature
is yet pure and simple ; but this they have re-
nounced. They must not tell us, ''It is true,
for you see and feel it to be so:" they must
tell me whether I really feel what I think
I feel; and if I do feel it, they must then tell
me why I feel it, and how, and what; let them
tell me the name, original, parts and junc-
tures of heat and cold; the qualities of agent
and patient ; or let them give up their profes-
sion, which is not to admit or approve of
anything but by the way of reason; that is
150 MONTAIGNE
their test in all sorts of essays : but, certainly,
*tis a test full of falsity, error, weakness, and
defect.
How can we better prove this than by
itself? if we are not to believe her, when
speaking of herself, she can hardly be thought
fit to judge of foreign things: if she know
anything, it must at least be her own being
and abode; she is in the soul, and either a
part or an effect of it; for true and essential
reason, from which we by a false color bor-
row the name, is lodged in the bosom of the
Almighty; there is her habitation and retreat,
His thence she imparts her rays, when God is
pleased to impart any beam of it to mankind,
as Pallas issued from her father's head to
communicate herself to the world.
Now let us see what human reason tells us
of herself, and of the soul : not of the soul in
general, of which almost all philosophy makes
the celestial and first bodies participants ; nor
of that which Thales attributed even to
things reputed inanimate, drawn on so to do
by the consideration of the loadstone; but o^
that which appertains to us, and that we
ought the best to know:
MONTAIGNE 151
**None know the nature of the soul,
whether it be bom with ns, or be infused into
us at our birth; whether it dies with us, or
descends to the shades below, or whether the
gods transmit it into other animals.'*
Crates and Dicaearchus were taught by it,
that there was no soul at all, but that the body
stirs by a natural motion; Plato, that it was
a substance moving of itself: Thales, a
nature without repose: Asclepiades, an exer-
cising of the senses: Hesiod and Anaximan-
der, a thing composed of earth and water;
Parmenides, of earth and fire; Empedocles, of
blood:
** He vomits his bloody soul;"
Posidonius, Cleanthes, and Galien, that it was
heat or a hot complexion:
** Their vigor is of fire, and a heavenly
birth;"
Hippocrates, a spirit diffused all over the
body; Varro, that it was an air received at
the mouth, heated in the lungs, moistened in
the heart, and diffused throughout the whole
152 MONTAIGNE
body; Zeno, the quintessence of the four ele-
ments; Heraclides Ponticus, that it was the
light; Xenocrates and the Egyptians, a mov-
able number; the Chaldaeans, a virtue with-
out any determinate form;
**That there is a certain vital habit which
the Oreeks call a hannony;**
let us not forget Aristotle, who held the soul
to be that which naturally causes the body to
move, which he calls Entelechia, with as cold
an invention as any of the rest; for he neither
speaks of the essence, nor of the original,
nor of the nature of the soul, but only takes
notice of the effect; Lactantius, Seneca, and
most of the dogmatists, have confessed that
it was a thing they did not understand; and
after all this enumeration of opinions,
"Of these opinions, which is the true, let
some God determine,'*
says Cicero ; I know, by myself, says St. Ber-
nard, how incomprehensible God is, seeing I
cannot comprehend the parts of my own
being. Heraclitus, who was of opinion that
MONTAIGNE 153
every place was full of souls and demons,
nevertheless maintained that no one could
advance so far towards the knowledge of the
soul as ever to arrive at it, so profound was
its essence.
Neither is there less controversy and de-
bate about locating it. Hippocrates and
Hierophilus place it in the ventricle of the
brain; Democritus and Aristotle throughout
the whole body:
"As when good health is often said to be
a part of the body, whereas of a healthy man
'tis no part.'*
Epicurus, in the stomach;
**This is the seat of terror and fear; here
is the place where joys exist:"
the Stoics, about and within the heart;
Arasistratus, adjoining the membrane of the
epicranion: Empedocles, in the blood, as also
Moses, which was the reason why he inter-
dicted eating the blood of beasts, because the
soul is there seated: Strato placed it betwixt
the eyebrows:
154 MONTAIGNE
*'What figure the soul is of, or what part it
inhabits, is not to be inquired into,"
says Cicero. I very willingly deliver this
author to you in his own words : for why spoil
the language of eloquence? besides that it
were no great prize to steal the matter of his
inventions; they are neither very frequent,
nor of any great weight, and sufficiently
known. But the reason why Chrysippus
argues it to be about the heart, as all the rest
of that sect do, is not to be omitted. "It is,"
says he, * ' because when we would affirm any-
thing, we lay our hand upon our breasts; and
when we will pronounce me, which signi-
fies I, we let the lower mandible sink towards
the stomach." This place ought not to be
over-slipped without a remark upon the
futility of so great a man; for besides that
these considerations are infinitely light in
themselves, the last is only a proof to the
Greeks that they have their souls lodged in
that part: no human judgment is so vigilant
that it does not sometime sleep. Why should
we be afraid to speak? We see the Stoics,
fathers of human prudence, have found out
MONTAIGNE 155
that the soul of a man crushed under a ruin,
long labors and strives to get out, like a
mouse caught in a trap, before it can disen-
gage itself from the burden. Some hold that
the world was made to give bodies, by way
of punishment, to the spirits, fallen by their
own fault, from the purity wherein they had
been created, the first creation having been
no other than incorporeal; and that accord-
ing as they are more or less remote from their
spirituality, so are they more or less lightly
or heavily incorporated, and that thence pro-
ceeds the variety of so much created matter.
But the spirit that, for his punishment, was
invested with the body of the sun, must cer-
tainly have a very rare and particular
measure of thirst.
The extremities of our perquisition all fall
into and terminate in a misty astonishment,
as Plutarch says, of the testimony of his-
tories, that as in charts and maps the utmost
bounds of known countries are filled up with
marshes, impenetrable forests, deserts, and
uninhabitable places; and this is the reason
why the most gross and childish ravings are
most found in those authors who treat of the
156 MONTAIGNE
most elevated subjects, and proceed the
furthest in them, losing themselves in their
own curiosity and presumption. The be-
ginning and the end of knowledge are equally
foolish: observe to what a pitch Plato flies
in his poetic clouds; take notice there of the
jargon of the gods; but what did he dream of
when he defined man to be a two-legged
animal, without feathers: giving those who
had a mind to deride him, a pleasant oc-
casion; for, having pulled off the feathers of
a live capon, they went about calling it the
Man of Plato.
And what of the Epicureans? out of what
simplicity did they first imagine that their
atoms, which they said were bodies having
some weight and a natural motion downward,
had made the world: till they were put in
mind by their adversaries that, according to
this description, it was impossible they should
unite and join to one another, their fall being
so direct and perpendicular, and producing
parallel lines throughout? wherefore they
were fain thereafter to add a fortuitous and
lateral motion, and moreover, to furnish
their atoms with hooked tails, by which they
MONTAIGNE 157
might unite and cling* to one another; and
even then do not those who attack them upon
this second invention put them hardly to it?
**If the atoms have by chance formed so
many sorts of figures, why did it never fall
out that they made a house or a shoel why, at
the same rate, should we not believe that an
infinite number of Greek letters, strewn all
over a place, might fall into the contexture
of the IHadl"
"Whatever is capable of reason,^' says
Zeno, **is better than that which is not
capable: there is nothing better than the
world: the world is therefore capable of rea-
son." Cotta, by this same argumentation,
makes the world a mathematician; and 'tis
also made a musician and an organist by this
other argumentation of Zeno: "The whole
is more than a part; we are capable of wis-
dom, and are part of the world : therefore the
world is wise." There are infinite like ex-
amples, not merely of arguments that are
false in themselves, but silly; that do not
hold together, and that accuse their authors
not so much of ignorance as of imprudence,
in the reproaches the philosophers throw in
158 MONTAIGNE
one another's teeth upon the dissensions in
their opinions and sects.
Whoever should accumulate a sufficient
fardel of the fooleries of human wisdom,
might tell wonders. I willingly muster these
few as patterns in their way not less profit-
able than more moderate instructions. Let
us judge by these what opinion we are to have
of man, of his sense and reason, when in
these great persons, who have raised human
knowledge so high, so many gross and mani-
fest errors and defects are to be found!
For my part, I would rather believe that
they have treated of knowledge casually, and
as a toy with both hands, and have contended
about reason as of a vain and frivolous in-
strument, setting on foot all sorts of inven-
tions and fancies, sometimes more sinewy,
and sometimes weaker. This same Plato, who
defines man as if he were a fowl, says else-
where, after Socrates, ''that he does not, in
truth, know what man is, and that he is a
member of the world the hardest to under-
stand.'* By this variety and instability of
opinions, they tacitly lead us as it were by
the hand to this resolution of their irresolu-
MONTAIGNE 159
tion. They profess not always to deliver
their opinions barefaced and apparent; they
have one while disguised them in the fabulous
shadows of poesy, and another while under
some other mask: our imperfection carries
this also along with it, that raw meat is not
always proper for our stomachs; we must
dry, alter, and mix it. These men do the
same; they often conceal their real opinions
and judgments, and falsify them to accom-
modate themselves to the public use. They
will not make an open profession of ignor-
ance and of the imbecility of human reason,
that they may not frighten children; but they
sufficiently discover it to us under the ap-
pearance of a troubled and inconstant science.
I advised a person in Italy, who had a
great mind to speak Italian, that provided he
only had a desire to make himself imder-
stood, without being ambitious otherwise to
excel, that he should simply make use of the
first words that came to the tongue's end,
Latin, French, Spanish or Gascon, and then
by adding the Italian termination, he could
not fail of hitting upon some idiom of the
country, either Tuscan, Roman, Venetian,
160 MONTAIGNE
Piedmontese, or Neapolitan, and to apply
himself to some one of those many forms; I
say the same of philosophy: she has so many
faces, so much variety, and has said so many
things, that all onr dreams and fantasies are
there to be found; human imagination can
conceive nothing good or bad that is not
there:
"Nothing can be so absurdly said, that is
not said by some of the philosophers. ' *
And I am the more willing to expose my own
whimsies to the public, forasmuch as though
they are spun out of myself and without any
pattern, I know they will be found related
to some ancient humor, and there will be no
want of some one to say, "That's whence he
took it." My manners are natural; I have
not called in the assistance of any discipline
to frame them: but weak as they are, when
it came into my head to lay them open to the
world's view, and that, to expose them to the
light in a little more decent garb, I went
about to help them with reasons and ex-
amples: it was a wonder to myself inci-
dentally to find them conformable to so many
MONTAIGNE 161
philosophical discourses and examples. I
learned not what was my mle of life, till it
was worn out and spent: a new figure, an im-
premeditate and accidental philosopher.
But to return to our soul; that Plato has
placed reason in the brain, anger in the heart,
and concupiscence in the liver, 'tis likely that
it was rather an interpretation of the move-
ments of the soul than that he intended a
division and separation of it, as of a body,
into several members. And the most likely
of their opinions is, that 'tis always a soul,
that, by its faculty, reasons, remembers, com-
prehends, judges, desires, and exercises all
its other operations by divers instruments of
the body; as the pilot guides his ship accord-
ing to his experience of it; now tightening,
now slacking the cordage, one while hoisting
the mainyard or moving the rudder, by one
and the same power carrying on so many
several effects: and that it is lodged in the
brain, which appears from this that the
woimds and accidents which touch that part
immediately offend the faculties of the soul;
and 'tis not incongruous that it should thence
diffuse itself into the other parts of the
body:
162 MONTAIGNE
"Phoebus never deviates from his central
way, yet enlightens all things with his rays;**
as the sun sheds from heaven its light and
influence, and fills the world with them:
**The other part of the soul, diffused all
over the body, obeys the divinity and great
name of the mind.'*
Some have said, that there was a general
soul, as it were a great body, from which all
the particular souls were extracted, and
thither again returned, always restoring
themselves to that universal matter:
"They believe that God circulates through
all the earth, sea, and high heavens; hence
cattle, men, flocks, every kind of wild ani-
mals, draw the breath of life, and thither re-
turn when the body is dissolved: nor is there
any death:**
others, that they only rejoined and reunited
themselves to it; others, that they were pro-
duced from the divine substance; others, by
the angels of fire and air: others, that they
were from all antiquity; some, that they were
created at the very point of time the bodies
MONTAIGNE 163
wanted them; others made them descend
from the orb of the moon, and return thither;
the generality of the ancients, that they were
begotten from father to son, after a like man-
ner and production with all other natural
things; raising their argument from the like-
ness of children to their fathers;
"The strong spring from the strong and
good;"
and that we see descend from fathers to their
children, not only bodily marks, but moreover
a resemblance of humors, complexions, and
inclinations of the soul:
**For why should ferocity ever spring from
the fierce lion's seed? why craft from the fox?
why fear from the stag? Why should his
readiness to fly descend to him from his
father.? . . . but that the soul has germs like
the body, and still increases as the body in-
creases!"
that thereupon the Divine justice is grounded,
punishing in the children the faults of their
fathers : forasmuch as the contagion of pater-
nal vices is in some sort imprinted in the soul
164 MONTAIGNE
of children, and that the disorders of their
will extend to them: moreover, that if sonls
had any other derivation than a natural con-
sequence, and that they had been some other
thing out of the body, they would retain some
memory of their first being, the natural facul-
ties that are proper to them of discoursing,
reasoning, and remembering being consid-
ered:
** If it be infused in our bodies at our birth,
why do we retain no memory of our preceding
life, and why not remember anything we did
before?'*
for to make the condition of our souls such
as we would have it to be, we must presup-
pose them all-knowing, when in their natural
simplicity and purity; and, this being so,
they had been such, while free from the
prison of the body, as well before they en-
tered into it, as we hope they shall be after
they are gone out of it: and this former
knowledge, it should follow, they should re-
member being yet in the body, as Plato said,
**That what we learn is no other than a re-
membrance of what we knew before;" a thing
MONTAIGNE 165
which every one by experience may maintain
to be false; forasmuch in the first place, as we
remember what we have been taught: and
as, if the memory purely performed its office,
it would at least suggest to us something
more than what we have been taught; sec-
ondly, that which she knew, being in her
purity, was a true knowledge, knowing
things, as they are, by her divine intelli-
gence: whereas here we make her receive
falsehood and vice, when we tell her of these,
and herein she cannot employ her reminis-
cence, that image and conception having
never been planted in her. To say that the
corporeal presence so suffocates her natural
faculties that they are there utterly ex-
tinguished, is, first, contrary to this other be-
lief of acknowledging her power to be so
great, and those operations of it that men
sensibly perceive in this life to be so ad-
mirable, as to have thereby concluded this
divinity and past eternity, and the immortal-
ity to come:
'*For if the mind is so changed that it has
lost all memory of past things, this, I confess,
appears to me not far from death."
166 MONTAIGNE
Furthermore 'tis here with us, and not else-
where, that the powers and effects of the soul
ought to be considered: all the rest of her per-
fections are vain and useless to her; 'tis by
her present condition that all her immortality
is to be rewarded and paid, and of the life
of man only that she is to render an account.
It had been injustice to have stripped her of
her means and power; to have disarmed her,
in order in the time of her captivity and im-
prisonment, of her weakness and infirmity,
in the time wherein she is under force and
constraint, to pass my sentence and condem-
nation of infinite and perpetual duration; and
insist, upon the consideration of so short a
time, peradventure a life of but an hour or
two, or at the most but of a century, which
have no more proportion to infinity than an
instant: from this momentary interval, to
ordain and definitely determine her whole
being: it were an unreasonable disproportion
to acquire an eternal recompense in return
for so short a life. Plato, to save himself
from this inconvenience, will have future re-
wards limited to the term of a hundred years,
relatively to human duration; and among
MONTAIGNE 167
ourselves several have given them temporal
limits: by this they judged that the genera-
tion of the soul followed the common condi-
tion of human things, as also her life, accord-
ing to the opinion of Epicurus and Demo-
critus, which has been the most received, pur-
suant to these fine notions : that we see it bom
as soon as the body is capable of it; that we
see it increase in vigor as the corporeal vigor
increases; that its feebleness in infancy is very
manifest, then its better form and maturity,
and finally, its declensions in old age, and its
decrepitude:
**We see that the mind is bom with the
body, with it increases, and with it decays:"
they perceived it to be capable of divers
passions, and agitated with several painful
motions, whence it fell into lassitude and un-
easiness; capable of alteration and change,
of cheerfulness, of dulness, of faintness; sub-
ject to diseases and injuries of its own, as the
stomach or the foot:
"We see sick minds cured as well as sick