bodies by the help of medicines:"
168 MONTAIGNE
dazzled and intoxicated with the fumes of
wine; jostled from her seat by the vapors of
a burning fever; laid asleep by the applica-
tion of some medicaments, and roused by
others:
"The soul must, of necessity, be corporeal,
for we see it suffer from wounds and blows:"
they saw it astounded and all its faculties
overthrown by the mere bite of a mad dog,
and, in that condition, to have no such sta-
bility of reason, no such sufficiency, no such
virtue, no philosophical resolution, no such
resistance as could exempt it from the sub-
jection of these accidents; the slaver of a con-
temptible cur, shed upon the hand of
Socrates, to shake all his wisdom and all his
so great and well-regulated imaginations, and
so to annihilate them as that there remained
no trace or footstep of his former knowl-
edge:
**The power of the soul is disturbed, over-
thrown, and distracted by the same poison:"
and this poison to find no more resistance in
this great soul than in that of an infant of
MONTAIGNE 169
four years old : a poison sufficient to make all
philosophy, if it were incarnate, furious and
mad; insomuch that Cato, so stiff-necked
against death and fortune, could not endure
the sight of a looking-glass or of water, con-
founded with horror and affright at the dan-
ger of falling, by the contagion of a mad dog,
into the disease called by physicians hydro-
phobia:
''The violence of the disease diffused
throughout the limbs, disturbs the soul, as
in the salt sea the foaming waves rage with
the force of the strong winds.'*
Now, as to this particular, philosophy has
sufficiently armed man to encounter all other
accidents, either with patience, or if the
search of that costs too dear, by an infallible
defeat, in totally depriving himself of all
sentiment; but these are expedients, that are
only of use to a soul being itself and in its
full power, capable of reason and delibera-
tion: but not at all proper for this incon-
venience, where even in a philosopher, the
soul becomes the soul of a madman, troubled,
overturned, and lost: which many occasions
170 MONTAIGNE
may produce, as a too vehement agitation
that any violent passion of the soul may beget
in itself, or a wound in a certain part of the
person, or vapors from the stomach, any of
which may stupefy the understanding and
turn the brain;
"In the ailments of the body the mind
often wanders, grows disordered and wild,
and sometimes by a heavy lethargy is cast
into a profound and everlasting sleep; the
eyes close, the head sinks.**
The philosophers, methinks, have scarcely
touched this string, no more than another of
the same importance; they have this dilemma
continually in their mouths to console our
mortal condition: *'The soul is either mortal
or immortal; if mortal, it will suffer no pain;
if immortal, it will change for the better.**
They never touch the other branch: ''What
if she change for the worse?** And they
leave to the poets the menaces of future tor-
ments; but thereby they make for themselves
a good game. These are two omissions that
I often meet with in their discourses: I re-
turn to the first.
MONTAIGNE 171
This soul loses the use of the sovereign
stoical good, so constant and so firm: our
fine human wisdom must here yield and give
up its arms. As to the rest, they also con-
sidered, hy the vanity of human reason, that
the mixture and association of two so con-
trary things as the mortal and the immortal,
is unimaginable:
"For to join the mortal and the eternal,
and think they can agree and discharge
mutual functions, is folly. For what things
are more differing or more distinct betwixt
themselves, and more opposed, than the
mortal and the immortal and enduring joined
together in order to undergo cruel storms?"
Moreover, they perceived the soul declining
in death, as well as the body:
**It yields up the body to old age:"
which, according to Zeno, the image of sleep
sufficiently demonstrates to us; for he looks
upon it as a fainting and fall of the soul, as
well as of the body:
**He thinks the mind is contracted, and
that it slips and falls."
172 MONTAIGNE
And what they perceived in some, that the
soul maintained its force and vigor to the
last gasp of life , they attributed to the
variety of diseases ; as it is observable in men
at the last extremity, that some retain one
sense and some another; one the hearing, and
another the smell, without any alteration;
and that there is no so universal a depriva-
tion, that some parts do not remain entire
and vigorous:
"Not otherwise than if, when a sick man's
foot may be in pain, yet his head be free from
any suffering.'*
The sight of our judgment has the same re-
lation to truth that the owl's eyes have to the
splendor of the sun, says Aristotle. By what
can we better convict it than by so gross
blindness in so apparent a light! For as to
the contrary opinion of the immortality of the
soul, which Cicero says was first introduced,
at all events by the testimony of books, by
Pherecides Syrius in the time of King Tul-
lius, though others attribute it to Thales, and
others to others, 'tis the part of human
science that is treated of with the most doubt
MONTAIGNE 173
and the greatest reservation. The most posi-
tive dogmatists are, on this point, principally
constrained to fly to the refuge of the
Academy. No one knows what Aristotle has
established upon this subject, any more than
all the ancients in general, who handle it with
a wavering belief:
"A thing more satisfactory in the promise
than in the proof;"
he conceals himself in clouds of words and
difficult and unintelligible fancies, and has
left to his sect as great a dispute about his
judgment as about the matter itself.
Two things rendered this opinion plausi-
ble to them: one, that without the immortality
of souls there would be nothing whereon to
ground the vain hopes of glory, which is a
consideration of wonderful repute in the
world; the other, that it is a very profitable
impression, as Plato says, that vices, though
they escape the discovery and cognizance of
human justice, are still within the reach of
the divine, which will pursue them even after
the death of the guilty. Man is excessively
solicitous to prolong his being, and has, to
174 MONTAIGNE
the utmost of his power, provided for it;
momunents are erected for the conservation
of the body, and from glory to transmit the
name; impatient of his fortune, he has em-
ployed all his wit and opinion in the rebuild-
ing of himself, and in the sustenance of him-
self by his productions. The soul, by reason
of its anxiety and impotence, being unable
to stand by itself, wanders up and down to
seek support in consolations, hopes, and other
external circumstances, to which she adheres
and fixes; and how light or fantastic soever
invention pronounces them to it, relies more
willingly and with greater assurance upon
them, than upon itself. But 'tis wonderful
to observe how short the most constant and
firm maintainers of this just and clear persua-
sion of the immortality of the soul fall, and
how weak their arguments are, when they go
about to prove it by human reason:
''They are dreams, not of the teacher, but
of the wisher,"
says one of the ancients. By which testi-
mony man may know that he owes the truth
he himself fiinds out to fortune and accident;
MONTAIGNE 175
since, even when it is fallen into his hand, he
has not wherewith to hold and maintain it, and
that his reason has not force to make use of it.
All things produced by our own reasoning
and understanding, whether true or false, are
subject to incertitude and controversy. 'Twas
for the chastisement of our pride, and for the
instruction of our misery and incapacity, that
God wrought the perplexity and confusion of
the old tower of Babel. Whatever we under-
take without His assistance, whatever we see
without the lamp of His grace, is but vanity
and folly; we corrupt and debase by our
weakness the very essence of truth, which is
uniform and constant, when fortune puts it
into our possession. What course soever man
takes of himself, God still permits it to come
to the same confusion, the image whereof He
so vividly represents to us in the just chas-
tisement wherewith He crushed Nimrod's
presumption, and frustrated the vain attempt
of his pyramid:
**I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and
will bring to nothing the understanding of
the prudent."
176 MONTAIGNE
The diversity of idioms and languages with
which He disturbed this work, what are they
other than this infinite and perpetual alter-
cation and discordance of opinions and rea-
sons, which accompany and confound the vain
building of human wisdom, and to very good
effect ? For what would hold us if we had but
the least grain of knowledge ? This saint has
very much obliged me:
**The very obscurity of the truth is either
an exercise of humility or a crushing of
pride."
To what a pitch of presumption and insolence
do we raise our blindness and folly!
But to return to my subject: it was truly
very good reason that we should be beholden
to God only, and to the favor of His grace,
for the truth of so noble a belief, since from
His sole bounty we receive the fruit of im-
mortality, which consists in the enjoyment
of eternal beatitude. Let us ingenuously con-
fess that God alone has dictated it to us, and
faith; for 'tis no lesson of nature and our
own reason : and whoever will inquire into his
own being and power, both within and with-
MONTAIGNE 177
out, otherwise than by this divine privilege:
whoever shall consider man impartially and
without flattery, will see nothing in him of
efficacy or faculty that relishes of anything
but death and earth. The more we give, and
confess to owe and render to God, we do it
with the greater Christianity. That which
this Stoic philosopher says he holds from the
fortuitous consent of the popular voice, had
it not been better had he held it from God?
''When we discourse of the inamortality of
minds, the consent of men that either fear
or adore the infernal powers is of no small
moment. I make use of this public persua-
sion."
Now, the weakness of human arguments
upon this subject is particularly manifested
by the fabulous circumstances they have
superadded as consequences of this opinion,
to find out of what condition this immortality
of ours was. Let us omit the Stoics:
''They give us the enjoyment (of life), as
they do to crows; they say that minds shall
continue long, that they shall continue always
they deny:"
178 MONTAIGNE
who gives to soul a life after this, but finite.
The most universal and received fancy, and
which continues down to our times in various
places, is that of which they make Pytha-
goras the author: not that he was the original
inventor, but because it received a great deal
of weight and repute by the authority of his
approbation; and this is, that souls at their
departure out of us do nothing but shift from
one body to another, from a lion to a horse,
from a horse to a king, continually travelling
at this rate from habitation to habitation.
And he himself said that he remembered to
have been Aethalides, since that Euphorbus,
and afterwards Hermotimus, and finally from
Pyrrhus was passed into Pythagoras, having
a memory of himself of two hundred and six
years. Some have added that these very
souls at times remount to heaven and come
down again:
"0 father, is it to be believed that some
sublime souls should hence mount to heaven
and thence return to lumpish bodies! what
is the so dire affection for life in wretched
(men!)."
MONTAIGNE 179
Origen makes them eternally to go and come,
from a better to a worse estate. The opinion
that Varro makes mention of is, that after
four hmidred and forty years* revolution
they are reunited to their first bodies;
Chrysippus held that this would happen after
a certain space of time unknown and un-
limited. Plato, who professes to have de-
rived from Pindar and the ancient poets the
belief that souls are to undergo infinite vicis-
situdes of mutation, for which the soul is pre-
pared, having neither punishment nor reward
in the other world, but what is temporal, as
its life here is but temporal, concludes that it
has a singular knowledge of the affairs of
heaven, of hell, of the world, through all
which it has passed, repassed, and made stay
in several voyages; fit matters for her
memory. Observe her progress elsewhere:
**he who has lived well is reunited to the star
to which he is assigned: he who has lived ill
removes into a woman, and, if he does not
there reform, is again removed into a beast of
condition suitable to his vicious manners, and
will see no end of his punishments till he re-
180 MONTAIGNE
tTum to his natural constitution, and has by
the force of reason purged himself from the
gross, stupid, and elementary qualities he was
polluted with." But I will not forget the
objection the Epicureans make against this
transmigration from one body to another;
'tis a pleasant one: they ask, ''What expedi-
ent would be found out if the number of
dying should chance to be greater than that
of those who are coming into the world! for
the souls turned out of their old habitation
would scuffle and crowd which should first get
possession of this new lodging." And they
further demand, *'how they should pass away
their time whilst waiting till a new quarter
were made ready for them: or, on the con-
trary, if more animals should be bom than
die, the bodies, they say, would be but in an
ill condition whilst awaiting a soul to be in-
fused into them; and it would fall out that
some bodies would die before they had been
alive:
**In fine, it seems ridiculous that souls
should be always awaiting the coupling and
birth of animals, and that immortals should
in vast numbers crowd about mortal germs,
MONTAIGNE 181
and strive and contend with eagerness which
should first possess them."
Others have arrested the soul in the body of
the deceased, with it to animate serpents,
worms, and other beasts which are said to be
bred out of the corruption of our limbs, and
even out of our ashes; others divide it into
two parts, the one mortal, the other immortal;
others make it corporeal, and nevertheless
immortal; some make it immortal without
science or knowledge. And some have be-
lieved that devils were made of the souls of
the damned, and this has been the fancy of
some among ourselves, as Plutarch thinks
that gods are made of those that are saved;
for there are few things which that author is
80 positive in as he is in this; ever maintain-
ing, elsewhere, a doubtful and ambiguous
way of expression. **We are to hold," says
he, ''and steadfastly to believe, that the souls
of virtuous men, both according to nature and
to the divine justice, become saints, and from
saints demi-gods, and from demi-gods, after
they are perfectly, as in sacrifices of purga-
tion, cleansed and purified, being delivered
182 MONTAIGNE
from all passibility and all mortality, they
become, not by any civil decree but in real
tmth, and according to all probability of
reason, entire and perfect gods, receiving a
most happy and glorious end.'* But who
desires to see him, he who is the most sober
and moderate of the whole tribe, lay about
him with greater boldness, and relate his
miracles upon this subject, I refer him to his
Treatise of the Moon, and his Daemon of
Socrates, where he may, as evidently as in
any other place whatever, satisfy himself that
the mysteries of philosophy have many
strange things in common with those of
poesy; the himian understanding losing itself
in attempting to sound and search all things
to the bottom, just as we, tired and worn out
with a long course of life, relapse into in-
fancy. Such are the fine and certain instruc-
tions which we extract from human knowl-
edge concerning the soul.
There is not less temerity in what it teaches
us touching the corporeal parts. Let us
choose one or two examples, for otherwise
we should lose ourselves in this vast and
troubled ocean of medicinal errors. Let us
MONTAIGNE 183
see whether, at least, they agree about the
matter whereof men produce one another;
for as to their first production it is no wonder,
if in a thing so high and so long since past,
human understanding finds itself perplexed
and dissipated. Archelaus the naturalist,
whose disciple and favorite Socrates was, ac-
cording to Aristoxenus, said, that both men
and beasts were made of a lacteous slime, ex-
pressed by the heat of the earth: Pythagoras
says, that our seed is the foam of our better
blood: Plato, that it is the distillation of the
marrow of the backbone, which he argues
from the circumstance that that part is first
sensible of being weary of the work : Alcmeon,
that it is part of the substance of the brain,
and this is shown, says he, inasmuch as it
causes weakness of the eyes in those who im-
moderately labor in that exercise: Demo-
critus, that it is a substance extracted from
the whole mass of the body: Epicurus, that it
is extracted from soul and body: Aristotle, an
excrement drawn from the aliment of the
blood, the last which is diffused through our
members: others, that it is blood concocted
and digested by the heat of the genitories.
184 MONTAIGNE
which they judge by reason that in excessive
endeavors a man voids pure blood; wherein
there seems to be the most likelihood, could
a man extract any probability from so in-
finite a confusion. Now, to bring this seed to
do its work, how many contrary opinions are
set on foot. Aristotle and Democritus are of
opinion that women have no sperm, and that
'tis nothing but a sweat that they distil in
the heat of pleasure and motion, and that
contributes nothing at all to generation:
Galen, on the contrary, and his followers be-
lieve that without the fusion of seeds there
can be no generation. Here, again, are the
physicians, the philosophers, the lawyers, and
the divines by the ears with our wives about
the dispute, for what time women carry their
fruit; and I, for my part, by the example of
myself, side with those who maintain that a
woman goes eleven months with child. The
world is built upon this experience; there is
not so simple a little woman that cannot give
her judgment in all these controversies, and
yet we cannot agree.
Here is enough to verify that man is no
better instructed in the knowledge of him-
MONTAIGNE 185
self in his corporeal than in his spiritual part.
We have proposed himself to himself, and his
reason to his reason, to see what she could
say. I think I have sufficiently demonstrated
how little she understands herself in herself;
and who understands not himself in himself,
in what can he possibly understand?
*'As if he could understand the measure
of anything that knows not his own."
Truly, Protagoras told us a pretty flam, in
making man the measure of all things who
never knew so much as his own; if it be not
he, his dignity will not permit that any
other creature should have this advantage;
now, he being so contrary in himself, and one
judgment so incessantly subverting another,
this favorable proposition was but a mockery,
which led us necessarily to conclude the
nullity of the compass and the compasser.
When Thales reputes the knowledge of man
very difficult for man, he, at the same time,
gives him to understand, that all other knowl-
edge is impossible to him.
You, for whom I have taken the pains, con-
trary to my custom, to write so long a dis-
186 MONTAIGNE
course, will not refuse to maintain your
Sebonde by the ordinary forms of arguing
wherein you are every day instructed, and
in this will exercise your study. For this
last fencing trick is never to be made use of
but as an extreme remedy; 'tis a desperate
thrust, wherein you are to quit your own
arms to make your adversary abandon his:
and a secret sleight, which must be very
rarely and very reservedly put in practice.
'Tis great temerity to lose yourself, that you
may destroy another; you must not die to be
revenged, as Gobrias did; for, hotly grappling
in combat with a Persian lord, Darius com-
ing in, sword in hand, and fearing to strike
lest he should kill Gobrias, he called out to
him boldly to fall on, though he should nm
them both through at once. I have known
weapons and conditions of single combat,
without quarter, and wherein he who pro-
posed them, put himself and his adversary
upon terms of inevitable death to them both,
censured as unjust. The Portuguese, in the
Indian Sea, took certain Turks prisoners,
who, impatient of their captivity, resolved
(and it succeeded), by striking some ship
MONTAIGNE 187
nails against one another and making a spark
fall into the barrels of powder that were in
the place where they were confined, to blow
np and reduce themselves, their masters, and
the vessel to ashes. We touch here the utmost
limits of the sciences, whose extremity is
vicious, as in virtue. Keep yourselves in the
common road; it is not good to be so subtle
and cunning. Remember the Tuscan
proverb:
**If you draw your thread too fine, it will
break."
I advise you, in all your opinions and medi-
tations, as well as in your manners and all
other things, to keep yourself moderate and
reserved, and to avoid all novelty and
strangeness: I am an enemy to all out-of-the-
way proceedings. You who by the authority
of your greatness, and yet more by the ad-
vantages which those qualities give you that
are more your own, may, with the twinkle of
an eye, command whom you please, should
give this charge to some professor of letters,
who might, after a much better manner, have
sustained and illustrated these things to you.
188 MONTAIGNE
But here is as much as you will stand in need
of.
Epicurus said of the laws, that the worst
were so necessary for us, that without them
men would devour one another; and Plato
afl&rms, that without laws we should live like
beasts. Our mind is a wandering, dangerous,
and temerarious tool; it is hard to couple any
order or measure to it; and in my time, those
who are endued with some rare excellence
above others, or any extraordinary vivacity
of understanding, we see almost all of them
lash out into license of opinions and manners;
'tis almost a miracle to find one temperate
and socially tractable. There's all the rea-
son in the world to limit the human mind
within the strictest limits possible: in study,
as in all the rest, we ought to have its steps
and advances numbered and fixed, and that
the limits of its inquisition be bounded by
art. It is curbed and fettered by religions,
laws, customs, sciences, precepts, mortal and
immortal penalties and rewards; and yet we
see that by its volubility and dissolvability
it escapes from all these bounds; 'tis a vain
MONTAIGNE 189
body which has nothing to lay hold on; or
to seize a various and difform body, incapable
of being either bound or held. Truly, there
are few souls so regular, firm, and well de-
scended that are to be trusted with their own
conduct, and that can, with moderation and
without temerity, sail in the liberty of their
own judgments beyond the common and re-
ceived opinions: 'tis more expedient to put
them under pupilage. The mind is a danger-
ous weapon, even to the possessor, if he knows
not discreetly how to use it: and there is not
a beast to whom a headboard can more
properly be given to keep his looks down and
before his feet, and to hinder him from wan-
dering here and there out of the tracks which
custom and the laws have laid before him:
therefore it will be much better for you to
keep yourself in the beaten path, let it be
what it will, than to fly out at a venture with
this unbridled liberty. If any of these new
doctors should seek to exercise his ingenuity
in your presence, at the expense both of your
soul and his own, to avoid this dangerous
plague, which is every day laid in your way,
190 MONTAIGNE
this preservative, in extremist necessity, will
prevent the contagion of this poison from
offending either you or your company.
The liberty, then, and frolic forwardness
of these ancient wits, produced in philosophy
and human sciences, several sects of different
opinions, each undertaking to judge and
make choice of what he would stick to and
maintain. But now that men go all one way,
**Who are so tied and obliged to certain
beliefs, that they are bound to defend even