The Complete Essays (176 page)

There is nothing so supple and eccentric as our understanding. It is like Theramenes’ shoe: good for either foot.
²⁸
It is ambiguous and faces both ways; matters, too, are ambiguous and facing both ways: ‘Give me a silver penny,’ said a Cynic philosopher to Antigonus. ‘That is no present from a king,’ he replied. ‘Give me half a hundredweight of gold then’ – ‘That is no present for. Cynic!’
²⁹

Seu plures calor ille vias et cœca relaxat
Spiramenta, novas veniat qua succus in herbas;
Seu durat magis et venas astringit Mantes,
Ne tenues pluviœ, rapidive potentia solis
Acrior, out Boreœ penetrabile frigus adurat
.

[It is either because the heat opens up new ways through the secret pores in the soil, along which the sap rises to the tender plants, or else because it hardens that soil and constricts its gaping veins, thus protecting it from the drizzling rain, the heat of the burning sun and the penetrating cold of the north wind.]
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‘Ogni medaglia ha suo riverso.’
[Every medal has its obverse.] That is why Clitomachus said in ancient times that Carneades had surpassed the labours of Hercules by having wrenched assent away from Man (that is, conjecturing and rashness in judging).
³¹

That idea of Carneades – such a vigorous one – was born, I suggest, in antiquity because of the shamelessness of those whose profession was knowledge and their overweaning arrogance.

Aesop was put on sale with two other slaves. The purchaser asked the first what he could do: he, to enhance his value, answered mountains and miracles: he could do this and he could do that. The second said as much or more of himself. When it was Aesop’s turn to be asked what he could do he said, ‘Nothing! These two have got in first and taken the lot: they know everything!’
³²

That is what happened in the school of philosophy. The arrogance of those who attributed to Man’s mind a capacity for everything produced in others (through irritation and emulation) the opinion that it has a capacity for nothing. Some went to the same extreme about ignorance as the others did about knowledge, so that no one may deny that Man is immoderate in all things and that he has no stopping-point save necessity, when too feeble to get any farther.

12. On physiognomy

[Renaissance books on physiognomy all gave pride of place to Zopyrus the Physiognomist, who judged by his art that Socrates was a bad man and a bom womanizer. (Socrates admitted this, adding that he had ‘re-formed’ his soul.) Montaigne compares and contrasts himself to Socrates and shows how his own frank expression served him well. This chapter corrects much of what had been said in I, 20 (‘To philosophize is to learn how to die’) and takes even farther Montaigne’s respect for Nature and the wisdom of the beasts expounded in ‘An apology for Raymond Sebond’. In this most personally anecdotal of chapters, Montaigne has discovered the moral greatness of simple folk faced with certain death. And he hints at his hopes that Henry of Navarre will bring peace to France.]

[B] Virtually all the opinions which we have are held on authority and trust. That is no bad thing: in so ailing a time as this we could do nothing worse than to make our own choices. That portrait of the conversations of Socrates which his friends have bequeathed to us receives our approbation only because we are overawed by the general approval of them. It is not from our own knowledge, since they do not follow our
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practices: if something like them were to be produced nowadays there are few who would rate them highly. We can appreciate no graces which are not pointed, inflated and magnified by artifice. Such graces as flow on under the name of naïvety and simplicity readily go unseen by so coarse an insight as ours: they have a delicate, secret beauty: to uncover their hidden light requires sight which is purged and pure. For us, is not naïvety close kin to simplemindedness and a quality worthy of reproach?
²
Socrates makes his soul move with the natural motion of the common people: thus speaks a peasant; thus speaks a woman. [C] He has nothing on his lips but draymen, joiners, cobblers and masons. [B] His inductions and comparisons are drawn from the most ordinary and best-known of men’s activities; anyone can understand him. Under so common a form we today would never have discerned the nobility and splendour of his astonishing concepts; we [C] who judge any which are not swollen up by erudition
to be base and commonplace and [B] who are never aware of riches except when pompously paraded. Our society has been prepared to appreciate nothing but ostentation: nowadays you can fill men up with nothing but wind and then bounce them about like balloons. But this man, Socrates, did not deal with vain notions: his aim was to provide us with matter and precepts which genuinely and intimately serve our lives:

servare modum, finemque tenere,
Naturamque sequi
.

[to keep the mean; to hold fast to the limit; and to follow nature.]
³

He was ever one, ever the same: he raised himself up to the highest level of vigour not by sallies but by complexion. Or (to put it better) he raised nothing, but rather brought it down and back to its natural and original level, by which he moderated vigour, hardships and difficulties.

In the case of Cato we can clearly see that his manner is strained far above the normal: in the brave actions of his life and death we know that he is riding high as his tallest horses. Socrates however keeps his feet on the ground, dealing with the most useful subjects at a quiet and everyday pace, advancing at the rate of human life towards both death and the harshest ordeals that can ever occur. Fortunately it turned out that the man most worthy of being known and of being set before the world as an example was precisely the one we have the surest knowledge about.
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He was observed by the most observant men there ever have been: the testimonies that we have of him are astonishing by their fidelity and their skill. Happily for us he could so order the purest and most child-like thoughts that, without stretching them or perverting them, he could produce by them the most beautiful actions of our souls. He portrays the soul as neither high-soaring nor abundantly endowed: he portrays it simply as sane, though with a pure and lively sanity. From such commonplace natural principles, from such ordinary everyday ideas, without being carried away and without goading himself on, he formed beliefs, actions and morals which were not simply the best regulated but also the most sublime and most forceful that ever have been. [C] He it was who brought human wisdom back from the heavens where she was wasting her time and returned her to mankind, in whom lies her most proper and most demanding
task as well as her most useful one.
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[B] See him pleading his case before his judges; see with what arguments he awakens his mind for the hazards of war; see what reasons strengthen his endurance when confronted by lies, tyranny and death, as well as by his wife’s pig-headedness. Nothing there is lifted from the arts or sciences: the simplest folk can recognize in him their own means and strengths. It is not possible to be less pretentious or more lowly. He did a great favour to human nature by showing how much she can do by herself. We are richer than we think, each one of us. Yet we are schooled for borrowing and begging! We are trained to make more use of other men’s goods than of our own.

In nothing does Man know how to halt at the point of his need; be it pleasure, wealth or power, he clasps at more than he can hold: his greed is not susceptible to moderation. It is the same, I find, with his curiosity for knowledge: he hacks out for himself much greater tasks than he needs or can achieve, [C] making the extent of knowledge and the usefulness of knowledge co-equal:
‘Ut omnium return, sic litterarum quoque intemperantia laboramus.’
[In learning as in everything else, we suffer from lack of temperance.]
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And Tacitus is right to praise the mother of Agricola for having restrained in her son too seething an appetite for knowledge:
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like the rest of men’s goods, knowledge is one which, if we look at it steadily, has much inherent vanity and natural feebleness. And it costs us dear. To acquire such pabulum is more hazardous than the acquiring of other food or drink;
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for in other cases whatever food we have bought we can carry home in containers – which gives us time to decide on its worth, and on how much of it we shall take and when. But from the outset all kinds of learning can be put into no container but our soul: as we buy them we ingest them, leaving the market-place either already contaminated or else improved. Some of them, instead of nourishing us, burden us and hamper us; others still, under pretence of curing us, poison us.

[B] I have taken pleasure in hearing of men somewhere or other who, from piety, make vows of ignorance similar to vows of chastity, poverty and penance. To take the edge off that cupidity which goads us towards
the study of books, and to deprive our souls of that pleasurable self-satisfaction which thrills us with the opinion that we know something is farther to castrate our disordered desires. [C] And it is to fulfil the vow of poverty abundantly to be also poor in spirit.
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[B] We need but little doctrine to live at our ease. And Socrates teaches us that it lies within us, as well as how to find it there and how to make it help us.
¹⁰
All that capacity of ours for exceeding what is [C] natural is more or less [B] vain and superfluous:
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it is much if it does not burden and bother us more than it serves us: [C]
‘Paucis opus est litteris ad mentem bonam.’
[To produce a good mind you need only a few books.] [B] They are the feverish excesses of our mind, a confused and disquieted tool.

Contemplate yourself. You will find within you Nature’s arguments concerning death – true arguments, most fit to serve you in your need: they it is which make a farm-labourer, as well as entire nations, die with as much constancy as a philosopher.
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[C] Would I have died any the less happily before reading the
Tusculan Disputations?
I judge that I would not. And now that I find that I must really face death, I realize that my tongue has been enriched by them but not at all my mind, which is as Nature forged it for me: its buckler in that combat is to approach it as do the common people. Books have been useful to me less for instruction than as training. What if [B] erudition, while making an assay at arming us with new defences against natural ills, should have imprinted on our thoughts the weight of those ills and their size rather than her subtle arguments for protecting us against them! [C] For subtle arguments they are, by which erudition most vainly alerts us. Just see how writers – even the most wise and succinct of them – strew additional trivial arguments round about one good one, arguments which, if you look at them closely, have no body in them. They are nothing but verbal contortions by which we are deceived. Yet, in so far as they may serve a purpose, I have no wish to pluck them any barer. Here and there within these covers there are enough arguments of that sort, either borrowed or imitated. Nevertheless
we must be careful not to give the name of fortitude to what is but the conduct of a gentleman, nor call solid what is but clever, nor good what is but beautiful –
‘quae magis gustata quant potato delectant’
[things which are more pleasant to sip than to quaff].
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And,
‘ubi non ingenii sed animi negotium agitur’
[whenever we are concerned with the soul not the mind], not everything that we fancy feeds us.

[B] To see the exertions that Seneca imposed upon himself in order to steel himself against death, to see him sweat and grunt in order to stiffen and reassure himself during his long struggles on his pedestal, would have shaken his reputation for me if he had not sustained it with such valour as he was dying. His burning emotion, [C] so oft repeated, shows that he himself was ardent and impetuous. (We must convict him out of his own mouth:
‘Magnus animus remissius loquitur et securius’
[A great mind speaks with more calm and assurance];
‘Non est alius ingenio, alius animo color.’
[There is not one colour for the wit another for the mind.]) And it also [B] shows that
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he was to some extent hard pressed by his adversary. The style of Plutarch, being more detached and relaxed, is for me more manly and persuasive: I would find it easier to believe that his soul’s emotions were more assured and steady. Seneca, more [C] lively [B], puts in the goad
¹⁵
and wakes us up with a start; he stimulates, rather, our wit: Plutarch, more [C] settled, [B] constantly
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reassures and strengthens us; he stimulates, rather, our understanding. [C] Seneca enraptures our judgement: Plutarch wins it.

I have likewise seen even more hallowed writings which, in their portrayal of the conflict sustained against the prickings of the flesh, show them to be so sharp, so strong and invincible, that the likes of us, who are but the off-scourings of the commonality, are as struck with wonder by the strangeness and unknown power of the temptations as by the resistance put up to them.
¹⁷

[B] Why do we go on stiffening our morale by such learned maxims?
¹⁸

Let us look to the land and to the wretched people we can see scattered over it, bending low over their toil, ignorant of Aristotle, Cato, example and precept: from them Nature draws every day deeds of constancy and steadfastness which are purer and more unbending than those which we so carefully study in our schools. How many country-folk do I see ignoring poverty; how many yearning for death or meeting it without panic or distress? That man over there who is trenching my garden has, this morning, buried his father or his son. The very names by which they call our afflictions soften them and sweeten their bitter taste: for them consumption is ‘the cough’; dysentery, a ‘runny stomach’; pleurisy, ‘a chill’. And as they give them mild names they endure them better too. Ills have to be grievous indeed to interrupt their habitual toil. They take to their beds only to die: [C]
‘Simplex illa et aperta virtus in obscurant et solertam scientiam versa est.’
[Virtue, simple and open, has been converted into obscure and subtle erudition.]
¹⁹

[B] I wrote this round about the time when the huge burdens of our civil disturbances were for several months pressing right down on me with all their weight. I had the enemy at my gates on one side and on the other side a worse enemy, marauders: [C]
‘non armis sed vitiis certatur’
[not with arms is the fight but with crimes].
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[B] I was being assayed by every kind of military outrage all at once.