Essays of Michel de Montaigne - 043

“Nec ultra
Errorem foveo.”
[“Nor do I cherish error further.”
or: “Nor carry wrong further.”
--Juvenal, viii. 164.]
For as to the opinion of the Stoics, who say, “That the wise man when he
works, works by all the virtues together, though one be most apparent,
according to the nature of the action”; and herein the similitude of a
human body might serve them somewhat, for the action of anger cannot
work, unless all the humours assist it, though choler predominate;
--if they will thence draw a like consequence, that when the wicked man
does wickedly, he does it by all the vices together, I do not believe it
to be so, or else I understand them not, for I by effect find the
contrary. These are sharp, unsubstantial subleties, with which
philosophy sometimes amuses itself. I follow some vices, but I fly
others as much as a saint would do. The Peripatetics also disown this
indissoluble connection; and Aristotle is of opinion that a prudent and
just man may be intemperate and inconsistent. Socrates confessed to some
who had discovered a certain inclination to vice in his physiognomy, that
it was, in truth, his natural propension, but that he had by discipline
corrected it. And such as were familiar with the philosopher Stilpo
said, that being born with addiction to wine and women, he had by study
rendered himself very abstinent both from the one and the other.
What I have in me of good, I have, quite contrary, by the chance of my
birth; and hold it not either by law, precept, or any other instruction;
the innocence that is in me is a simple one; little vigour and no art.
Amongst other vices, I mortally hate cruelty, both by nature and
judgment, as the very extreme of all vices: nay, with so much tenderness
that I cannot see a chicken’s neck pulled off without trouble, and cannot
without impatience endure the cry of a hare in my dog’s teeth, though the
chase be a violent pleasure. Such as have sensuality to encounter,
freely make use of this argument, to shew that it is altogether “vicious
and unreasonable; that when it is at the height, it masters us to that
degree that a man’s reason can have no access,” and instance our own
experience in the act of love,
“Quum jam praesagit gaudia corpus,
Atque in eo est Venus,
ut muliebria conserat arva.”
[None of the translators of the old editions used for this etext
have been willing to translate this passage from Lucretius, iv.
1099; they take a cop out by bashfully saying: “The sense is in the
preceding passage of the text.” D.W.]
wherein they conceive that the pleasure so transports us, that our reason
cannot perform its office, whilst we are in such ecstasy and rapture. I
know very well it may be otherwise, and that a man may sometimes, if he
will, gain this point over himself to sway his soul, even in the critical
moment, to think of something else; but then he must ply it to that bent.
I know that a man may triumph over the utmost effort of this pleasure: I
have experienced it in myself, and have not found Venus so imperious a
goddess, as many, and much more virtuous men than I, declare. I do not
consider it a miracle, as the Queen of Navarre does in one of the Tales
of her Heptameron--[“Vu gentil liure pour son estoffe.”]--(which is a
very pretty book of its kind), nor for a thing of extreme difficulty, to
pass whole nights, where a man has all the convenience and liberty he can
desire, with a long-coveted mistress, and yet be true to the pledge first
given to satisfy himself with kisses and suchlike endearments, without
pressing any further. I conceive that the example of the pleasure of the
chase would be more proper; wherein though the pleasure be less, there is
the higher excitement of unexpected joy, giving no time for the reason,
taken by surprise, to prepare itself for the encounter, when after a long
quest the beast starts up on a sudden in a place where, peradventure, we
least expected it; the shock and the ardour of the shouts and cries of
the hunters so strike us, that it would be hard for those who love this
lesser chase, to turn their thoughts upon the instant another way; and
the poets make Diana triumph over the torch and shafts of Cupid:
“Quis non malarum, quas amor curas habet,
Haec inter obliviscitur?”
[“Who, amongst such delights would not remove out of his thoughts
the anxious cares of love.”--Horace, Epod., ii. 37.]
To return to what I was saying before, I am tenderly compassionate of
others’ afflictions, and should readily cry for company, if, upon any
occasion whatever, I could cry at all. Nothing tempts my tears but
tears, and not only those that are real and true, but whatever they are,
feigned or painted. I do not much lament the dead, and should envy them
rather; but I very much lament the dying. The savages do not so much
offend me, in roasting and eating the bodies of the dead, as they do who
torment and persecute the living. Nay, I cannot look so much as upon the
ordinary executions of justice, how reasonable soever, with a steady eye.
Some one having to give testimony of Julius Caesar’s clemency; “he was,”
says he, “mild in his revenges. Having compelled the pirates to yield by
whom he had before been taken prisoner and put to ransom; forasmuch as he
had threatened them with the cross, he indeed condemned them to it, but
it was after they had been first strangled. He punished his secretary
Philemon, who had attempted to poison him, with no greater severity than
mere death.” Without naming that Latin author,--[Suetonius, Life of
Casay, c. 74.]--who thus dares to allege as a testimony of mercy the
killing only of those by whom we have been offended; it is easy to guess
that he was struck with the horrid and inhuman examples of cruelty
practised by the Roman tyrants.
For my part, even in justice itself, all that exceeds a simple death
appears to me pure cruelty; especially in us who ought, having regard to
their souls, to dismiss them in a good and calm condition; which cannot
be, when we have agitated them by insufferable torments. Not long since,
a soldier who was a prisoner, perceiving from a tower where he was shut
up, that the people began to assemble to the place of execution, and that
the carpenters were busy erecting a scaffold, he presently concluded
that the preparation was for him, and therefore entered into a resolution
to kill himself, but could find no instrument to assist him in his design
except an old rusty cart-nail that fortune presented to him; with this he
first gave himself two great wounds about his throat, but finding these
would not do, he presently afterwards gave himself a third in the belly,
where he left the nail sticking up to the head. The first of his keepers
who came in found him in this condition: yet alive, but sunk down and
exhausted by his wounds. To make use of time, therefore, before he
should die, they made haste to read his sentence; which having done, and
he hearing that he was only condemned to be beheaded, he seemed to take
new courage, accepted wine which he had before refused, and thanked his
judges for the unhoped-for mildness of their sentence; saying, that he
had taken a resolution to despatch himself for fear of a more severe and
insupportable death, having entertained an opinion, by the preparations
he had seen in the place, that they were resolved to torment him with
some horrible execution, and seemed to be delivered from death in having
it changed from what he apprehended.
I should advise that those examples of severity by which ‘tis designed to
retain the people in their duty, might be exercised upon the dead bodies
of criminals; for to see them deprived of sepulture, to see them boiled
and divided into quarters, would almost work as much upon the vulgar, as
the pain they make the living endure; though that in effect be little or
nothing, as God himself says, “Who kill the body, and after that have no
more that they can do;”--[Luke, xii. 4.]--and the poets singularly
dwell upon the horrors of this picture, as something worse than death:
“Heu! reliquias semiustas regis, denudatis ossibus,
Per terram sanie delibutas foede divexarier.”
[“Alas! that the half-burnt remains of the king, exposing his bones,
should be foully dragged along the ground besmeared with gore.”
--Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., i. 44.]
I happened to come by one day accidentally at Rome, just as they were
upon executing Catena, a notorious robber: he was strangled without any
emotion of the spectators, but when they came to cut him in quarters, the
hangman gave not a blow that the people did not follow with a doleful cry
and exclamation, as if every one had lent his sense of feeling to the
miserable carcase. Those inhuman excesses ought to be exercised upon the
bark, and not upon the quick. Artaxerxes, in almost a like case,
moderated the severity of the ancient laws of Persia, ordaining that the
nobility who had committed a fault, instead of being whipped, as they
were used to be, should be stripped only and their clothes whipped for
them; and that whereas they were wont to tear off their hair, they should
only take off their high-crowned tiara.’--[Plutarch, Notable Sayings of
the Ancient King.]--The so devout Egyptians thought they sufficiently
satisfied the divine justice by sacrificing hogs in effigy and
representation; a bold invention to pay God so essential a substance in
picture only and in show.
I live in a time wherein we abound in incredible examples of this vice,
through the licence of our civil wars; and we see nothing in ancient
histories more extreme than what we have proof of every day, but I
cannot, any the more, get used to it. I could hardly persuade myself,
before I saw it with my eyes, that there could be found souls so cruel
and fell, who, for the sole pleasure of murder, would commit it; would
hack and lop off the limbs of others; sharpen their wits to invent
unusual torments and new kinds of death, without hatred, without profit,
and for no other end but only to enjoy the pleasant spectacle of the
gestures and motions, the lamentable groans and cries of a man dying in
anguish. For this is the utmost point to which cruelty can arrive:
“Ut homo hominem, non iratus, non timens,
tantum spectaturus, occidat.”
[“That a man should kill a man, not being angry, not in fear, only
for the sake of the spectacle.”--Seneca, Ep., 90.]
For my own part, I cannot without grief see so much as an innocent beast
pursued and killed that has no defence, and from which we have received
no offence at all; and that which frequently happens, that the stag we
hunt, finding himself weak and out of breath, and seeing no other remedy,
surrenders himself to us who pursue him, imploring mercy by his tears:
“Questuque cruentus,
Atque imploranti similis,”
[“Who, bleeding, by his tears seems to crave mercy.”
--AEnead, vii. 501.]
has ever been to me a very unpleasing sight; and I hardly ever take a
beast alive that I do not presently turn out again. Pythagoras bought
them of fishermen and fowlers to do the same:
“Primoque a caede ferarum,
Incaluisse puto maculatum sanguine ferrum.”

[“I think ‘twas slaughter of wild beasts that first stained the
steel of man with blood.”--Ovid, Met., xv. 106.]
Those natures that are sanguinary towards beasts discover a natural
proneness to cruelty. After they had accustomed themselves at Rome to
spectacles of the slaughter of animals, they proceeded to those of the
slaughter of men, of gladiators. Nature has herself, I fear, imprinted
in man a kind of instinct to inhumanity; nobody takes pleasure in seeing
beasts play with and caress one another, but every one is delighted with
seeing them dismember, and tear one another to pieces. And that I may
not be laughed at for the sympathy I have with them, theology itself
enjoins us some favour in their behalf; and considering that one and the
same master has lodged us together in this palace for his service, and
that they, as well as we, are of his family, it has reason to enjoin us
some affection and regard to them. Pythagoras borrowed the
metempsychosis from the Egyptians; but it has since been received by
several nations, and particularly by our Druids:
“Morte carent animae; semperque, priore relicts
Sede, novis domibus vivunt, habitantque receptae.”
[“Souls never die, but, having left their former seat, live
and are received into new homes.”--Ovid, Met., xv. 158.]
The religion of our ancient Gauls maintained that souls, being eternal,
never ceased to remove and shift their places from one body to another;
mixing moreover with this fancy some consideration of divine justice; for
according to the deportments of the soul, whilst it had been in
Alexander, they said that God assigned it another body to inhabit, more
or less painful, and proper for its condition:
“Muta ferarum
Cogit vincla pati; truculentos ingerit ursis,
Praedonesque lupis; fallaces vulpibus addit:
Atque ubi per varios annos, per mille figuras
Egit, Lethaeo purgatos flumine, tandem
Rursus ad humanae revocat primordia formae:”
[“He makes them wear the silent chains of brutes, the bloodthirsty
souls he encloses in bears, the thieves in wolves, the deceivers in
foxes; where, after successive years and a thousand forms, man had
spent his life, and after purgation in Lethe’s flood, at last he
restores them to the primordial human shapes.”
--Claudian, In Ruf., ii. 482.]
If it had been valiant, he lodged it in the body of a lion; if
voluptuous, in that of a hog; if timorous, in that of a hart or hare; if
malicious, in that of a fox, and so of the rest, till having purified it
by this chastisement, it again entered into the body of some other man:
“Ipse ego nam memini, Trojani, tempore belli
Panthoides Euphorbus eram.”
[“For I myself remember that, in the days of the Trojan war, I was
Euphorbus, son of Pantheus.”--Ovid, Met., xv. 160; and see Diogenes
Laertius, Life of Pythagoras.]
As to the relationship betwixt us and beasts, I do not much admit of it;
nor of that which several nations, and those among the most ancient and
most noble, have practised, who have not only received brutes into their
society and companionship, but have given them a rank infinitely above
themselves, esteeming them one while familiars and favourites of the
gods, and having them in more than human reverence and respect; others
acknowledged no other god or divinity than they:
“Bellux a barbaris propter beneficium consecratae.”
[“Beasts, out of opinion of some benefit received by them, were
consecrated by barbarians”--Cicero, De Natura Deor., i. 36.]

“Crocodilon adorat
Pars haec; illa pavet saturam serpentibus ibin:
Effigies sacri hic nitet aurea cercopitheci;
Hic piscem flumints, illic
Oppida tota canem venerantur.”
[“This place adores the crocodile; another dreads the ibis, feeder
on serpents; here shines the golden image of the sacred ape; here
men venerate the fish of the river; there whole towns worship a
dog.”--Juvenal, xv. 2.]
And the very interpretation that Plutarch, gives to this error, which is
very well conceived, is advantageous to them: for he says that it was not
the cat or the ox, for example, that the Egyptians adored: but that they,
in those beasts, adored some image of the divine faculties; in this,
patience and utility: in that, vivacity, or, as with our neighbours the
Burgundians and all the Germans, impatience to see themselves shut up; by
which they represented liberty, which they loved and adored above all
other godlike attributes, and so of the rest. But when, amongst the more
moderate opinions, I meet with arguments that endeavour to demonstrate
the near resemblance betwixt us and animals, how large a share they have
in our greatest privileges, and with how much probability they compare us
together, truly I abate a great deal of our presumption, and willingly
resign that imaginary sovereignty that is attributed to us over other
creatures.
But supposing all this were not true, there is nevertheless a certain
respect, a general duty of humanity, not only to beasts that have life
and sense, but even to trees, and plants. We owe justice to men, and
graciousness and benignity to other creatures that are capable of it;
there is a certain commerce and mutual obligation betwixt them and us.
Nor shall I be afraid to confess the tenderness of my nature so childish,
that I cannot well refuse to play with my dog, when he the most
unseasonably importunes me to do so. The Turks have alms and hospitals
for beasts. The Romans had public care to the nourishment of geese, by
whose vigilance their Capitol had been preserved. The Athenians made a
decree that the mules and moyls which had served at the building of the
temple called Hecatompedon should be free and suffered to pasture at
their own choice, without hindrance. The Agrigentines had a common use
solemnly to inter the beasts they had a kindness for, as horses of some
rare quality, dogs, and useful birds, and even those that had only been
kept to divert their children; and the magnificence that was ordinary
with them in all other things, also particularly appeared in the
sumptuosity and numbers of monuments erected to this end, and which
remained in their beauty several ages after. The Egyptians buried
wolves, bears, crocodiles, dogs, and cats in sacred places, embalmed
their bodies, and put on mourning at their death. Cimon gave an
honourable sepulture to the mares with which he had three times gained
the prize of the course at the Olympic Games. The ancient Xantippus
caused his dog to be interred on an eminence near the sea, which has ever
since retained the name, and Plutarch says, that he had a scruple about
selling for a small profit to the slaughterer an ox that had been long in
his service.

Chapter XII. Apology For Raimond Sebond.
Learning is, indeed, a very great and a very material accomplishment;
and those who despise it sufficiently discover their own want of
understanding; but learning yet I do not prize it at the excessive rate
that some others do, as Herillus, the philosopher, for one, who therein
places the sovereign good, and maintained “That it was only in her to
render us wise and contented,” which I do not believe; no more than I
do what others have said, that learning is the mother of all virtue, and
that all vice proceeds from ignorance, which, if it be true, required
a very long interpretation. My house has long-been open to men of
knowledge, and is very well known to them; for my father, who governed
it fifty years and upwards, inflamed with the new ardour with which
Francis the First embraced letters, and brought them into esteem, with
great diligence and expense hunted after the acquaintance of learned
men, receiving them into his house as persons sacred, and that had some
particular inspiration of divine wisdom; collecting their sayings and
sentences as so many oracles, and with so much the greater reverence
and religion as he was the less able to judge of them; for he had no
knowledge of letters any more than his predecessors. For my part I love
them well, but I do not adore them. Amongst others, Peter Bunel, a man
of great reputation for knowledge in his time, having, with some others
of his sort, staid some days at Montaigne in my father’s company,
he presented him at his departure with a book, entitled _Theologia
naturalis; sive Liber Creaturarum, magistri Raimondi de Sebonde._ And as
the Italian and Spanish tongues were familiar to my father, and as this
book was written in a sort of jargon of Spanish with Latin terminations,
he hoped that, with a little help, he might be able to understand it,
and therefore recommended it to him for a very useful book, and proper
tor the time wherein he gave it to him; which was when the novel
doctrines of Luther began to be in vogue, and in many places to stagger
our ancient belief: wherein he was very well advised, wisely, in his own
reason, foreseeing that the beginning of this distemper would easily
run into an execrable atheism, for the vulgar, not having the faculty of
judging of things, suffering themselves to be carried away by chance and
appearance, after having once been inspired with the boldness to
despise and control those opinions which they had before had in extreme
reverence, such as those wherein their salvation is concerned, and
that some of the articles of their religion are brought into doubt and
dispute, they afterwards throw all other parts of their belief into the
same uncertainty, they having with them no other authority or foundation
than the others they had already discomposed; and shake off all the
impressions they had received from the authority of the laws, or the
reverence of the ancient customs, as a tyrannical yoke:

Nam cupide eonculcatur nimis ante metutum;

“For with most eagerness they spurn the law,
By which they were before most kept in awe;”

resolving to admit nothing for the future to which they had not first
interposed their own decrees, and given their particular consent.
It happened that my father, a little before his death, having
accidentally found this book under a heap of other neglected papers,
commanded me to translate it for him into French. It is good too
translate such authors as this, where there is little but the matter
itself to express; but such wherein grace of language and elegance of
style are aimed at, are dangerous to attempt, especially when a man is
to turn them into a weaker idiom. It was a strange and a new undertaking
for me; but having by chance at that time nothing else to do, and not
being able to resist the command of the best father that ever was, I did
it as well as I could; and he was so well pleased with it as to order it
to be printed, which after his death was done.
I found the ideas of this author exceeding fine the contexture of his
work well followed, and his design full of piety; and because many
people take a delight to read it, and particularly the ladies, to whom
we owe the most service, I have often thought to assist them to clear
the book of two principal objections made to it. His design is bold and
daring, for he undertakes, by human and natural reasons, to establish
and make good, against the atheists, all the articles of the Christian
religion: wherein, to speak the truth, he is so firm and so successful
that I do not think it possible to do better upon that subject; nay, I
believe he has been equalled by none. This work seeming to me to be too
beautiful and too rich for an author whose name is so little known, and
of whom all that we know is that he was a Spaniard, practising physic at
Toulouse about two hundred years ago; I enquired of Adrian Turnebus, who
knew all things, what he thought of that book; who made answer, “That he
thought it was some abstract drawn from St. Thomas d’Aquin; for that, in
truth, his mind, so full of infinite erudition and admirable subtlety,
was alone capable of such thoughts.” Be this as it may, whoever was the
author and inventor (and ‘tis not reasonable, without greater certainty,
to deprive Sebond of that title), he was a man of great judgment and
most admirable parts.
The first thing they reprehend in his work is “That Christians are to
blame to repose their belief upon human reason, which is only conceived
by faith and the particular inspiration of divine grace.” In which
objection there appears to be something of zeal to piety, and therefore
we are to endeavour to satisfy those who put it forth with the greater
mildness and respect. This were a task more proper for a man well
read in divinity than for me, who know nothing of it; nevertheless, I
conceive that in a thing so divine, so high, and so far transcending
all human intelligence, as is that truth, with which it has pleased
the bounty of God to enlighten us, it is very necessary that he should
moreover lend us his assistance, as a very extraordinary favour and
privilege, to conceive and imprint it in our understanding. And I do
not believe that means purely human are in any sort capable of doing it:
for, if they were, so many rare and excellent souls, and so abundantly
furnished with natural force, in former ages, could not have failed,
by their reason, to arrive at this knowledge. ‘Tis faith alone that
livelily mind certainly comprehends the deep mysteries of our religion;
but, withal, I do not say that it is not a worthy and very laudable
attempt to accommodate those natural and human utensils with which God
has endowed us to the service of our faith: it is not to be doubted but
that it is the most noble use we can put them to; and that there is not
a design in a Christian man more noble than to make it the aim and end
of all his studies to extend and amplify the truth of his belief. We do
not satisfy ourselves with serving God with our souls and understandings
only, we moreover owe and render him a corporal reverence, and apply our
limbs and motions, and external things to do him honour; we must here
do the same, and accompany our faith with all the reason we have, but
always with this reservation, not to fancy that it is upon us that
it depends, nor that our arguments and endeavours can arrive at so
supernatural and divine a knowledge. If it enters not into us by an
extraordinary infusion; if it enters not only by reason, but, moreover,
by human ways, it is not in us in its true dignity and splendour: and
yet, I am afraid, we only have it by this way.
If we hold upon God by the mediation of a lively faith; if we hold upon
God by him, and not by us; if we had a divine basis and foundation,
human occasions would not have the power to shake us as they do; our
fortress would not surrender to so weak a battery; the love of novelty,
the constraint of princes, the success of one party, and the rash and
fortuitous change of our opinions, would not have the power to stagger
and alter our belief: we should not then leave it to the mercy of every
new argument, nor abandon it to all the rhetoric in the world; we should
withstand the fury of these waves with an immovable and unyielding
constancy:

As a great rock repels the rolling tides,
That foam and bark about her marble sides,
From its strong bulk

If we were but touched with this ray of divinity, it would appear
throughout; not only our words, but our works also, would carry
its brightness and lustre; whatever proceeded from us would be seen
illuminated with this noble light. We ought to be ashamed that, in all
the human sects, there never was any of the faction, that did not, in
some measure, conform his life and behaviour to it, whereas so divine
and heavenly an institution does only distinguish Christians by the
name! Will you see the proof of this? Compare our manners to those of a
Mahometan or Pagan, you will still find that we fall very
short; there, where, out of regard to the reputation and advantage of
our religion, we ought to shine in excellency at a vast distance beyond
all others: and that it should be said of us, “Are they so just, so
charitable, so good: Then they are Christians.” All other signs are
common to all religions; hope, trust, events, ceremonies, penance,
martyrs. The peculiar mark of our truth ought to be our virtue, as it
is also the most heavenly and difficult, and the most worthy product