Essays of Michel de Montaigne - 054

overturned, and lost; which many occasions 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 vapours from the
stomach, any of which may stupefy the understanding and turn the brain.

Morbis in corporis avius errat
Sæpe animus; dementit enim, deliraque fatur;
Interdumque gravi lethargo fertur in altum
Æternumque soporem, oculis mi tuque cadenti:
“For when the body’s sick, and ill at ease,
The mind doth often share in the disease;
Wonders, grows wild, and raves, and sometimes by
A heavy and a stupid lethargy,
Is overcome and cast into a deep,
A most profound and everlasting sleep.”

The philosophers, methinks, have not much touched this string, no more
than another of equal 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 leave to the poets the menaces of
future torments. But thereby they make themselves a good game. These are
two omissions that I often meet with in their discourses. I return to
the first.
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 her arms. As
to the rest, they also considered, by the vanity of human reason, that
the mixture and association of two so contrary things as the mortal and
the immortal, was unimaginable:--

Quippe etenim mortale æterao jungere, et una
Consentire putare, et fungi mutua posse,
Desipere est. Quid enim diversius esse putandum est,
Aut magis inter se disjunctum discrepitansque,
Quam, mortale quod est, immortali atque perenni
Junctum, in concilio, sævas tolerare procellas?
“The mortal and th’ eternal, then, to blend,
And think they can pursue one common end,
Is madness: for what things more diff’rent are.
Distinct in nature, and disposed to jar?
How can it then be thought that these should bear,
When thus conjoined, of harms an equal share?”

Moreover, they perceived the soul tending towards death as well as the
body:--

Simul ovo fessa fatiscit:
“Fatigued together with the weight of years:”

which, according to Zeno, the image of sleep does sufficiently
demonstrate to us; for he looks upon it “as a fainting and fall of the
soul, as well as of the body:” _Contrahi animum et quasi labi putat
atque decidere:_ and, what they perceived in some, that the soul
maintained its force and vigour 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 manner of defect or
alteration; and that there is not so universal a deprivation that some
parts do not remain vigorous and entire:--

Non alio pacto, quam si, pes cum dolet ægri,
In nullo caput interea sit forte dolore.
“So, often of the gout a man complains,
Whose head is, at the same time, free from pains.”

The sight of our judgment is, to truth, the same that the owl’s eyes
are to the splendour of the sun, says Aristotle. By what can we better
convince him, than by so gross blindness in so apparent a light? For the
contrary opinion of the immortality of the soul, which, Cicero says,
was first introduced, according to the testimony of books at least, by
Pherecydes
Syrius, in the time of King Tullus (though some attribute it to Thales,
and others to others), ‘tis the part of human science that is treated of
with the greatest doubt and
reservation. The most positive dogmatists are fain, in this point
principally, to fly to the refuge of the Academy. No one doubts what
Aristotle has established upon this subject, no more than all the
ancients in general, who handle it with a wavering belief: _Rem
gratissimam promittentium magis quam probantium:_ “A thing more
acceptable in the promisors than the provers.” He conceals himself in
clouds of words of difficult, unintelligible sense, and has left to
those of his sect as great a dispute about his judgment as about the
matter itself.
Two things rendered this opinion plausible 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, when 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 the utmost of his power
provided for it; there are monuments for the conservation of the body,
and glory to preserve the name. He has employed all his wit and opinion
to the rebuilding of himself, impatient of his fortune, and to prop
himself by his inventions. The soul, by reason of its anxiety and
impotence, being unable to stand by itself, wanders up and down to seek
out consolations, hopes, and foundations, and alien circumstances, to
which she adheres and fixes; and how light or fantastic soever invention
delivers them to her, relies more willingly, and with greater assurance,
upon them than upon herself. But ‘tis wonderful to observe how the most
constant and obstinate maintainers of this just and clear persuasion
of the immortality of the soul fall short, and how weak their arguments
are, when they go about to prove it by human reason: _Somnia sunt non
docentis, sed optantis:_ “They are dreams, not of the teacher, but
wisher,” says one of the ancients. By which testimony man may know that
he owes the truth he himself finds out to fortune and accident; since
that even then, 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 meditation 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 miserable
condition and incapacity, that God wrought the perplexity and confusion
of the tower of Babel. Whatever we undertake without his assistance,
whatever we see without the lamp of his grace, is but vanity and folly.
We corrupt the very essence of truth, which is uniform and constant,
by our weakness, 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 lively represents to us in the just
chastisement wherewith he crushed Nimrod’s presumption, and frustrated
the vain attempt of his proud structure; _Perdam sapientiam sapientium,
et prudentiam prudentium reprobabo._ “I will destroy the wisdom of the
wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent.” The
diversity of idioms and tongues, with which he disturbed this work,
what are they other than this infinite and perpetual alteration and
discordance of opinions and reasons, which accompany and confound the
vain building of human wisdom, and to very good effect too; for what
would hold us, if we had but the least grain of knowledge? This saint
has very much obliged me: _Ipsa veritatis occultatio ant humili-tatis
exercitatio est, aut elationis attritio_ “The very concealment of the
truth is either an exercise of humility or a quelling of presumption.”
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 favour of his grace, for the
truth of so noble a belief, since from his sole bounty we receive
the fruit of immortality, which consists in the enjoyment of eternal
beatitude. Let us ingenuously confess 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 without, without this divine privilege; whoever shall consider
man impartially, and without flattery, will see in him no efficacy or
faculty that relishes of any thing 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 that he
had held it from God? _Cum de animarum otemitate disserimus, non leve
momentum apud nos habet consensus hominum aut timentium inferos, aut
colentium. Utor hâc publicâ persuasione._ “When we discourse of the
immortality of souls, the consent of men that either fear or adore the
infernal powers, is of no small advantage. I make use of this public
persuasion.” 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, (_usuram
nobis largiuntur tanquam cornicibus; diu mansuros aiunt animos; semper,
negant._ “They give us a long life, as also they do to crows; they say
our soul shall continue long, but that it shall continue always they
deny,”) who give to souls a life after this, but finite. The most
universal and received fancy, and that continues down to our times in
various places, is that of which they make Pythagoras 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: “That souls,
at their departure out of us, did 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 he had been Ætha-lides, since that Euphorbus,
afterwards Hermotimus, and, finally, from Pyrrhus was passed into
Pythagoras; having a memory of himself of two hundred and six years. And
some have added that these very souls sometimes mount up to heaven, and
come down again:--

O pater, aime aliquas ad colum hinc ire putandum est
Sublimes animas, iterumque ad tarda reverti
Corpora? Quæ lucis miseris tam dira cupido?
“O, father, is it then to be conceiv’d
That any of these spirits, so sublime,
Should hence to the celestial regions climb,
And thence return to earth to reassume
Their sluggish bodies rotting in a tomb?
For wretched life whence does such fondness come?”

Origen makes them eternally to go and come from a better to a worse
estate. The opinion that Varro mentions is that, after four hundred and
forty years’ revolution, they should be reunited to their first bodies;
Chrysippus held that this would happen after a certain space of time
unknown and unlimited. Plato, who professes to have embraced this belief
from Pindar and the ancient poets, that we are to undergo infinite
vicissitudes of mutation, for which the soul is prepared, 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, are matters for her
memory. Observe her progress elsewhere: “The soul that has lived well
is reunited to the stars to which it is assigned; that which has lived
ill removes into a woman, and if it do not there reform, is again
removed into a beast of condition suitable to its vicious manners, and
shall see no end of its punishments till it be returned to its natural
constitution, and that it has, by the force of reason, purged itself
from those gross, stupid, and elementary qualities it was polluted
with.” But I will not omit the objection the Epicureans make against
this transmigration from one body to another; ‘tis a pleasant one; they
ask what expedient would be found out if the number of the 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 their new lodging; and they
further demand how they shall pass away their time, whilst waiting
till new quarters are made ready for them? Or, on the contrary, if more
animals should be born than die, the body, they say, would be but in an
ill condition whilst waiting for a soul to be infused into it; and it
would fall out that some bodies would die before they had been alive.

Denique comrabia ad Veneris, partusque ferarum
Esse animas præsto, deridiculum esse videtur;
Et spectare immortales mortalia membra
Innumero numéro, certareque præproperanter
Inter se, quæ prima potissimaqæ insinueter.
“Absurd to think that whilst wild beasts beget,
Or bear their young, a thousand souls do wait,
Expect the falling body, fight and strive
Which first shall enter in and make it live.”

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 members, and even out of our ashes; others
divide them into two parts, the one mortal, the other immortal; others
make it corporeal, and nevertheless immortal. Some make it immortal,
without
sense or knowledge. There are others, even among ourselves, who have
believed that devils were made of the souls of the damned; as Plutarch
thinks that gods were made of those that were saved; for there are few
things which that author is so positive in as he is in this; maintaining
elsewhere a doubtful and ambiguous way of expression. “We are told,”
says he, “and steadfastly should believe, that the souls of virtuous
men, both according to nature and the divine justice, become saints, and
from saints demigods, and from demigods, after they are perfectly, as in
sacrifices of purgation, cleansed and purified, being delivered from all
passibility and all mortality, they become, not by any civil decree, but
in real truth, and according to all probability of reason, entire and
perfect gods, in receiving a most happy and glorious end.” But who
desires to see him--him, who is yet the most sober and moderate of the
whole gang of philosophers, lay about him with greater boldness, and
relate his miracles upon this subject, I refer him to his treatise _of
the Moon,_ and _of the Demon 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 poetry;
human understanding losing itself in attempting to sound and search all
things to the bottom; even as we, tired and worn out with a long course
of life, return to infancy and dotage. See here the fine and certain
instructions which we extract from human knowledge concerning the soul.
Neither is there less temerity in what they teach us touching our
corporal parts. Let us choose out one or two examples; for otherwise we
should lose ourselves in this vast and troubled ocean of medical errors.
Let us first know 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 puzzled and perplexed. Archelaus, the
physician, whose disciple and favourite Socrates was, according to
Aristoxenus, said that both men and beasts were made of a lacteous
slime, expressed by the heat of the earth; Pythagoras says that our
seed is the foam or cream of our better blood; Plato, that it is the
distillation of the marrow of the backbone; raising his argument from
this, that that part is first sensible of being weary of the work;
Alcmeon, that it is part of the substance of the brain, and that it
is so, says he, is proved by the weakness of the eyes in those who
are immoderate in that exercise; Democritus, that it is a substance
extracted from the whole mass of the body; Epicurus, an extract from
soul and body; Aristotle, an excrement drawn from the aliment of the
blood, the last which is diffused over our members; others, that it is
a blood concocted and digested by the heat of the genitals, which they
judge, by reason that in excessive endeavours a man voids pure blood;
wherein there seems to be more likelihood, could a man extract any
appearance from so infinite a confusion. Now, to bring this seed to do
its work, how many contrary opinions do they 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, believe that without the concurrence
of seeds there can be no generation. Here are the physicians, the
philosophers, the lawyers, and divines, by the ears with our wives about
the dispute, “For what term women carry their fruit?” and I, for my
part, by the example of myself, stick with those that maintain a woman
goes eleven months with child. The world is built upon this experience;
there is no so commonplace a 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 himself, in his corporal 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? _Quasi vero mensuram ullius rei possit agere,
qui sui nesciat._ “As if he could understand the measure of any other
thing, that knows not his own.” In earnest, Protagoras told us a pretty
flam in making man the measure of all things, that never knew so much as
his own; and 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
favourable proposition was but a mockery, which induced us necessarily
to conclude the nullity of the compass and the compasser. When Thales
reputes the knowledge of man very difficult for man to comprehend, he
at the same time gives him to understand that all other knowledge is
impossible.
You,* for whom I have taken the pains, contrary to my custom, to write
so long a discourse, will not refuse to support your Sebond by the
ordinary forms of arguing, wherewith you are every day instructed, and
in this will exercise both your wit and learning; 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 then 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, being closely grappled in combat with a lord of
Persia, Darius coming in sword in hand, and fearing to strike lest he
should kill Gobrias, he called out to him boldly to fall on,

* The author, as we have already mentioned, is addressing
Margaret de Valois.

though he should run them both through at once. I have known desperate
weapons, and conditions of single combat, and wherein he that offered
them put himself and his adversary upon terms of inevitable death to
them both, censured for unjust. The Portuguese, in the Indian Sea, took
certain Turks prisoners, who, impatient of their captivity, resolved,
and it succeeded, by striking the nails of the ship one against another,
and making a spark to fall into the barrels of powder that were set in
the place where they were guarded, to blow up and reduce themselves,
their masters, and the vessel to ashes. We here touch the out-plate
and utmost limits of sciences, wherein the 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:--

Chi troppo s’assottiglia, si scavezza.
“Who makes himself too wise, becomes a fool.”

I advise you that, in all your opinions and discourses, as well as
in your manners and all other things, you keep yourself moderate and
temperate, and avoid novelty; I am an enemy to all extravagant ways.
You, who by the authority of your grandeur, and yet more by the
advantages which those qualities give you that are more your own, may
with the twinkle of an eye command whom you please, ought to have given
this charge to some one who made profession of letters, who might after
a better manner have proved and illustrated these things to you. 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 affirms, “That
without laws we should live like beasts.” Our wit is a wandering,
dangerous, and temerarious utensil; it is hard to couple any order or
measure to it; in those of our own time, who are endued with any rare
excellence above others, or any extraordinary vivacity of understanding,
we see them almost all lash out into licentiousness of opinions and
manners; and ‘tis almost a miracle to find one temperate and sociable.
‘Tis all the reason in the world to limit human wit within the strictest
limits imaginable; 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
yet we see that it escapes from all these bonds by its volubility and
dissolution; *tis a vain body which has nothing to lay hold on or to
seize; a various and difform body, incapable of being either bound
or held. In earnest, there are few souls so regular, firm, and well
descended, as 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 received opinions; *tis more expedient
to put them under pupilage. Wit is a dangerous weapon, even to the
possessor, if he knows not how to use it discreetly; and there is not a
beast to whom a headboard is more justly to be given, to keep his looks
down and before his feet, and to hinder him from wandering here and
there out of the tracks which custom and the laws have laid before him.
And therefore it will be 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. But if any of these new doctors will pretend to be
ingenious 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 to infect you, this preservative, in the extremest necessity,
will prevent the danger and hinder 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,
every one undertaking to judge and make choice of what he would stick
to and maintain. But now that men go all one way, _Qui certis quibusdam
destinatisque sententiis addicti et consecrati sunt, ut etiam, quæ non
probant, cogantur defendere,_ “Who are so tied and obliged to certain
opinions that they are bound to defend even those they do not approve,”
and that we receive the arts by civil authority and decree, so that the
schools have but one pattern, and a like circumscribed institution and
discipline, we no more take notice what the coin weighs, and is really
worth, but every one receives it according to the estimate that common
approbation and use puts upon it; the alloy is not questioned, but how
much it is current for. In like manner all things pass; we take
physic as we do geometry; and tricks of hocus-pocus, enchantments,
and love-spells, the correspondence of the souls of the dead,
prognostications, domifications, and even this ridiculous pursuit of the
philosophers’ stone, all things pass for current pay, without any manner
of scruple or contradiction. We need to know no more but that Mars’
house is in the middle of the triangle of the hand, that of Venus in
the thumb, and that of Mercury in the little finger; that when the
table-line cuts the tubercle of the forefinger ‘tis a sign of cruelty,
that when it falls short of the middle finger, and that the natural
median-line makes an angle with the vital in the same side, ‘tis a sign
of a miserable death; that if in a woman the natural line be open, and
does not close the angle with the vital, this denotes that she shall not
be very chaste. I leave you to judge whether a man qualified with such
knowledge may not pass with reputation and esteem in all companies.
Theophrastus said that human knowledge, guided by the senses, might
judge of the causes of things to a certain degree; but that being
arrived to first and extreme causes, it must stop short and retire, by
reason either of its own infirmity or the difficulty of things. ‘Tis a
moderate and gentle opinion, that our own understandings may conduct
us to the knowledge of some things, and that it has certain measures
of power, beyond which ‘tis temerity to employ it; this opinion is
plausible, and introduced by men of well composed minds, but ‘tis hard
to limit our wit, which is curious and greedy, and will no more stop
at a thousand than at fifty paces; having experimentally found that,
wherein one has failed, the other has hit, and that what was unknown to
one age, the age following has explained; and that arts and sciences are
not cast in a mould, but are formed and perfected by degrees, by often
handling and polishing, as bears leisurely lick their cubs into form;
what my force cannot discover, I do not yet desist to sound and to try;
and by handling and kneading this new matter over and over again, by
turning and heating it, I lay open to him that shall succeed me, a kind
of facility to enjoy it more at his ease, and make it more maniable and
supple for him,

Ut hymettia sole
Cera remollescit, tractataque poll ice multas
Vertitur in facies, ipsoque fit utilis usu;
“As wax doth softer in the sun become,
And, tempered ‘twixt the finger and the thumb,
Will varions forms, and several shapes admit,
Till for the present use ‘tis rendered fit;”

as much will the second do for the third; which is the cause that
the difficulty ought not to make me despair, and my own incapacity as
little; for ‘tis nothing but my own.
Man is as capable of all things as of some; and if he confesses, as
Theophrastus says, the ignorance of first causes, let him at once
surrender all the rest of his knowledge; if he is defective in
foundation, his reason is aground; disputation and inquiry have no other
aim nor stop but principles; if this aim do not stop his career, he
runs into an infinite irresolution. _Non potest aliud alio magis minusve
comprehendi, quoniam omnium rerum una est dejinitio comprehendendi:_
“One thing can no more or less be comprehended than another, because
the definition of comprehending all things is the same.” Now ‘tis very
likely that, if the soul knew any thing, it would in the first place
know itself; and if it knew any thing out of itself, it would be its own
body and case, before any thing else. If we see the gods of physic to
this very day debating about our anatomy,

Mulciber in Trojam, pro Trojâ stabat Apollo;
“Vulcan against, for Troy Apollo stood;”