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The Essays of Montaigne/Book III/Chapter XI

Chapter xi. of cripples. [ edit ].

'Tis now two or three years ago that they made the year ten days shorter in France.—[By the adoption of the Gregorian calendar.]—How many changes may we expect should follow this reformation! it was really moving heaven and earth at once. Yet nothing for all that stirs from its place my neighbours still find their seasons of sowing and reaping, the opportunities of doing their business, the hurtful and propitious days, dust at the same time where they had, time out of mind, assigned them; there was no more error perceived in our old use, than there is amendment found in the alteration; so great an uncertainty there is throughout; so gross, obscure, and obtuse is our perception. 'Tis said that this regulation might have been carried on with less inconvenience, by subtracting for some years, according to the example of Augustus, the Bissextile, which is in some sort a day of impediment and trouble, till we had exactly satisfied this debt, the which itself is not done by this correction, and we yet remain some days in arrear: and yet, by this means, such order might be taken for the future, arranging that after the revolution of such or such a number of years, the supernumerary day might be always thrown out, so that we could not, henceforward, err above four-and-twenty hours in our computation. We have no other account of time but years; the world has for many ages made use of that only; and yet it is a measure that to this day we are not agreed upon, and one that we still doubt what form other nations have variously given to it, and what was the true use of it. What does this saying of some mean, that the heavens in growing old bow themselves down nearer towards us, and put us into an uncertainty even of hours and days? and that which Plutarch says of the months, that astrology had not in his time determined as to the motion of the moon; what a fine condition are we in to keep records of things past. I was just now ruminating, as I often do, what a free and roving thing human reason is. I ordinarily see that men, in things propounded to them, more willingly study to find out reasons than to ascertain truth: they slip over presuppositions, but are curious in examination of consequences; they leave the things, and fly to the causes. Pleasant talkers! The knowledge of causes only concerns him who has the conduct of things; not us, who are merely to undergo them, and who have perfectly full and accomplished use of them, according to our need, without penetrating into the original and essence; wine is none the more pleasant to him who knows its first faculties. On the contrary, both the body and the soul interrupt and weaken the right they have of the use of the world and of themselves, by mixing with it the opinion of learning; effects concern us, but the means not at all. To determine and to distribute appertain to superiority and command; as it does to subjection to accept. Let me reprehend our custom. They commonly begin thus: "How is such a thing done?" Whereas they should say, "Is such a thing done?" Our reason is able to create a hundred other worlds, and to find out the beginnings and contexture; it needs neither matter nor foundation: let it but run on, it builds as well in the air as on the earth, and with inanity as well as with matter:                     "Dare pondus idonea fumo."           ["Able to give weight to smoke."—Persius, v. 20.] I find that almost throughout we should say, "there is no such thing," and should myself often make use of this answer, but I dare not: for they cry that it is an evasion produced from ignorance and weakness of understanding; and I am fain, for the most part, to juggle for company, and prate of frivolous subjects and tales that I believe not a word of; besides that, in truth, 'tis a little rude and quarrelsome flatly to deny a stated fact; and few people but will affirm, especially in things hard to be believed, that they have seen them, or at least will name witnesses whose authority will stop our mouths from contradiction. In this way, we know the foundations and means of things that never were; and the world scuffles about a thousand questions, of which both the Pro and the Con are false.           "Ita finitima sunt falsa veris, ut in praecipitem           locum non debeat se sapiens committere."      ["False things are so near the true, that a wise man should not      trust himself in a precipitous place"—Cicero, Acad., ii. 21.] Truth and lies are faced alike; their port, taste, and proceedings are the same, and we look upon them with the same eye. I find that we are not only remiss in defending ourselves from deceit, but that we seek and offer ourselves to be gulled; we love to entangle ourselves in vanity, as a thing conformable to our being. I have seen the birth of many miracles in my time; which, although they were abortive, yet have we not failed to foresee what they would have come to, had they lived their full age. 'Tis but finding the end of the clew, and a man may wind off as much as he will; and there is a greater distance betwixt nothing and the least thing in the world than there is betwixt this and the greatest. Now the first that are imbued with this beginning of novelty, when they set out with their tale, find, by the oppositions they meet with, where the difficulty of persuasion lies, and so caulk up that place with some false piece;      [Voltaire says of this passage, "He who would learn to doubt should      read this whole chapter of Montaigne, the least methodical of all      philosophers, but the wisest and most amiable."      —Melanges Historiques, xvii. 694, ed. of Lefevre.] besides that:      "Insita hominibus libido alendi de industria rumores,"           ["Men having a natural desire to nourish reports."           —Livy, xxviii. 24.] we naturally make a conscience of restoring what has been lent us, without some usury and accession of our own. The particular error first makes the public error, and afterwards, in turn, the public error makes the particular one; and thus all this vast fabric goes forming and piling itself up from hand to hand, so that the remotest witness knows more about it than those who were nearest, and the last informed is better persuaded than the first. 'Tis a natural progress; for whoever believes anything, thinks it a work of charity to persuade another into the same opinion; which the better to do, he will make no difficulty of adding as much of his own invention as he conceives necessary to his tale to encounter the resistance or want of conception he meets with in others. I myself, who make a great conscience of lying, and am not very solicitous of giving credit and authority to what I say, yet find that in the arguments I have in hand, being heated with the opposition of another, or by the proper warmth of my own narration, I swell and puff up my subject by voice, motion, vigour, and force of words, and moreover, by extension and amplification, not without some prejudice to the naked truth; but I do it conditionally withal, that to the first who brings me to myself, and who asks me the plain and bare truth, I presently surrender my passion, and deliver the matter to him without exaggeration, without emphasis, or any painting of my own. A quick and earnest way of speaking, as mine is, is apt to run into hyperbole. There is nothing to which men commonly are more inclined than to make way for their own opinions; where the ordinary means fail us, we add command, force, fire, and sword. 'Tis a misfortune to be at such a pass, that the best test of truth is the multitude of believers in a crowd, where the number of fools so much exceeds the wise:      "Quasi vero quidquam sit tam valde, quam nil sapere, vulgare."           ["As if anything were so common as ignorance."           —Cicero, De Divin., ii.]           "Sanitatis patrocinium est, insanientium turba."      ["The multitude of fools is a protection to the wise."      —St. Augustine, De Civit. Dei, vi. 10.] 'Tis hard to resolve a man's judgment against the common opinions: the first persuasion, taken from the very subject itself, possesses the simple, and from them diffuses itself to the wise, under the authority of the number and antiquity of the witnesses. For my part, what I should not believe from one, I should not believe from a hundred and one: and I do not judge opinions by years. 'Tis not long since one of our princes, in whom the gout had spoiled an excellent nature and sprightly disposition, suffered himself to be so far persuaded with the report made to him of the marvellous operations of a certain priest who by words and gestures cured all sorts of diseases, as to go a long journey to seek him out, and by the force of his mere imagination, for some hours so persuaded and laid his legs asleep, as to obtain that service from them they had long time forgotten. Had fortune heaped up five or six such-like incidents, it had been enough to have brought this miracle into nature. There was afterwards discovered so much simplicity and so little art in the author of these performances, that he was thought too contemptible to be punished, as would be thought of most such things, were they well examined:                "Miramur ex intervallo fallentia."      ["We admire after an interval (or at a distance) things that      deceive."—Seneca, Ep., 118, 2.] So does our sight often represent to us strange images at a distance that vanish on approaching near:                "Nunquam ad liquidum fama perducitur."                ["Report is never fully substantiated."                —Quintus Curtius, ix. 2.] 'Tis wonderful from how many idle beginnings and frivolous causes such famous impressions commonly, proceed. This it is that obstructs information; for whilst we seek out causes and solid and weighty ends, worthy of so great a name, we lose the true ones; they escape our sight by their littleness. And, in truth, a very prudent, diligent, and subtle inquisition is required in such searches, indifferent, and not prepossessed. To this very hour, all these miracles and strange events have concealed themselves from me: I have never seen greater monster or miracle in the world than myself: one grows familiar with all strange things by time and custom, but the more I frequent and the better I know myself, the more does my own deformity astonish me, the less I understand myself. The principal right of advancing and producing such accidents is reserved to fortune. Passing the day before yesterday through a village two leagues from my house, I found the place yet warm with a miracle that had lately failed of success there, where with first the neighbourhood had been several months amused; then the neighbouring provinces began to take it up, and to run thither in great companies of all sorts of people. A young fellow of the place had one night in sport counterfeited the voice of a spirit in his own house, without any other design at present, but only for sport; but this having succeeded with him better than he expected, to extend his farce with more actors he associated with him a stupid silly country girl, and at last there were three of them of the same age and understanding, who from domestic, proceeded to public, preachings, hiding themselves under the altar of the church, never speaking but by night, and forbidding any light to be brought. From words which tended to the conversion of the world, and threats of the day of judgment (for these are subjects under the authority and reverence of which imposture most securely lurks), they proceeded to visions and gesticulations so simple and ridiculous that—nothing could hardly be so gross in the sports of little children. Yet had fortune never so little favoured the design, who knows to what height this juggling might have at last arrived? These poor devils are at present in prison, and are like shortly to pay for the common folly; and I know not whether some judge will not also make them smart for his. We see clearly into this, which is discovered; but in many things of the like nature that exceed our knowledge, I am of opinion that we ought to suspend our judgment, whether as to rejection or as to reception. Great abuses in the world are begotten, or, to speak more boldly, all the abuses of the world are begotten, by our being taught to be afraid of professing our ignorance, and that we are bound to accept all things we are not able to refute: we speak of all things by precepts and decisions. The style at Rome was that even that which a witness deposed to having seen with his own eyes, and what a judge determined with his most certain knowledge, was couched in this form of speaking: "it seems to me." They make me hate things that are likely, when they would impose them upon me as infallible. I love these words which mollify and moderate the temerity of our propositions: "peradventure; in some sort; some; 'tis said, I think," and the like: and had I been set to train up children I had put this way of answering into their mouths, inquiring and not resolving: "What does this mean? I understand it not; it may be: is it true?" so that they should rather have retained the form of pupils at threescore years old than to go out doctors, as they do, at ten. Whoever will be cured of ignorance must confess it. Iris is the daughter of Thaumas;      ["That is, of Admiration. She (Iris, the rainbow) is beautiful, and      for that reason, because she has a face to be admired, she is said      to have been the daughter of Thamus."      —Cicero, De Nat. Deor., iii. 20.] admiration is the foundation of all philosophy, inquisition the progress, ignorance the end. But there is a sort of ignorance, strong and generous, that yields nothing in honour and courage to knowledge; an ignorance which to conceive requires no less knowledge than to conceive knowledge itself. I read in my younger years a trial that Corras,      [A celebrated Calvinist lawyer, born at Toulouse; 1513, and      assassinated there, 4th October 1572.] a councillor of Toulouse, printed, of a strange incident, of two men who presented themselves the one for the other. I remember (and I hardly remember anything else) that he seemed to have rendered the imposture of him whom he judged to be guilty, so wonderful and so far exceeding both our knowledge and his own, who was the judge, that I thought it a very bold sentence that condemned him to be hanged. Let us have some form of decree that says, "The court understands nothing of the matter" more freely and ingenuously than the Areopagites did, who, finding themselves perplexed with a cause they could not unravel, ordered the parties to appear again after a hundred years. The witches of my neighbourhood run the hazard of their lives upon the report of every new author who seeks to give body to their dreams. To accommodate the examples that Holy Writ gives us of such things, most certain and irrefragable examples, and to tie them to our modern events, seeing that we neither see the causes nor the means, will require another sort-of wit than ours. It, peradventure, only appertains to that sole all-potent testimony to tell us. "This is, and that is, and not that other." God ought to be believed; and certainly with very good reason; but not one amongst us for all that who is astonished at his own narration (and he must of necessity be astonished if he be not out of his wits), whether he employ it about other men's affairs or against himself. I am plain and heavy, and stick to the solid and the probable, avoiding those ancient reproaches:           "Majorem fidem homines adhibent iis, quae non intelligunt;           —Cupidine humani ingenii libentius obscura creduntur."      ["Men are most apt to believe what they least understand: and from      the acquisitiveness of the human intellect, obscure things are more      easily credited." The second sentence is from Tacitus, Hist. 1. 22.] I see very well that men get angry, and that I am forbidden to doubt upon pain of execrable injuries; a new way of persuading! Thank God, I am not to be cuffed into belief. Let them be angry with those who accuse their opinion of falsity; I only accuse it of difficulty and boldness, and condemn the opposite affirmation equally, if not so imperiously, with them. He who will establish this proposition by authority and huffing discovers his reason to be very weak. For a verbal and scholastic altercation let them have as much appearance as their contradictors;                "Videantur sane, non affirmentur modo;"      ["They may indeed appear to be; let them not be affirmed (Let them      state the probabilities, but not affirm.)"      —Cicero, Acad., n. 27.] but in the real consequence they draw from it these have much the advantage. To kill men, a clear and strong light is required, and our life is too real and essential to warrant these supernatural and fantastic accidents. As to drugs and poisons, I throw them out of my count, as being the worst sort of homicides: yet even in this, 'tis said, that men are not always to rely upon the personal confessions of these people; for they have sometimes been known to accuse themselves of the murder of persons who have afterwards been found living and well. In these other extravagant accusations, I should be apt to say, that it is sufficient a man, what recommendation soever he may have, be believed as to human things; but of what is beyond his conception, and of supernatural effect, he ought then only to be believed when authorised by a supernatural approbation. The privilege it has pleased Almighty God to give to some of our witnesses, ought not to be lightly communicated and made cheap. I have my ears battered with a thousand such tales as these: "Three persons saw him such a day in the east three, the next day in the west: at such an hour, in such a place, and in such habit"; assuredly I should not believe it myself. How much more natural and likely do I find it that two men should lie than that one man in twelve hours' time should fly with the wind from east to west? How much more natural that our understanding should be carried from its place by the volubility of our disordered minds, than that one of us should be carried by a strange spirit upon a broomstaff, flesh and bones as we are, up the shaft of a chimney? Let not us seek illusions from without and unknown, we who are perpetually agitated with illusions domestic and our own. Methinks one is pardonable in disbelieving a miracle, at least, at all events where one can elude its verification as such, by means not miraculous; and I am of St. Augustine's opinion, that, "'tis better to lean towards doubt than assurance, in things hard to prove and dangerous to believe." 'Tis now some years ago that I travelled through the territories of a sovereign prince, who, in my favour, and to abate my incredulity, did me the honour to let me see, in his own presence, and in a private place, ten or twelve prisoners of this kind, and amongst others, an old woman, a real witch in foulness and deformity, who long had been famous in that profession. I saw both proofs and free confessions, and I know not what insensible mark upon the miserable creature: I examined and talked with her and the rest as much and as long as I would, and gave the best and soundest attention I could, and I am not a man to suffer my judgment to be made captive by prepossession. In the end, and in all conscience, I should rather have prescribed them hellebore than hemlock;      "Captisque res magis mentibus, quam consceleratis similis visa;"      ["The thing was rather to be attributed to madness, than malice."      ("The thing seemed to resemble minds possessed rather than guilty.")      —Livy, viii, 18.] justice has its corrections proper for such maladies. As to the oppositions and arguments that worthy men have made to me, both there, and often in other places, I have met with none that have convinced me, and that have not admitted a more likely solution than their conclusions. It is true, indeed, that the proofs and reasons that are founded upon experience and fact, I do not go about to untie, neither have they any end; I often cut them, as Alexander did the Gordian knot. After all, 'tis setting a man's conjectures at a very high price upon them to cause a man to be roasted alive. We are told by several examples, as Praestantius of his father, that being more profoundly, asleep than men usually are, he fancied himself to be a mare, and that he served the soldiers for a sumpter; and what he fancied himself to be, he really proved. If sorcerers dream so materially; if dreams can sometimes so incorporate themselves with effects, still I cannot believe that therefore our will should be accountable to justice; which I say as one who am neither judge nor privy councillor, and who think myself by many degrees unworthy so to be, but a man of the common sort, born and avowed to the obedience of the public reason, both in its words and acts. He who should record my idle talk as being to the prejudice of the pettiest law, opinion, or custom of his parish, would do himself a great deal of wrong, and me much more; for, in what I say, I warrant no other certainty, but that 'tis what I had then in my thought, a tumultuous and wavering thought. All I say is by way of discourse, and nothing by way of advice:           "Nec me pudet, ut istos fateri nescire, quod nesciam;"      ["Neither am I ashamed, as they are, to confess my ignorance of what      I do not know."—Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., i. 25.] I should not speak so boldly, if it were my due to be believed; and so I told a great man, who complained of the tartness and contentiousness of my exhortations. Perceiving you to be ready and prepared on one part, I propose to you the other, with all the diligence and care I can, to clear your judgment, not to compel it. God has your hearts in His hands, and will furnish you with the means of choice. I am not so presumptuous even as to desire that my opinions should bias you—in a thing of so great importance: my fortune has not trained them up to so potent and elevated conclusions. Truly, I have not only a great many humours, but also a great many opinions, that I would endeavour to make my son dislike, if I had one. What, if the truest are not always the most commodious to man, being of so wild a composition? Whether it be to the purpose or not, tis no great matter: 'tis a common proverb in Italy, that he knows not Venus in her perfect sweetness who has never lain with a lame mistress. Fortune, or some particular incident, long ago put this saying into the mouths of the people; and the same is said of men as well as of women; for the queen of the Amazons answered the Scythian who courted her to love, "Lame men perform best." In this feminine republic, to evade the dominion of the males, they lamed them in their infancy—arms, legs, and other members that gave them advantage over them, and only made use of them in that wherein we, in these parts of the world, make use of them. I should have been apt to think; that the shuffling pace of the lame mistress added some new pleasure to the work, and some extraordinary titillation to those who were at the sport; but I have lately learnt that ancient philosophy has itself determined it, which says that the legs and thighs of lame women, not receiving, by reason of their imperfection, their due aliment, it falls out that the genital parts above are fuller and better supplied and much more vigorous; or else that this defect, hindering exercise, they who are troubled with it less dissipate their strength, and come more entire to the sports of Venus; which also is the reason why the Greeks decried the women-weavers as being more hot than other women by reason of their sedentary trade, which they carry on without any great exercise of the body. What is it we may not reason of at this rate? I might also say of these, that the jaggling about whilst so sitting at work, rouses and provokes their desire, as the swinging and jolting of coaches does that of our ladies. Do not these examples serve to make good what I said at first: that our reasons often anticipate the effect, and have so infinite an extent of jurisdiction that they judge and exercise themselves even on inanity itself and non-existency? Besides the flexibility of our invention to forge reasons of all sorts of dreams, our imagination is equally facile to receive impressions of falsity by very frivolous appearances; for, by the sole authority of the ancient and common use of this proverb, I have formerly made myself believe that I have had more pleasure in a woman by reason she was not straight, and accordingly reckoned that deformity amongst her graces. Torquato Tasso, in the comparison he makes betwixt France and Italy, says that he has observed that our legs are generally smaller than those of the Italian gentlemen, and attributes the cause of it to our being continually on horseback; which is the very same cause from which Suetonius draws a quite opposite conclusion; for he says, on the contrary, that Germanicus had made his legs bigger by the continuation of the same exercise. Nothing is so supple and erratic as our understanding; it is the shoe of Theramenes, fit for all feet. It is double and diverse, and the matters are double and diverse too. "Give me a drachm of silver," said a Cynic philosopher to Antigonus. "That is not a present befitting a king," replied he. "Give me then a talent," said the other. "That is not a present befitting a Cynic."               "Seu plures calor ille vias et caeca relaxat                Spiramenta, novas veniat qua succus in herbas                Seu durat magis, et venas astringit hiantes;                Ne tenues pluviae, rapidive potentia colic                Acrior, aut Boreae penetrabile frigus adurat."      ["Whether the heat opens more passages and secret pores through      which the sap may be derived into the new-born herbs; or whether it      rather hardens and binds the gaping veins that the small showers and      keen influence of the violent sun or penetrating cold of Boreas may      not hurt them."—Virg., Georg., i. 89.]                     "Ogni medaglia ha il suo rovescio."           ["Every medal has its reverse."—Italian Proverb.] This is the reason why Clitomachus said of old that Carneades had outdone the labours of Hercules, in having eradicated consent from men, that is to say, opinion and the courage of judging. This so vigorous fancy of Carneades sprang, in my opinion, anciently from the impudence of those who made profession of knowledge and their immeasurable self-conceit. AEsop was set to sale with two other slaves; the buyer asked the first of these what he could do; he, to enhance his own value, promised mountains and marvels, saying he could do this and that, and I know not what; the second said as much of himself or more: when it came to AEsop's turn, and that he was also asked what he could do; "Nothing," said he, "for these two have taken up all before me; they know everything." So has it happened in the school of philosophy: the pride of those who attributed the capacity of all things to the human mind created in others, out of despite and emulation, this opinion, that it is capable of nothing: the one maintain the same extreme in ignorance that the others do in knowledge; to make it undeniably manifest that man is immoderate throughout, and can never stop but of necessity and the want of ability to proceed further.

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Guide to the classics: Michel de Montaigne’s Essays

Associate Professor in Philosophy, Deakin University

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Matthew Sharpe is part of an ARC funded project on modern reinventions of the ancient idea of "philosophy as a way of life", in which Montaigne is a central figure.

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When Michel de Montaigne retired to his family estate in 1572, aged 38, he tells us that he wanted to write his famous Essays as a distraction for his idle mind . He neither wanted nor expected people beyond his circle of friends to be too interested.

His Essays’ preface almost warns us off:

Reader, you have here an honest book; … in writing it, I have proposed to myself no other than a domestic and private end. I have had no consideration at all either to your service or to my glory … Thus, reader, I myself am the matter of my book: there’s no reason that you should employ your leisure upon so frivolous and vain a subject. Therefore farewell.

The ensuing, free-ranging essays, although steeped in classical poetry, history and philosophy, are unquestionably something new in the history of Western thought. They were almost scandalous for their day.

No one before Montaigne in the Western canon had thought to devote pages to subjects as diverse and seemingly insignificant as “Of Smells”, “Of the Custom of Wearing Clothes”, “Of Posting” (letters, that is), “Of Thumbs” or “Of Sleep” — let alone reflections on the unruliness of the male appendage , a subject which repeatedly concerned him.

French philosopher Jacques Rancière has recently argued that modernism began with the opening up of the mundane, private and ordinary to artistic treatment. Modern art no longer restricts its subject matters to classical myths, biblical tales, the battles and dealings of Princes and prelates.

If Rancière is right, it could be said that Montaigne’s 107 Essays, each between several hundred words and (in one case) several hundred pages, came close to inventing modernism in the late 16th century.

Montaigne frequently apologises for writing so much about himself. He is only a second rate politician and one-time Mayor of Bourdeaux, after all. With an almost Socratic irony , he tells us most about his own habits of writing in the essays titled “Of Presumption”, “Of Giving the Lie”, “Of Vanity”, and “Of Repentance”.

But the message of this latter essay is, quite simply, that non, je ne regrette rien , as a more recent French icon sang:

Were I to live my life over again, I should live it just as I have lived it; I neither complain of the past, nor do I fear the future; and if I am not much deceived, I am the same within that I am without … I have seen the grass, the blossom, and the fruit, and now see the withering; happily, however, because naturally.

Montaigne’s persistence in assembling his extraordinary dossier of stories, arguments, asides and observations on nearly everything under the sun (from how to parley with an enemy to whether women should be so demure in matters of sex , has been celebrated by admirers in nearly every generation.

Within a decade of his death, his Essays had left their mark on Bacon and Shakespeare. He was a hero to the enlighteners Montesquieu and Diderot. Voltaire celebrated Montaigne - a man educated only by his own reading, his father and his childhood tutors – as “the least methodical of all philosophers, but the wisest and most amiable”. Nietzsche claimed that the very existence of Montaigne’s Essays added to the joy of living in this world.

More recently, Sarah Bakewell’s charming engagement with Montaigne, How to Live or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer (2010) made the best-sellers’ lists. Even today’s initiatives in teaching philosophy in schools can look back to Montaigne (and his “ On the Education of Children ”) as a patron saint or sage .

So what are these Essays, which Montaigne protested were indistinguishable from their author? (“ My book and I go hand in hand together ”).

It’s a good question.

Anyone who tries to read the Essays systematically soon finds themselves overwhelmed by the sheer wealth of examples, anecdotes, digressions and curios Montaigne assembles for our delectation, often without more than the hint of a reason why.

To open the book is to venture into a world in which fortune consistently defies expectations; our senses are as uncertain as our understanding is prone to error; opposites turn out very often to be conjoined (“ the most universal quality is diversity ”); even vice can lead to virtue. Many titles seem to have no direct relation to their contents. Nearly everything our author says in one place is qualified, if not overturned, elsewhere.

Without pretending to untangle all of the knots of this “ book with a wild and desultory plan ”, let me tug here on a couple of Montaigne’s threads to invite and assist new readers to find their own way.

Philosophy (and writing) as a way of life

Some scholars argued that Montaigne began writing his essays as a want-to-be Stoic , hardening himself against the horrors of the French civil and religious wars , and his grief at the loss of his best friend Étienne de La Boétie through dysentery.

Certainly, for Montaigne, as for ancient thinkers led by his favourites, Plutarch and the Roman Stoic Seneca, philosophy was not solely about constructing theoretical systems, writing books and articles. It was what one more recent admirer of Montaigne has called “ a way of life ”.

Montaigne has little time for forms of pedantry that value learning as a means to insulate scholars from the world, rather than opening out onto it. He writes :

Either our reason mocks us or it ought to have no other aim but our contentment.

We are great fools . ‘He has passed over his life in idleness,’ we say: ‘I have done nothing today.’ What? have you not lived? that is not only the fundamental, but the most illustrious of all your occupations.

One feature of the Essays is, accordingly, Montaigne’s fascination with the daily doings of men like Socrates and Cato the Younger ; two of those figures revered amongst the ancients as wise men or “ sages ”.

Their wisdom, he suggests , was chiefly evident in the lives they led (neither wrote a thing). In particular, it was proven by the nobility each showed in facing their deaths. Socrates consented serenely to taking hemlock, having been sentenced unjustly to death by the Athenians. Cato stabbed himself to death after having meditated upon Socrates’ example , in order not to cede to Julius Caesar’s coup d’état .

To achieve such “philosophic” constancy, Montaigne saw, requires a good deal more than book learning . Indeed, everything about our passions and, above all, our imagination , speaks against achieving that perfect tranquillity the classical thinkers saw as the highest philosophical goal.

We discharge our hopes and fears, very often, on the wrong objects, Montaigne notes , in an observation that anticipates the thinking of Freud and modern psychology. Always, these emotions dwell on things we cannot presently change. Sometimes, they inhibit our ability to see and deal in a supple way with the changing demands of life.

Philosophy, in this classical view, involves a retraining of our ways of thinking, seeing and being in the world. Montaigne’s earlier essay “ To philosophise is to learn how to die ” is perhaps the clearest exemplar of his indebtedness to this ancient idea of philosophy.

Yet there is a strong sense in which all of the Essays are a form of what one 20th century author has dubbed “ self-writing ”: an ethical exercise to “strengthen and enlighten” Montaigne’s own judgement, as much as that of we readers:

And though nobody should read me, have I wasted time in entertaining myself so many idle hours in so pleasing and useful thoughts? … I have no more made my book than my book has made me: it is a book consubstantial with the author, of a peculiar design, a parcel of my life …

As for the seeming disorder of the product, and Montaigne’s frequent claims that he is playing the fool , this is arguably one more feature of the Essays that reflects his Socratic irony. Montaigne wants to leave us with some work to do and scope to find our own paths through the labyrinth of his thoughts, or alternatively, to bobble about on their diverting surfaces .

A free-thinking sceptic

Yet Montaigne’s Essays, for all of their classicism and their idiosyncracies, are rightly numbered as one of the founding texts of modern thought . Their author keeps his own prerogatives, even as he bows deferentially before the altars of ancient heroes like Socrates, Cato, Alexander the Great or the Theban general Epaminondas .

There is a good deal of the Christian, Augustinian legacy in Montaigne’s makeup. And of all the philosophers, he most frequently echoes ancient sceptics like Pyrrho or Carneades who argued that we can know almost nothing with certainty. This is especially true concerning the “ultimate questions” the Catholics and Huguenots of Montaigne’s day were bloodily contesting.

Writing in a time of cruel sectarian violence , Montaigne is unconvinced by the ageless claim that having a dogmatic faith is necessary or especially effective in assisting people to love their neighbours :

Between ourselves, I have ever observed supercelestial opinions and subterranean manners to be of singular accord …

This scepticism applies as much to the pagan ideal of a perfected philosophical sage as it does to theological speculations.

Socrates’ constancy before death, Montaigne concludes, was simply too demanding for most people, almost superhuman . As for Cato’s proud suicide, Montaigne takes liberty to doubt whether it was as much the product of Stoic tranquility, as of a singular turn of mind that could take pleasure in such extreme virtue .

Indeed when it comes to his essays “ Of Moderation ” or “ Of Virtue ”, Montaigne quietly breaks the ancient mold. Instead of celebrating the feats of the world’s Catos or Alexanders, here he lists example after example of people moved by their sense of transcendent self-righteousness to acts of murderous or suicidal excess.

Even virtue can become vicious, these essays imply, unless we know how to moderate our own presumptions.

Of cannibals and cruelties

If there is one form of argument Montaigne uses most often, it is the sceptical argument drawing on the disagreement amongst even the wisest authorities.

If human beings could know if, say, the soul was immortal, with or without the body, or dissolved when we die … then the wisest people would all have come to the same conclusions by now, the argument goes. Yet even the “most knowing” authorities disagree about such things, Montaigne delights in showing us .

The existence of such “ an infinite confusion ” of opinions and customs ceases to be the problem, for Montaigne. It points the way to a new kind of solution, and could in fact enlighten us.

Documenting such manifold differences between customs and opinions is, for him, an education in humility :

Manners and opinions contrary to mine do not so much displease as instruct me; nor so much make me proud as they humble me.

His essay “ Of Cannibals ” for instance, presents all of the different aspects of American Indian culture, as known to Montaigne through travellers’ reports then filtering back into Europe. For the most part, he finds these “savages’” society ethically equal, if not far superior, to that of war-torn France’s — a perspective that Voltaire and Rousseau would echo nearly 200 years later.

We are horrified at the prospect of eating our ancestors. Yet Montaigne imagines that from the Indians’ perspective, Western practices of cremating our deceased, or burying their bodies to be devoured by the worms must seem every bit as callous.

And while we are at it, Montaigne adds that consuming people after they are dead seems a good deal less cruel and inhumane than torturing folk we don’t even know are guilty of any crime whilst they are still alive …

A gay and sociable wisdom

“So what is left then?”, the reader might ask, as Montaigne undermines one presumption after another, and piles up exceptions like they had become the only rule.

A very great deal , is the answer. With metaphysics, theology, and the feats of godlike sages all under a “ suspension of judgment ”, we become witnesses as we read the Essays to a key document in the modern revaluation and valorization of everyday life.

There is, for instance, Montaigne’s scandalously demotic habit of interlacing words, stories and actions from his neighbours, the local peasants (and peasant women) with examples from the greats of Christian and pagan history. As he writes :

I have known in my time a hundred artisans, a hundred labourers, wiser and more happy than the rectors of the university, and whom I had much rather have resembled.

By the end of the Essays, Montaigne has begun openly to suggest that, if tranquillity, constancy, bravery, and honour are the goals the wise hold up for us, they can all be seen in much greater abundance amongst the salt of the earth than amongst the rich and famous:

I propose a life ordinary and without lustre: ‘tis all one … To enter a breach, conduct an embassy, govern a people, are actions of renown; to … laugh, sell, pay, love, hate, and gently and justly converse with our own families and with ourselves … not to give our selves the lie, that is rarer, more difficult and less remarkable …

And so we arrive with these last Essays at a sentiment better known today from another philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, the author of A Gay Science (1882) .

Montaigne’s closing essays repeat the avowal that: “ I love a gay and civil wisdom … .” But in contrast to his later Germanic admirer, the music here is less Wagner or Beethoven than it is Mozart (as it were), and Montaigne’s spirit much less agonised than gently serene.

It was Voltaire, again, who said that life is a tragedy for those who feel, and a comedy for those who think. Montaigne adopts and admires the comic perspective . As he writes in “Of Experience”:

It is not of much use to go upon stilts , for, when upon stilts, we must still walk with our legs; and when seated upon the most elevated throne in the world, we are still perched on our own bums.

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Michel de Montaigne

Given the huge breadth of his readings, Montaigne could have been ranked among the most erudite humanists of the XVIth century. But in the Essays , his aim is above all to exercise his own judgment properly. Readers who might want to convict him of ignorance would find nothing to hold against him, he said, for he was exerting his natural capacities, not borrowed ones. He thought that too much knowledge could prove a burden, preferring to exert his ‘natural judgment’ to displaying his erudition.

3. A Philosophy of Free Judgment

4. montaigne's scepticism, 5. montaigne and relativism, 6. montaigne's legacy on charron and descartes, 7. conclusion, translations in english, secondary sources, translations, related entries.

Montaigne (1533-1592) came from a rich bourgeois family that acquired nobility after his father fought in Italy in the army of King Francis I of France; he came back with the firm intention of bringing refined Italian culture to France. He decorated his Périgord castle in the style of an ancient Roman villa. He also decided that his son would not learn Latin in school. He arranged instead for a German preceptor and the household to speak to him exclusively in Latin at home. So the young Montaigne grew up speaking Latin and reading Vergil, Ovid, and Horace on his own. At the age of six, he was sent to board at the Collège de Guyenne in Bordeaux, which he later praised as the best humanist college in France, though he found fault with humanist colleges in general. Where Montaigne later studied law, or, indeed, whether he ever studied law at all is not clear. The only thing we know with certainty is that his father bought him an office in the Court of Périgueux. He then met Etienne de La Boëtie with whom he formed an intimate friendship and whose death some years later, in 1563, left him deeply distraught. Tired of active life, he retired at the age of only 37 to his father's castle. In the same year, 1571, he was nominated Gentleman of King Charles IX's Ordinary Chamber, and soon thereafter, also of Henri de Navarre's Chamber. He received the decoration of the Order of Saint-Michel, a distinction all the more exceptional as Montaigne's lineage was from recent nobility. On the title page of the first edition (1580) of the Essays , we read: “Essais de Messire Michel Seigneur de Montaigne, Chevalier de l'ordre du Roy, & Gentilhomme ordinaire de sa chambre.” Initially keen to show off his titles and, thus, his social standing, Montaigne had the honorifics removed in the second edition (1582).

Replicating Petrarca's choice in De vita solitaria , Montaigne chose to dedicate himself to the Muses. In his library, which was quite large for the period, he had wisdom formulas carved on the wooden beams. They were drawn from, amongst others, Ecclesiastes , Sextus Empiricus, Lucretius, and other classical authors, whom he read intensively. To escape fits of melancholy, he began to commit his thoughts to paper. In 1580, he undertook a journey to Italy, whose main goal was probably to cure the pain of his kidney stones at thermal resorts. The journey is related in part by a secretary, in part by Montaigne himself, in a manuscript that was only discovered during the 18th century, given the title The Journal of the Journey to Italy , and forgotten soon after. While Montaigne was taking the baths near Pisa, he learnt of his election as Mayor of Bordeaux. He was first tempted to refuse out of modesty, but eventually accepted (he even received a letter from the King urging him to take the post) and was later re-elected. In his second term he came under criticism for having abandoned the town during the great plague in an attempt to protect himself and his family. His time in office was dimmed by the wars of religion between Catholics and Protestants. Several members of his family converted to Protestantism, but Montaigne himself remained a Catholic.

Montaigne wrote three books of Essays . (‘Essay’ was an original name for this kind of work; it became an appreciated genre soon after.) Three main editions are recognized: 1580 (at this stage, only the first two books were written), 1588, and 1595. The last edition, which could not be supervised by Montaigne himself, was edited from the manuscript by his adoptive daughter Marie de Gournay.. Till the end of the 19th century, the copy text for all new editions was that of 1595; Fortunat Strowski and shortly after him Pierre Villey dismissed it in favor of the “Bordeaux copy”, a text of the 1588 edition supplemented by manuscript additions. [ 1 ] Montaigne enriched his text continuously; he preferred to add for the sake of diversity, rather than to correct. [ 2 ] The unity of the work and the order of every single chapter remain problematic. We are unable to detect obvious links from one chapter to the next: in the first book, Montaigne jumps from “ Idleness” (I,8) to “Liars” (I,9), then from “Prompt or slow speech” (I,10) to “Prognostications” (I,11). The random aspect of the work, acknowledged by the author himself, has been a challenge for commentators ever since. Part of the brilliance of the Essays lies in this very ability to elicit various forms of explanatory coherence whilst at the same time defying them. The work is so rich and flexible that it accommodates virtually any academic trend. Yet, it is also so resistant to interpretation that it reveals the limits of each interpretation.

Critical studies of the Essays have, until recently, been mainly of a literary nature. However, to consider Montaigne as a writer rather than as a philosopher can be a way of ignoring a disturbing thinker. It was he after all who shook some fundamental aspects of Western thought, such as the superiority we assign to man over animals, [ 3 ] to European civilization over ‘Barbarians’, [ 4 ] or to reason as an alleged universal standard. In Montaigne we have a writer whose work is deeply infused by philosophical thought. A tradition rooted in the 19th century tends to relegate his work to the status of literary impressionism or to the expression of a frivolous subjectivity. Yet to do him justice, one needs to bear in mind the inseparable unity of thought and style in his work. Montaigne's repeated revisions of his text, as modern editions show with the three letters A, B, C standing for the three main editions, mirror the relationship between the activity of his thought and the Essays as a work in progress. The Essays display both the laboriousness and the delight of thinking.

If it is true, as Edmund Husserl said, that philosophy is a shared endeavor, Montaigne is perhaps the most exemplary of philosophers since his work extensively borrows and quotes from others. Montaigne managed to internalize a huge breadth of reading, so that his erudition does not appear as such. He created a most singular work, yet one that remains deeply rooted in the community of poets, historians, and philosophers. His decision to use only his own judgment in dealing with all sorts of matters, his resolutely distant attitude towards memory and knowledge, his warning that we should not mix God or transcendent principles with the human world, are some of the key elements that characterize Montaigne's position. As a humanist, he considered that one has to assimilate the classics, but above all to display virtue, “according to the opinion of Plato, who says that steadfastness, faith, and sincerity are real philosophy, and the other sciences which aim at other things are only powder and rouge.” [ 5 ]

Montaigne rejects the theoretical or speculative way of philosophizing that prevailed under the Scholastics ever since the Middle Ages. According to him, science does not exist, but only a general belief in science. Petrarch had already criticized the Scholastics for worshiping Aristotle as their God. Siding with the humanists, Montaigne develops a sharp criticism of science “à la mode des Geométriens”, [ 6 ] the mos geometricus deemed to be the most rigorous. It is merely ‘a practice and business of science’, [ 7 ] he says, which is restricted to the University and essentially carried out between masters and their disciples. The main problem of this kind of science is that it makes us spend our time justifying as rational the beliefs we inherit, instead of calling into question their foundations; it makes us label fashionable opinions as truth, instead of gauging their strength. Whereas science should be a free inquiry, it consists only in gibberish discussions on how we should read Aristotle or Galen. [ 8 ] Critical judgment is systematically silenced. Montaigne demands a thought process that would not be tied down by any doctrinaire principle, a thought process that would lead to free enquiry.

If we trace back the birth of modern science, we find that Montaigne as a philosopher was ahead of his time. In 1543, Copernicus put the earth in motion, depriving man of his cosmological centrality. Yet he nevertheless changed little in the medieval conception of the world as a sphere. The Copernican world became an “open” world only with Thomas Digges (1576) although his sky was still situated in space, inhabited by gods and angels. [ 9 ] One has to wait for Giordano Bruno to find the first representative of the modern conception of an infinite universe (1584). But whether Bruno is a modern mind remains controversial (the planets are still animals, etc). Montaigne, on the contrary, is entirely free from the medieval conception of the spheres. He owes his cosmological freedom to his deep interest in ancient philosophers, to Lucretius in particular. In the longest chapter of the Essays , the ‘Apologie de Raymond Sebond’, Montaigne conjures up many opinions, regarding the nature of the cosmos, or the nature of the soul. He weighs the Epicureans' opinion that several worlds exist, against that of the unicity of the world put forth by both Aristotle and Aquinas. He comes out in favor of the former, without ranking his own evaluation as truth.

As a humanist, Montaigne conceived of philosophy as morals. In the chapter “On the education of children”, [ 10 ] education is identified with philosophy, this being understood as the formation of judgment and manners in everyday life: “for philosophy, which, as the molder of judgment and conduct, will be his principal lesson, has the privilege of being everywhere at home”. [ 11 ] Philosophy, which exerts itself essentially by the use of judgment, is significant to the very ordinary, varied and ‘undulating’ [ 12 ] process of life. In fact, under the guise of innocuous anecdotes, Montaigne achieved the humanist revolution in philosophy. He moved from a conception of philosophy conceived of as theoretical science, to a philosophy conceived of as the practice of free judgment. Lamenting that ‘philosophy, even with people of understanding, should be an empty and fantastic name, a thing of no use and no value”, [ 13 ] he asserted that philosophy should be the most cheerful activity. He practised philosophy by setting his judgment to trial, in order to become aware of its weaknesses, but also to get to know its strength. ‘Every movement reveals us”, [ 14 ] but our judgments do so the best. At the beginning of the past century, one of Montaigne's greatest commentators, Pierre Villey, developed the idea that Montaigne truly became himself through writing. This idea remains more or less true, in spite of its obvious link with late romanticist psychology. The Essays remain an exceptional historical testimony of the progress of privacy and individualism, a blossom ing of subjectivity, an attainment of personal maturity that will be copied, but maybe has never since matched. It seems that Montaigne, who dedicated himself to freedom of the mind and peacefulness of the soul, did not have any other aim than cultivating and educating himself. Since philosophy had failed to determine a secure path towards happiness, he committed each individual to do so in his own way. [ 15 ]

Montaigne wants to escape the stifling of thought by knowledge, a wide-spread phenomenon which he called “pedantism’, [ 16 ] an idea that he may have gleaned from the tarnishing of professors by the successful Commedia dell'arte . He praises one of the most famous professors of the day, Adrianus Turnebus, for having combined robust judgment with massive erudition. We have to moderate our thirst for knowledge, just as we do our appetite for pleasure. Siding here with Callicles against Plato, Montaigne asserts that a gentleman should not dedicate himself entirely to philosophy. [ 17 ] Practised with restraint, it proves useful, whereas in excess it leads to eccentricity and insociability. [ 18 ] Reflecting on the education of the children of the aristocracy (chapter I, 26, is dedicated to the countess Diane de Foix, who was then pregnant), Montaigne departs significantly from a traditional humanist education, the very one he himself received. Instead of focusing on the ways and means of making the teaching of Latin more effective, as pedagogues usually did, Montaigne stresses the need for action and playful activities. The child will conform early to social and political customs, but without servility. The use of judgment in every circumstance, as a warrant for freedom and practical intelligence has to remain at the core of education. He transfers the major responsibility of education from the school to everyday life: ‘Wonderful brilliance may be gained for human judgment by getting to know men’. [ 19 ] The priority given to the formation of judgment and character strongly opposes the craving for a powerful memory during his time. He reserves for himself the freedom to pick up bits of knowledge here and there, displaying “nonchalance” intellectually, much in the same way that Castiglione's courtier would use sprezzatura in social relationships. Although Montaigne presents this nonchalance as essential to his nature, his position is not innocent: it allows him to take on the voice now of a Stoic, and then of a Sceptic, now of an Epicurean and then of a Christian. Although his views are never fully original, they always bear his unmistakable mark. Montaigne's thought, which is often rated as modern in so many aspects, remains deeply rooted in the classical tradition. Nourished by the classical authors, Montaigne navigates easily through heaps of knowledge, proposing remarkable literary and philosophical innovations along the way.

Montaigne begins his project to know man by noticing that the same human behavior can have opposite effects, or that opposite conducts can have the same effects: ‘by diverse means we arrive at the same end‘. [ 20 ] Human life cannot be turned into an object of rational theory. Human conduct does not obey universal rules, but a great diversity of rules, among which the most accurate still fall short of the intended mark. ‘Human reason is a tincture infused in about equal strength in all our opinions and ways, whatever their form: infinite in substance, infinite in diversity’ [ 21 ] says the chapter on custom. By focusing on anecdotal experience, Montaigne comes thus to write “the masterpiece of modern moral science”, according to the great commentator Hugo Friedrich. He gives up the moral ambition of telling how men should live, in order to arrive at a non-prejudiced mind for knowing man as he is. “Others form man, I tell of him”. [ 22 ] Man is ever since “without a definition”, as Marcel Conche commented. [ 23 ] In the chapter ‘Apologie de Raimond Sebond’, Montaigne draws from classical and Renaissance knowledge in order to remind us that, in some parts of the world, we find men that bear little resemblance to us. Our experience of man and things should not be perceived as limited by our present standards of judgment. We display a sort of madness when we settle limits for the possible and the impossible. [ 24 ]

Philosophy has failed to secure man a determined idea of his place in the world, or of his nature. Metaphysical or psychological opinions, indeed far too numerous, come as a burden more than as a help. Montaigne pursues his quest for knowledge through experience; the meaning of concepts is not set down by means of a definition, it is related to common language or to historical examples. One of the essential elements of experience is the ability to reflect on one's actions and thoughts. Montaigne is engaging in a case-by-case gnôti seauton , “know thyself”: although truth in general is not truly an appropriate object for human faculties, we can reflect on our experience. What counts is not the fact that we eventually know the truth or not, but rather the way in which we seek it. [ 25 ] “The question is not who will hit the ring, but who will make the best runs at it.” The aim is to properly exercise our judgment.

Montaigne's thinking baffles our most common categories. The vision of an ever-changing world that he developed threatens the being of all things. ‘We have no communication with being’. [ 26 ] We wrongly take that which appears for that which is, and we indulge in a dogmatic, deceptive language that is cut off from an ever-changing reality. We ought to be more careful with our use of language. Montaigne would prefer that children be taught other ways of speaking, more appropriate to the nature of human inquiry, such as ‘What does that mean ?’, ‘I do not understand it’, ‘This might be’, ‘Is it true?’ [ 27 ] Montaigne himself is fond of ‘these formulas that soften the boldness of our propositions’: “perhaps”, “to some extent”, “they say”, “I think”, [ 28 ] and the like. Criticism on theory and dogmatism permeates for example his reflexion on politics. Because social order is too complicated to be mastered by individual reason, he deems conservatism as the wisest stance. [ 29 ] This policy is grounded on the general evaluation that change is usually more damaging than the conservation of social institutions. Nevertheless, there may be certain circumstances that advocate change as a better solution, as history sometimes showed. Reason being then unable to decide a priori , judgment must come into play and alternate its views.

With Cornelius Agrippa, Henri Estienne or Francisco Sanchez, among others, Montaigne has largely contributed to the rebirth of scepticism during the XVIth century. His literary encounter with Sextus produced a decisive shock: around 1576, when Montaigne had his own personal medal coined, he had it engraved with his age, with “ Epecho ” , “I abstain” in Greek, and another Sceptic motto in French: ‘ Que sais-je ?’: what do I know ?. At this period in his life, Montaigne is thought to have undergone a “sceptical crisis”, as Pierre Villey famously commented. In fact, this interpretation dates back to Pascal, for whom scepticism could only be a sort of momentary frenzy. [ 30 ] The “Apologie de Raimond Sebond”, the longest chapter of the Essays , bears the sign of intellectual despair that Montaigne manages to shake off elsewhere. Another interpretation of scepticism formulates it as a strategy used to comfort “fideism”: because reason is unable to demonstrate religious dogmas, we must rely on spiritual revelation and faith. The paradigm of this interpretation has been delivered by Richard Popkin in his History of Scepticism . Montaigne appears here as a founding father of the Counter Reformation, being the leader of the “Nouveaux Pyrrhoniens’, for whom scepticism is used as a means to an end, that is, to neutralize the grip that philosophy once had on religion.

Commentators now agree upon the fact that Montaigne largely transformed the type of scepticism he borrowed from Sextus. The two sides of the scale are never perfectly balanced, since reason always tips the scale in favor of the present at hand. This imbalance undermines the key mechanism of isosthenia (the equality of strength of the two opposing arguments). Since the suspension of judgment cannot be said to occur “casually”, as Sextus Empiricus would like it to, judgment must abstain from giving its assent. In fact, the sources of Montaigne's scepticism are much wider: his child readings of Ovid's Metamorphosis , the in utramque partem academic debate he practised at the Collège de Guyenne (a pro and contra discussion inherited from Aristotle and Cicero) and the humanist philosophy of action, shaped his mind early on. Through them, he learned repeatedly that rational appearances are deceptive. In most of the chapters of the Essays , Montaigne now and then reverses his judgment: these sudden shifts of perspective are designed to escape adherence, and to tackle the matter from another point of view. [ 31 ] The Essays mirror a discreet conduct of judgment, in keeping with the formula iudicio alternante , which we still find engraved today on the beams of the Périgord castle's library. The aim is not to ruin arguments by opposing them, as it is the case in the Pyrrhonian ‘antilogy’, but rather to counterbalance a single opinion by taking into account other opinions. In order to work, each scale of judgment has to be laden. If we take morals, for example, Montaigne refers to varied moral authorities, one of them being custom and the other reason. Against every form of dogmatism, Montaigne returns moral life to its original diversity and inherent uneasiness. Through philosophy, he seeks full accordance with the diversity of life: “As for me, I love life and cultivate as God has been pleased to grant it to us”. [ 32 ]

We find two readings of Montaigne as a Sceptic. The first one concentrates on the polemical, negative arguments drawn from Sextus Empiricus, at the end of the ‘Apology’. This hard-line scepticism draws the picture of man as “humiliated”. [ 33 ] Its aim is essentially to fight the pretensions of reason and to annihilate human knowledge. “Truth”, “being” and “justice” are equally dismissed as unattainable. Doubt foreshadows Descartes' Meditations , on the problem of the reality of the outside world. Dismissing the objective value of one's representations, Montaigne would have created the long-lasting problem of ‘solipsism’. We notice, nevertheless, that he does not question the reality of things — except occasionally at the very end of the 'Apology' — but the value of opinions and men. The second reading of his scepticism puts forth that Cicero's probabilism is of far greater significance in shaping the sceptical content of the Essays . After the 1570's, Montaigne no longer read Sextus; additions show, however, that he took up a more and more extensive reading of Cicero's philosophical writings. We assume that, in his search for polemical arguments against rationalism during the 1570's, Montaigne borrowed much from Sextus, but as he got tired of the sceptical machinery, and understood scepticism rather as an ethics of judgment, he went back to Cicero. [ 34 ] The paramount importance of the Academica for XVI th century thought has been underlined by Charles B. Schmitt. In the free enquiry, which Cicero engaged throughout the varied doctrines, the humanists found an ideal mirror of their own relationship with the Classics. “The Academy, of which I am a follower, gives me the opportunity to hold an opinion as if it were ours, as soon as it shows itself to be highly probable” [ 35 ] wrote Cicero in the De Officiis . Reading Seneca, Montaigne will think as if he were a member of the Stoa; then changing for Lucretius, he will think as if he had become an Epicurean, and so on. Doctrines or opinions, beside historical stuff and personal experiences, make up the nourishment of judgment. Montaigne assimilates opinions, according to what appears to him as true, without taking it to be absolutely true. He insists on the dialogical nature of thought, referring to Socrates' way of keeping the discussion going: “The leader of <Plato's> dialogues, Socrates, is always asking questions and stirring up discussion, never concluding, never satisfying….” [ 36 ] Judgment has to determine the most convincing position, or at least to determine the strengths and weaknesses of each position. The simple dismissal of truth would be too dogmatic a position; but if absolute truth is lacking, we still have the possibility to balance opinions. We have resources enough, to evaluate the various authorities that we have to deal with in ordinary life.

The original failure of commentators was perhaps in labelling Montaigne's thought as “sceptic” without reflecting on the original meaning of the essay. Montaigne's exercise of judgment is an exercise of ‘natural judgment’, which means that judgment does not need any principle or any rule as a presupposition. In this way, many aspects of Montaigne's thinking can be considered as sceptical, although they were not used for the sake of scepticism. For example, when Montaigne sets down the exercise of doubt as a good start in education, he understands doubt as part of the process of the formation of judgment. This process should lead to wisdom, characterized as ‘always joyful’. [ 37 ] Montaigne's scepticism is not a desperate one. On the contrary, it offers the reader a sort of jubilation which relies on the modest but effective pleasure in dismissing knowledge, thus making room for the exercise of one's natural faculties.

Renaissance thinkers strongly felt the necessity to revise their discourse on man. But no one accentuated this necessity more than Montaigne: what he was looking for, when reading historians or travellers such as Lopez de Gomara's History of Indies , was the utmost variety of beliefs and customs that would enrich his image of man. Neither the Hellenistic Sage, nor the Christian Saint, nor the Renaissance Scholar, are unquestioned models in the Essays . Instead, Montaigne is considering real men, who are the product of customs. “Here they live on human flesh; there it is an act of piety to kill one's father at a certain age….” [ 38 ] The importance of custom plays a polemical part: alongside with scepticism, the strength of imagination (chapter I,21) or Fortune (chapters I,1, I,24, etc.), it contributes to the devaluation of reason and will. It is bound to destroy the spontaneous trust that we do know the truth, and that we live according to justice. During the XVIth century, the jurists of the “French school of law” showed that the law is tied up with historical determinations. [ 39 ] In chapter I,23, ‘On custom’, Montaigne seems to extrapolate on this idea : our opinions and conducts being everywhere the product of custom, reference to universal “reason”, “truth”, or “justice” is to be dismissed as an illusion. Pierre Villey was the first to use the terms ‘relativity’ and “relativism”, which proved to be useful tools when commenting on the fact that Montaigne acknowledges that no universal reason presides over the birth of our beliefs. [ 40 ] The notion of absolute truth, applied to human matters, vitiates the understanding and wreaks havoc in society. Upon further reflexion, contingent customs impact everything: ‘in short, to my way of thinking, there is nothing that custom will not or cannot do’. [ 41 ] Montaigne calls it “Circe's drink”. [ 42 ] Custom is a sort of witch, whose spell, among other effects, casts moral illusion. “The laws of conscience, which we say are born from nature, are born of custom. Each man, holding in inward veneration the opinions and the behavior approved and accepted around him…,’ [ 43 ] obeys custom in all his actions and thoughts. The power of custom, indeed, not only guides man in his behavior, but also persuades him of its legitimacy. What is crime for one person will appear normal to another. In the XVIIth century, Pascal will use this argument when challenging the pretension of philosophers of knowing truth. One century later, David Hume will lay stress on the fact that the power of custom is all the stronger, specifically because we are not aware of it. What are we supposed to do, then, if our reason is so flexible that it “changes with two degrees of elevation towards the pole”, as Pascal says? [ 44 ] For Pascal, only one alternative exists, faith in Jesus Christ. However, it is more complicated in the case of Montaigne. Getting to know all sorts of customs, through his readings or travels, he makes an exemplary effort to open his mind. “We are all huddled and concentrated in ourselves, and our vision is reduced to the length of our nose”. [ 45 ] Custom's grip is so strong that it is dubious as to whether we are in a position to become aware of it and therefore shake off its power.

Montaigne was hailed by Claude Lévi-Strauss as the progenitor of the human sciences, and the pioneer of cultural relativism. [ 46 ] However, Montaigne has not been willing to indulge entirely in relativism. Judgment is at first sight unable to stop the relativistic discourse, but it is not left without remedy when facing the power of custom. Inner freedom of thought is the first counterweight we can make use of, for example when criticizing an existing law. Customs are not almighty, since their authority can be reflected upon, evaluated or challenged by individual judgment. The comparative method can also be applied to the freeing of judgment: although lacking a universal standard, we can nevertheless stand back from particular customs, by the mere fact of comparing them. Montaigne thus denounces the fanaticism and the cruelty displayed by Christians against one another during the civil wars in France which he compares to cannibalism: “I think there is more barbarity in eating a man alive than in eating him dead, and in tearing by tortures and the rack a body still full of feeling….” [ 47 ] The meaning of the word ‘barbarity’ is not merely relative to a culture or a point of view, since there are degrees of barbarity. Passing a judgment on cannibals, Montaigne also says: “So we may well call these people barbarians, in respect to the rules of reason, but not in respect to ourselves, who surpass them in every kind of barbarity….” [ 48 ] Judgment is still endowed with the possibility of postulating universal standards, such as “reason” or “nature”, which help when evaluating actions and behaviors. Although Montaigne maintains in the ‘Apologie’ that true reason and true justice are only known by God, he asserts in other chapters that these standards are somehow accessible to man, since they allow judgment to consider customs as particular and contingent rules. [ 49 ] In order to criticize the changeable and the relative, we must suppose that our judgment is still able to “bring things back to truth and reason”. [ 50 ] Man is everywhere enslaved by custom, but this does not mean that we should accept the numbing of our mind. Montaigne elaborates a pedagogy, which rests on the practice of judgment itself. The task of the pupil is not to repeat what the master said, but, on a given subject of problem, to confront his judgment with the master's one. Moreover, relativistic readings of the Essays are forced to ignore certain passages that carry a more rationalistic tone. “The violent detriment inflicted by custom” (I,23) is certainly not a praise of custom, but an invitation to escape it. In the same way that Circe's potion has changed men into pigs, custom turns their intelligence into stupidity. In the toughest cases, Montaigne's critical use of judgment aims at giving ‘a good whiplash to the ordinary stupidity of judgment.’ [ 51 ] In many other places, Montaigne boasts of himself being able to resist vulgar opinion. Independence of thinking, alongside with clear-mindedness and good faith, are the first virtues a young gentleman should acquire.

Pierre Charron was Montaigne's friend and official heir. In De la sagesse (1601 and 1604), he re-organized many of his master's ideas, setting aside the most disturbing ones. His work is now usually dismissed as a dogmatic misrepresentation of Montaigne's thought. Nevertheless, his book was given priority over the Essays themselves during the whole 17th century, especially after Malebranche's critics conspired to have the Essays included in the Roman Index of 1677. Montaigne's historical influence must be reckoned through the lens of this mediation. Moreover, Charron's reading is not simply faulty. According to him, wisdom relies on the readiness of judgment to revise itself towards a more favorable outcome: [ 52 ] this idea is one of the most remarkable readings of the Essays in the early history of their reception.

The influence Montaigne had on Descartes has been commented upon by many critics, at least from the 19th century on, within the context of the birth of modern science. As a sceptic, calling into question the natural link between mind and things, Montaigne would have won his position in the modern philosophical landscape in any case. The scepticism in the ‘Apologie’ is, no doubt, a main source of “solipsism”, but Descartes cannot be called a disciple of Montaigne in the sense that he would have inherited a doctrine. Above all, he owes the Périgordian gentleman a way of educating himself. Far from substituting Montaigne for his Jesuit schoolteachers, Descartes decided to teach himself from scratch, following the path indicated by Montaigne to achieve independence and firmness of judgment. The mindset that Descartes inherited from the Essays appears as something particularly obvious, in the two first parts of the Discours de la méthode . As the young Descartes left the Collège de La Flèche, he decided to travel, and to test his own value in action. “I employed the rest of my youth to travel, to see courts and armies, to meet people of varied humors and conditions, to collect varied experiences, to try myself in the meetings that fortune was offering me….” [ 53 ] Education, taken out of a school context, is presented as an essay of the self through experience. The world, as pedagogue, has been substituted for books and teachers. This new education allows Descartes to get rid of the prejudice of overrating his own customs, a widespread phenomenon that we now call ethnocentrism. Montaigne's legacy becomes particularly conspicuous when Descartes draws the lesson from his travels, "having acknowledged that those who have very contrary feelings to ours are not barbarians or savages, but that many of them make use of reason as much or more so than we do". “It is good to know something of different people, in order to judge our own with more sanity, and not to think that everything that is against our customs and habits is ridiculous and against reason, as usually do those who have never seen anything.” [ 54 ] Like Montaigne, Descartes begins by philosophizing on life with no other device than the one of a discipline of judgment: “I was learning not to believe anything too firmly, of which I had been persuaded through example and custom.” [ 55 ] He departs nevertheless from Montaigne when he equates with error opinions that are grounded on custom. [ 56 ] The latter would not have dared to speak of error: varied opinions, having more or less authority, are to be weighed upon the scale of judgment. It is thus not correct to interpret Montaigne's philosophy as a ‘criticism of prejudice’, from a Cartesian stance.

Montaigne cultivates his liberty by not adhering exclusively to any one idea, while at the same time exploring them all. In exercising his judgment on various topics, he trains himself to go off on fresh tracks, starting from something he read or experienced. For Montaigne this also means calling into question the convictions of his time, reflecting upon his beliefs and education, and cultivating his own personal thoughts. His language can be said to obey only one rule, that is, to be “an effect of sincerity,” which is the very one that he demands from the pupil. His language bears an unmistakable tone but contradicts itself sometimes from one place to another, perhaps for the very reason that it follows so closely the movements of thought.

If being a philosopher means being insensitive to human frailties and to the evils or to the pleasures which befall us, then Montaigne is not a philosopher. If it means using a “jargon”, and being able to enter the world of scholars, then Montaigne is not one either. Yet, if being a philosopher is being able to judge properly in any circumstances of life, then the Essays are the exemplary testimony of an author who wanted to be a philosopher for good. Montaigne is putting his judgment to trial on whatever subject, in order not only to get to know its value, but also to form and strengthen it.

He manages thus to offer us a philosophy in accordance with life. As Nietzsche puts it, “that such a man has written, joy on earth has truly increased…If my task were to make this earth a home, I would attach myself to him.” Or, as Stefan Zweig said, in a context which was closer to the historical reality experienced by Montaigne himself : “Montaigne helps us answer this one question: ‘How to stay free? How to preserve our inborn clear-mindedness in front of all the threats and dangers of fanaticism, how to preserve the humanity of our hearts among the upsurge of bestiality?’”

Bibliography

• Essais , F. Strowski (ed.), Paris: Hachette, 1912, Phototypic reproduction of the ‘Exemplaire de Bordeaux’, showing Montaigne's handwritten additions of 1588-1592.
• Essais , Pierre Villey (ed.), 3 volumes, Alcan, 1922-1923, revised by V.-L. Saulnier, 1965. Gives the 3 strata indications, probable dates of composition of the chapters, and many sources.
• Michel de Montaigne. Les Essais , J. Balsamo, C. Magnien-Simonin & M. Magnien (eds.) (with “Notes de lecture” and “Sentences peintes” edited by Alain Legros), Paris, “Pléiade”, Gallimard, 2007. The Essays are based on the 1595 published version.
• La Théologie naturelle de Raymond Sebond , traduicte nouvellement en François par Messire Michel, Seigneur de Montaigne, Chevalier de l'ordre du Roy et Gentilhomme ordinaire de sa chambre . Ed. by Dr Armaingaud, Paris: Conard, 1935.
• Le Journal de Voyage en Italie de Michel de Montaigne . Ed. by François Rigolot, Paris: PUF, 1992.
• Lettres . Ed. by Arthur Armaingaud, Paris, Conard, 1939 (vol. XI, in Œuvres complètes , pp.159-266).
• The Essayes , tr. by John Florio. London: V. Sims, 1603.
• The Essays , tr. by Charles Cotton. 3 vol., London: T. Basset, M. Gilliflower and W. Hensman, 1685-1686.
• The Essays , tr. by E.J. Trechmann. 2 vol., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1927.
• Michel de Montaigne. The Complete Works. Essays, Travel Journal, Letters, tr. by Donald M. Frame , Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958, renewed 1971 & 1976.
• The Complete Essays , tr. by M.A. Screech, London/New York: Penguin, 1993.
• The Journal of Montaigne's Travels , tr. by W.G. Watters, 3 vol., London: John Murray, 1903.
• The Diary of Montaigne's Journey to Italy in 1580 and 1581 , tr. by E.J. Trechmann. London: Hogarth Press, 1929.
• Auerbach, Erich, 1946, “l'humaine condition” (on Montaigne) in Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans . Willard Trask. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003 (originally pub. Bern: Francke).
• Burke, Peter, 1981, Montaigne , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Compayré, Gabriel, 1908, Montaigne and the Education of the Judgment, trans. J. E. Mansion, New York: Burt Franklin, 1971.
• Conche, Marcel, 1996, Montaigne et la philosophie , Paris: PUF.
• Desan, Philippe (dir.), 2007, Dictionnaire de Montaigne , Paris: Champion.
• Frame, Donald M., 1984, Montaigne: A Biography , New York: Harcourt/ London: Hamish Hamilton, 1965/ San Francisco: North Point Press.
• Friedrich, Hugo, 1991, Montaigne , Bern: Francke, 1949; Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Fontana, Biancamaria, 2008, Montaigne’s Politics: Authority and Governance in the Essays , Geneva: Princeton University Press.
• Hoffmann, Georges, 1998, Montaigne's Career , Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Horkheimer, Max, 1938, Montaigne und die Funktion der Skepsis , Frankfurt: Fischer, reprinted 1971.
• Imbach, Ruedi, 1983, “‘Et toutefois nostre outrecuidance veut faire passer la divinité par nostre estamine’, l'essai II,12 et la genèse de la pensée moderne. Construction d'une thèse explicative” in Paradigmes de théologie philosophique , O. Höffe et R. Imbach (eds) Fribourg.
• Ulrich Langer, 2005, The Cambridge Companion to Montaigne , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Leake, R.E., 1981, Concordance des Essais de Montaigne , 2 vol., Genève: Droz.
• Popkin, Richard, 1979, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza , Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Schmitt, Charles B., 1972, Cicero scepticus , The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
• Screech, Michael, 1983, Montaigne & Melancholy — The Wisdom of the Essays , London: Duckworth.
• Starobinski, Jean, 2009, Montaigne in Motion , University of Chicago Press.
• Supple, James, 1984, Arms versus Letters, The Military and Literary Ideals in the Essays , Cambridge: Clarendon Press.
• Tournon, André, 1983, La glose et l'essai , Paris: H. Champion, reprinted 2001.
• Zweig, Stefan, 1960, Montaigne [written 1935-1941] Frankfurt: Fischer.

Other Internet Resources

• The complete, searchable text of the Villey-Saulnier edition , from the ARFTL project at the University of Chicago (French)
• The Charles’ Cotton translation of the Essays , searchable HTML version at Oregon State University (English)
• Montaigne Studies: An Interdisciplinary Forum , Philippe Desan, ed., (University of Chicago).
• Portrait Gallery , in Montaigne Studies: An Interdisciplinary Forum
• Société Internationale des Amis de Montaigne (in French).
• Montaigne's Essays John Florio's translation (first published 1603, Ben R. Schneider (ed.), Lawrence University, Wisconsin, from The World's Classics, 1904, 1910, 1924), published at Renascence Editions, U. Oregon
• Essays by Michel De Montaigne , Charles Cotton's translation (1685-1686).

civic humanism | Descartes, René | -->humanism: in the Renaissance --> | -->liberty --> | relativism | -->Sextus Empiricus --> | skepticism | Stoicism

Essays (Montaigne)

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The Essais exercised an important influence on both French and English literature , in thought and style. [2]

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22 Montaigne on Reading

Peter Mack, Professor, Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick

• Published: 11 February 2016
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Montaigne’s wide and critical reading contributed enormously to his writing. that we know more about Montaigne’s reading than any other Renaissance author. This chapter begins by discussing the books Montaigne read and the comments he made on his reading. It argues that we should take seriously his advice to read in order to become wise, by discovering one’s own views, rather than to become learned, by summarizing the views of others. It describes Montaigne’s method of writing in reaction to his reading (especially the re-reading of his own text) by building fragments, such as axioms, proverbs, narratives and comparisons into logical sequences, using seven basic types of logical connection and the ways in which Montaigne uses quotations taken from history and poetry in the Essays , concluding with a discussion of the use of quotations in “Of vanity” (III, 9).

Montaigne collected books and made extensive use of them in his Essays , as he demonstrates by his numerous quotations, translations, and paraphrases. Montaigne’s practices of reading were a significant part of what made him a great writer. He also writes a great deal about his habits of reading. In addition to this we possess about one hundred of his books with his own annotations in some of them. Consequently, we know more about Montaigne’s practices of reading and views on reading than for any other sixteenth-century author. As important as what he read was what he did with that reading, the way he embodied axioms and narratives taken from his reading in passages of questioning and reflection. At times he seems to read in order to develop and test his own opinions. This is nowhere more true than in Montaigne’s habitual rereading and emendation of his own text. Most of his writing is formed as a response to what he has already written, often on the basis of his rereading of his favorite authors. Studying Montaigne’s reading gives us a special opportunity to reflect on the differences between his practices of reading and our own and to wonder what Montaigne has to teach us about reading.

This chapter will begin by considering the books Montaigne read and the comments he made on his reading, including the implications of those comments for our reading. Then it will discuss Montaigne’s method of building fragments, largely taken from his reading into logical sequences. Finally it will describe the uses that Montaigne makes of quotations taken from his reading in the Essays , concluding with a discussion of the use of quotations in “Of vanity” (III, 9).

Montaigne tells us that his own favorite reading was Plutarch, in Amyot’s French translation, and Seneca, in Latin, an assertion amply confirmed by the quotations and paraphrases from their work. Indeed, it is quite possible that Plutarch’s Moralia and Seneca’s Moral Epistles to Lucilius were a principal inspiration for the form of the individual chapters, along with the Renaissance collections of moralizing materials, such as Pietro Crinito’s De honesta disciplina (1504), the later editions of Erasmus’s Adagia (1515 onward), and Pedro de Mexia’s La Silva di varia leccion (1542), which Montaigne used in the expanded French translation by Claude Gruget (1552). 1

Plutarch is the author whom Montaigne uses most, often in direct (but unmarked) quotation of the French translation, sometimes with light alteration. Isabelle Konstantinovic’s valuable Montaigne et Plutarque lists 751 borrowings from the Parallel Lives and the Moralia in the Essays . Her tables show that these borrowings are spread across 91 of Montaigne’s 107 chapters. The great majority of these borrowings (601 out of her subdivided total of 763) occur in the first published version of each chapter. 2 The greatest number of borrowings are from three less well-known “essays”: “Whether land or sea animals are more intelligent” (46 borrowings), “Spartan sayings” (38), and “Sayings of kings and commanders” (33), collections of quotations Montaigne uses as evidence or as provocations to contradiction. The essays, with proportionally large numbers of uses in 1588 and after, tend to be ethical treatises (“How to tell a friend from a flatterer” (20 borrowings in 1588 and after), “Tranquillity of mind” (10), “Why divine justice delays” (8), and “How to restrain anger” (7), used particularly in Montaigne’s third book. Among the Lives only Alexander, Caesar , and Lycurgus are much used after the first edition. 3 These numerical patterns suggest that Montaigne used Plutarch mainly as a starting point. But on the whole the Moralia provides general rather than specific models. When Plutarch and Montaigne write essays on similar topics (for example, education and friendship) there is usually little resemblance between them, but the opening section of “Of anger” (II, 31) makes considerable use of Moralia 29, “On restraining anger.” 4

Among the Latin poets Montaigne’s favorites, to judge from his comments and quotations, were Virgil, Lucretius, Horace, Catullus, and Ovid. 5 He also quotes from Lucan, Martial, Propertius, and Tibullus. He made considerable use of the Latin satirists, Juvenal, Persius, and Horace. Among the philosophers, Plato, in Ficino’s Latin translation, Sextus Empiricus, in Estienne’s Latin translation, and (in the final revisions) Cicero were especially important to him.

Montaigne often tells us that history is his favorite reading matter and the kind he would most recommend for the education of others:

The historians come right to my forehand. They are pleasant and easy; and at the same time, man in general, the knowledge of whom I seek, appears in them more alive and entire than in any other place… . Now, those who write biographies, since they spend more time on plans than on events, more on what comes from within than on what happens without, are most suited to me. That is why in every way Plutarch is my man. 6

Among historians he especially likes Plutarch because Plutarch tells him about the internal motivation of the great men of the ancient world.

For I have a singular curiosity, as I have said elsewhere, to know the soul and the natural judgments of my authors… . I have regretted a thousand times that we have lost the book that Brutus had written on virtue… . But since the preachings are one thing and the preacher another, I am as glad to see Brutus in Plutarch as in a book of his own. I would rather choose to know truly the conversation he held in his tent with some one of his intimate friends on the eve of a battle than the speech he made next day to his army. 7

Montaigne believes that historians must both report what they discover and offer judgments and conclusions. Contrasting the simple historians who report facts with the truly excellent ones, he concludes

The really outstanding ones have the capacity to choose what is worth knowing; they can pick out of two reports the one that is more likely. From the nature and humors of princes they infer their intentions and attribute appropriate words to them. 8

At the end of “Of the art of discussion” Montaigne writes three discriminating pages of praise and analysis of Tacitus, whose history he has just read through complete, contrary to his normal practice of dipping in and out of books.

I know of no author who introduces into a register of public events so much consideration of private behaviour and inclinations… . This form of history is by far the most useful. Public movements depend more on the guidance of fortune, private ones on our own. This is rather a judgment of history than a recital of it; there are more precepts than stories. It is not a book to read, it is a book to study and learn; it is so full of maxims that you find every sort, both right and wrong; it is a nursery of ethical and political reflections for the provision and adornment of those who hold a place in the management of the world. He always pleads with solid and vigorous arguments, in a pointed and subtle fashion, following the affected style of his time. 9

For different reasons, then, Plutarch and Tacitus are Montaigne’s ideal historians: Plutarch because of what he can tell us about the private behavior and the motivations of great men; Tacitus because of his reflections on, and judgments about, the narrative he tells.

Montaigne is notable for the very wide range of historians he read: all the Roman historians, Herodotus, Xenophon, Diodorus, Arrian, and Quintus Curtius, but probably not Thucydides; many historians of the different French regions and the different periods of French history; Bruni, Giovio, Guicciardini, Villani, and Giustiniano for Italy; Osorio and Goulard for Spain and Portugal; Chalcondylas, Postel, Giovio, Lebelski, Porsius, and Lavardin for the history of Turkey and the Ottoman Empire; Balbi, Castañeda, Goulart, Osorio, and Gonçalez de Mendoza for India and China; and Thevet, Léry, Benzoni, and López de Gómara for the new world. In his Les Sources et l’évolution des Essais de Montaigne , Pierre Villey lists about ninety historians known to Montaigne, though this may be a little optimistic. 10

Since Montaigne clearly knew some of these texts very well indeed and had apparently reread Plutarch and Tacitus several times, I think we would be right to be impressed by the extent of Montaigne’s reading in history. According to Pierre Villey’s classification of Montaigne’s reading, history accounted for approximately one-third of the authors Montaigne read, whereas poetry amounted to roughly one-sixth. The fact that so many different historians were translated into French and printed in sixteenth-century France indicates that Montaigne was far from unique in his strong interest in history, but he may well have been unusual in the range of the books he studied.

Alongside Montaigne’s books on history and ancient philosophy, and his Latin poetry, the reconstructed library contains a little theology (Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Ochino, Philo) and rhetoric (Cicero, Isocrates, Quintilian and Victorinus’s commentary on Aristotle’s Rhetoric ); a good deal of recent poetry and fiction in French (Baïf, Des Périers, Dorat, Du Bellay, Marguerite de Navarre, Pibrac, Rabelais, Ronsard), Italian (Ariosto, Boccaccio, Guazzo, Petrarch, Tasso), and Latin (Bèze, Buchanan, Erasmus, Poliziano, Secundus); and a few modern works on medicine (Arculanus, Joubert, Pichotus), political theory (Blackwood, Bodin, Gentillet, Machiavelli, Sansovino), law (a commentary on the Decretals , Forsterus, Masuer), and philosophy (Cornelius Agrippa, Brues, Cusanus, Leone Ebreo, Ficino, La Boétie, Sebond). In addition, there is a considerable category of modern collections of exempla, anecdotes, myths, proverbs, and sententiae drawn from classical sources (Crinito, Egnatius, Erasmus, Estienne, Fourquevaux, Guevara, Hyginis, La Primaudaye, Lipsius, Mauro, Nizolius, Ravisius Textor and a 1560 French translation of the Byzantine compiler Zonaras).

In “Of three kinds of association,” Montaigne paints a delightful picture of the way he lives among his library of roughly one thousand books. 11

When at home, I turn aside a little more often to my library, from which at one sweep I command a view of my household. I am over the entrance, and see below me my garden, my farmyard, my courtyard and into most of the parts of my house. There I leaf through now one book, now another, without order and without plan, by disconnected fragments. One moment I muse, another moment I set down or dictate, walking back and forth, these fancies of mine that you see here… . If anyone tells me that it is degrading the Muses to use them only as a plaything and a pastime, he does not know as I do, the value of pleasure, play and pastime. I would almost say that any other aim is ridiculous. I live from day to day, and, without wishing to be disrespectful, I live only for myself; my purposes go no further. 12

Montaigne likes to present his reading as essentially frivolous. “I leaf through books, I do not study them.” 13 “I seek in books only to give myself pleasure by honest amusement.” 14 “If I encounter difficulties in reading, I do not gnaw my nails over them; I leave them there, after making one or two attacks on them… . If this book wearies me, I take up another.” 15 But his detailed comments on his reading and the deep enthusiasm we have already seen him express for some favorite authors suggest that this is must be a pose. 16 There is also good evidence in Montaigne’s surviving books of the thoroughness and discriminating judgment with which he read. 17 Elsewhere he claims that reading has a special role in stimulating his processes of thought: “Reading serves me particularly to arouse my reason by offering it various subjects to set my judgment to work, not my memory.” 18 He insists that a lecteur suffisant “often discovers in other men’s writings perfections beyond those that the author put in or perceived, and lends them richer meanings and aspects,” 19 and he evidently includes himself in this category: “I have read in Livy a hundred things that another man has not read in him. Plutarch has read in him a hundred besides the ones I could read, and perhaps besides what the author had put in.” 20 He also hopes for this critical and creative reading from his own readers. 21 He fully understands that there is no end to interpretation: “This theory reminds me of the experience we have that there is no sense or aspect, either straight or bitter, or sweet, or crooked, that the human mind does not find in the writings it undertakes to search.” 22

The reading of books promotes the proliferation of more writing. Reading stimulates him to write but reading the very best authors can also be a little intimidating: “When I write, I prefer to do without the company and remembrance of books, for fear they may interfere with my style. Also because, in truth, the good authors humble me and dishearten me too much.” 23 Nevertheless the amount of quotation and paraphrase indicates that Montaigne must have had books before him as he composed and revised his Essays . While attacking others for indiscriminate borrowing he claims that he uses other authors when they have expressed what he thinks better than he can (“I do not speak the minds of others except to speak my own mind better”). 24 While Montaigne rejects the emphasis on rote-learning in humanist education, arguing that the teacher should ask the pupil what he thinks rather than expecting him to repeat what the authors have said, 25 he nevertheless believes that readers ought to take over from others the arguments they believe to be true:

For if he embraces Xenophon’s and Plato’s opinions by his own reasoning, they will no longer be theirs, they will be his… . Truth and reason are common to everyone, and no more belong to the man who first spoke them than to the man who says them later… . The bees plunder the flowers here and there, but afterward they make of them honey, which is all theirs; it is no longer thyme or marjoram. Even so with the pieces borrowed from others; he will transform and blend them to make a work that is all his own, to wit, his judgment. His education, work and study aim only at forming this. 26

This comment depends heavily on Plutarch’s “How to Listen to Poetry” ( Moralia 2), which itself draws on Horace and Seneca. 27 For all his criticism of humanist educational methods, it seems that Montaigne’s thinking, which he prefers to describe as self-expression, generally forms itself as a response (sometimes appreciative, sometimes critical) to the texts he has been reading.

Montaigne claims that reading provokes him to thought and to the exercise of his judgment. By considering and reacting to what others have written he can develop his own ideas on a topic. Sometimes those ideas will be the same as those he finds in his reading; sometimes the writers of the past will give him more confidence in holding an opinion, but the general aim is to read in order to think for himself and to express his own ideas better. And this often implies the move of contradiction. Furthermore, he claims that a really good reader will often find in a text meanings beyond what the original writer thought that he was expressing.

This contrasts quite strongly with our normal professed approach to writing about Montaigne. In writing about Montaigne modern scholars want to find meanings beyond previous critics but we always want to claim that what we are discovering is Montaigne’s own view. In his terms we are trying to be learned rather than wise. But perhaps his comment involves us more than we realize, for the decision to write about Montaigne implies a belief that he has something important to tell us about human experience of the world. We write about him because we value what he has to say and we think that by interpreting him in our way we will be able to say something about how we understand the world and we will use the claim that this view is his in order to give it greater expressive force or authority. If that is the way we actually work we may well find that there are times when even while we are, in principle, interpreting Montaigne’s text we want to correct his views, as, for example, when modern critics express reservations about his view of love within marriage or about his self-centeredness. This might lead us to consider taking his advice on reading more directly to heart: perhaps we should be reading the Essays to stimulate our own thinking rather than to try to uncover his.

One further complicating factor here is the issue of changeability. Montaigne accepted change as a fact of human life and he portrayed himself as depicting the mind in motion:

I cannot keep my subject still. It goes along befuddled and staggering, with a natural drunkenness. I take it in this condition, just as it is at the moment I give my attention to it. I do not portray being: I portray passing. Not the passing from one age to another, or, as the people say, from seven years to seven years, but from day to day, from minute to minute. My history needs to be adapted to the moment. I may presently change, not merely by chance, but also by intention. This is a record of various and changeable occurrences, and of irresolute and, when it so befalls, contradictory ideas: whether I am different myself, or whether I take hold of my subjects in different circumstances and aspects. 28

We never fully possess Montaigne’s chapters. There are always places where more thought can bring us the pleasure of new understanding, to set alongside the growing pleasure of the familiarity of other passages. This changeability may also help explain why such very different people can share the experience of finding themselves in reading Montaigne. Helpfully Montaigne says something similar about his own experience of reading in the “Apology.”

When I pick up books, I will have perceived in such-and-such a passage surpassing charms which will have struck my soul; let me come upon it another time, in vain I turn it over and over, in vain I twist it and manipulate it, to me it is a shapeless and unrecognizable mass. Even in my own writings I do not always find again the sense of my first thought; I do not know what I meant to say, and often I get burned by correcting and putting in a new meaning, because I have lost the first one, which was better. 29

Our best chance to understand him lies in following him carefully over short periods. It may be helpful here to introduce the idea of fragments and sequences, which I developed in my book Reading and Rhetoric in Montaigne and Shakespeare . Montaigne was taught to quarry maxims, stories, and quotations from his reading. We find him doing just this in constructing the essays. Since his audience was taught in the same way, it follows that from the Renaissance point of view one entirely legitimate way to read Montaigne is to read him for the sake of fragments (such as quotations, stories, fine phrases) that can be stored up and used elsewhere. There are plenty of examples of Renaissance authors reading contemporary and ancient texts in this way. But if we want to follow Montaigne’s own thought or to state that a particular opinion is his, the meaning of each particular fragment will need to be clarified by reading its immediate predecessors and successors. A comment may be made and then immediately contested and contradicted; indeed, some statements seem to be introduced for the sake of the responses that can be made to them. In such cases the initial statement might be a stage of Montaigne’s thought (or a provocation to his thought), which we can reuse because it is fruitful for our thinking in other ways but which could not reasonably be claimed to be Montaigne’s view. When we look at a sequence of fragments, though, the connections between them will usually give us some indications about the role of each particular fragment. In cases where there is a sequence of argument the meaning of the whole sequence may seem more secure than the meaning of the fragments considered separately. There will be other cases where the sequence of fragments has the effect of questioning all the ideas that are put forward and this questioning (sometimes relativizing, sometimes setting up contradictions) will be Montaigne’s point in that passage. So, while the chapter is evidently made up of fragments, the sequence will usually be more capable of definite interpretation as well as richer in meaning. Equally the meaning of fragments and sequences will alter when new material is added in successive stages. But, as he keeps reminding us, the point of reading is not merely to understand what the writer is saying but, much more importantly, to use what the writer says as a stimulus for our own thinking.

The fragments are defined as stories and axioms that are largely taken from Montaigne’s reading, but which he may derive from his own experience and reflection. The sequences are constructed by combinations of a number of logical moves made to connect these fragments or to react to them. The basis for these connecting moves seems to come, in part, from the topics of invention. Montaigne may also have studied some dialectic at the Collège de Guyenne, where the more advanced pupils took part in disputations. 30 These may be summed up as seven basic moves, which are always capable of repetition and combination:

In the earliest forms of the chapters maxim and story are connected directly. The story is offered as a particular exemplification of the general proposition encapsulated in the maxim or the maxim is placed after the story as an abstract (and generalizing) summary of its message. The story provides detail, interest, and often emotion, where the maxim proposes meaning.

The most common move for Montaigne to make after stating a principle, proverb, or thought is to provide some justification for it. The justification may take the form of a quotation from philosophy or poetry. Or Montaigne may give an example or a cause. In the later versions of “Of liars” (I, 9, 22) Montaigne says (as one of the advantages of a bad memory) that he talks less than other people because it is harder to think up things to say than to remember them. Later he makes the converse point that his bad memory causes him to think things out more for himself than people with good memories would need to.

Another frequent move is to state a principle and then explore its meaning. This may involve distinguishing the particular shade of meaning in which one of the words is employed. Or Montaigne may examine the logical consequence of a statement or look at the effects that arise from some phenomenon. In “Of liars” (23–24), the exclamation that lying is a terrible vice is justified by the larger claim that only language keeps people human and keeps society together. The implication is that since lying corrupts the use of language, it also has the effect of damaging people and society. Clarifying the meaning or consequence of a proposition can be linked to amplification, when something is made to seem more significant by going into detail, by backing it up with more examples, or by repeating the same idea in different words.

Much of Montaigne’s most important thought is driven by the motive of opposition. This can take the form of questioning a proposition by immediately stating its contrary and backing this up with a further maxim or an example. In “By diverse means we arrive at the same end” (I, 1, 3–5) Montaigne follows his statement that strong noble minds may respond better to bravery by stating the objection, that less magnanimous minds can be moved in the same way, and he provides an example to illustrate this. The example of Alexander’s cruelty to Betis is introduced in 1588 as a contrary to the earlier examples of defiance provoking mercy. In “On the art of discussion” Montaigne gave his own appreciation of the role of contradiction in clarifying and advancing thought:

So contradictions of opinions neither offend nor affect me; they merely arouse and exercise me. We flee from correction; when we should face it and go to meet it… . When someone opposes me, he arouses my attention, not my anger. I go to greet a man who contradicts me, who instructs me. 31

In conversation people learn from each other by testing points of contradiction. The method of contraries is equally important to the internal conversation of the essays. In the “Apology,” Montaigne tells us that when he finds himself arguing a certain position he sometimes puts the arguments for the contrary position as a mental exercise and then finds himself believing those arguments. He states:

Many times (as I sometimes do deliberately), having undertaken as exercise and sport to maintain an opinion contrary to my own, my mind, applying itself and turning in that direction, attaches me to it so firmly that I can no longer find the reason for my former opinion, and I abandon it. 32

His aim in this passage is to illustrate the changeability of human reason using himself as an example, but it also provides an insight into the way he directs his mind. Some of Montaigne’s most original and stimulating thoughts arise from setting up contrary positions on an issue and trying to work a positive statement out of his objections to both contradictory positions. We do not know exactly where Montaigne studied logic, but it is hard to imagine that he could have pursued his legal career without it.

Montaigne’s characteristic move from a general statement of an issue to exploring his own experience and opinions is often related to this statement of opposition. Most often his own habits and opinions are contrasted with the generality of other people. In “Of vanity” his habit of being defiant in bad times and prayerful and ready to learn when times are good is contrasted with the general custom, which he mocks. But at other times his own experience is used to support a position that he has taken in the essay or when he wishes to affirm the community of experience between himself and other men. In “Of repentance” he asserts that every man bears the whole form of the human condition, to imply that his account of his own life has exemplary value for others. 33

The movement to expressing his own view may be linked to the more general issue of comparison. Montaigne may use comparison at a very local level as a way of illuminating a particular idea or he may juxtapose similar statements or stories with the aim of eliciting difference as well as similarity. Comparisons can have a comic effect, like that with the nobleman in “Of vanity” who displays his used chamberpots. The comparison a few pages later between those who seek novelty and those who are content with themselves serves to improve the status of vanity with an effective sideswipe at Stoicism.

Alongside comparison we may notice moves that Montaigne makes to place a particular occurrence in a wider context, perhaps of the historical time in which it takes place or perhaps of human experience viewed more generally. The effort to try to understand things as in harmony with their time or as having their value changed by differences between national or temporal customs forms one of Montaigne’s most important maneuvers for questioning received opinions or commonsense reactions. In “Of vanity” Montaigne appeals to the connection between part and whole in order to make a whole series of moves to destabilize the reader’s sense of the implication of vanity.

In the Essays Montaigne gives his readers three main resources: first, the axioms and narratives that he has derived from his reading and which he provides for us as materials which we can reflect on; second, the comments that he himself makes, both narratives from his own life and his own reflections. Montaigne gives particular prominence to his own arguments when he tells us that other people will have to take responsibility for the truth of the narratives he borrows: “I refer the stories that I borrow to the conscience of those from whom I take them. The reflections are my own and depend on the proofs of reason, not of experience.” 34 As with the first category we as readers can take these over or we can use them as the basis for further thought. The third resource is the method of thinking with the different resources he has inherited. Montaigne takes material from his reading and his experience and uses it to generate more thought and reflection. He is, in effect, inviting us to do the same with his writings. His methods of using the material he inherits serve as a model to his readers of the way in which we might use materials from our reading, including the materials he gives us in his Essays .

A consideration of Montaigne’s employment of material taken from history will give us a start in discussing the way in which he actually uses his reading. In the Essays Montaigne used examples taken from history in five main ways. First and most often he gives a name and sometimes a very brief description as a historical example to support a general principle that he has just enunciated. Thus in “Of the custom of wearing clothes” he mentions several generals who wore the same clothes in all seasons on the basis of Plutarch, Suetonius, perhaps via Pedro de Mexia, and Silius Italicus. 35

Second, and related to this, he sometimes uses historians to construct a list of examples that demonstrate the variety of human customs and behavior. A good example of this would be in the 1588 additions to “Of custom and not easily changing an accepted law” in which Montaigne mentions, on the basis of López de Gómara, nations where you greet people by turning your backs on them, where you never look at anyone you honor, where only the family of the king can greet him without using an intermediary, and many other scabrous and sexual examples. 36

Third, Montaigne takes information from histories about exemplary figures, whom he wishes to imitate or repudiate. Thus he frequently collects information about Alexander, Julius Caesar, and Suleiman the Great. His discussions of the behavior and opinions of Socrates should also be considered in this class.

Fourth, Montaigne quite often takes from historians statements by historical figures. These statements are then used like the other axioms employed in the Essays but carrying an additional weight because of the fame of the figure he cites. Phocion’s comment to the Athenians when they prosper after rejecting his advice, used in “Of repentance,” would be an example of this. 37 In this instance the example is taken via Plutarch’s collection of the sayings of great princes from the Moralia , which would serve as a model for the taste for historical quotations of this type.

Fifth, from time to time Montaigne retells a story from history at length, in order to give particular importance and sometimes particular emotional force to support one of his propositions. A good example here would be the stories of the torture of Amerindian kings in “Of coaches.” 38 Such lengthy retellings are relatively rare. Montaigne much more often tells a story from his own life at length than any stories from history. Furthermore, he only uses a few historians in this way, principally López de Gómara, Osorio, Tacitus, and Livy.

If we turn from his use of history to his use of his reading more generally, other patterns emerge. Reading provided Montaigne with the starting point for some of his chapters. For example “Of conscience” (II, 5) takes its inspiration and some of its early examples from two pages of Moralia 41, “Why Divine Justice Delays.” 39 “Of solitude” begins its exploration of the contemplative life with some close translations from Seneca’s Epistolae morales , 7 and 28 and draws material from other letters and treatises of Seneca as it continues. 40 “A custom of the island of Cea” takes its first examples of suicide as a form of defiance from Plutarch, Moralia 16, “Spartan sayings” before drawing on Stoic sources such as Seneca, Epistolae morales , 70, 77, and 78 and Cicero, De finibus . 41 The essay begins by citing quotations for and against suicide before developing Montaigne’s own view through a discussion of narrative examples mostly taken from his reading.

It seems that sometimes Montaigne decided early on that a chapter would conclude with a quotation or a passage based on quotation. “That to philosophize is to learn to die” ends with a four-page imaginary speech for Nature, based on Lucretius III, 931–962 (several quotations from here and elsewhere in Lucretius III were added in 1588) and translations from Seneca’s Epistolae morales , 24, 30, 49, 77, 117, 120. 42 “Of solitude” ends with a letter constructed out of phrases translated from Seneca’s Epistolae morales , 7, 22, and 68. 43 Most strikingly (and wittily) of all Montaigne ends his massive argument about the inability of the unaided human intellect to make theological conclusions in the “Apology” with a long, just about acknowledged quotation from Plutarch’s Moralia 24, “On the E at Delphi,” in which the pagan Plutarch argues that man should not fear death because man’s experience of existence is wholly inadequate in comparison with the full existence of God. 44

It seems to me likely that Montaigne undertook systematic research for some of his essays, deliberately reading particular texts that he thought might furnish material for particular chapters. 45 The case of Lucretius provides some indications. 46 We now know that Montaigne bought a copy of Lambinus’s edition of Lucretius soon after its publication in late 1563 or early 1564. 47 Between the date of this purchase and October 16, 1564, he read the entire work carefully and made many annotations to the text. The pattern of the quotations suggests that Montaigne must have reread the work at least twice: at some time between 1572 and 1580 for the first edition and again in the second phase of the composition of the Essays in 1585–1588. 48 The likelihood is that he read sections of Lucretius even more frequently since he regarded him as one of his four favorite Latin poets, but the use of Lucretius in the Essays is highly concentrated. Of the total of 148 quotations, 98 occur in just three chapters. The seventy-six quotations in “Apology for Raymond Sebond” form an essential part of the argument of that work. Montaigne takes delight in inverting Lucretius’s arguments that unless we believe our senses we have no knowledge, to argue that, because the senses are unreliable, secure knowledge of any kind is unattainable. 49 Montaigne quotes a series of excerpts from book IV of Lucretius to make this point. 50 It seems that Montaigne had certain pages of Lucretius before him at both stages of writing his longest chapter. 51 The much shorter “That to philosophize is to learn to die” includes sixteen quotations from Lucretius in its nineteen pages, many of them concentrated in the speech of Nature at the end. The next largest number of quotations (6) occurs in the ten-page “Of the inequality that is between us,” where Lucretius and Horace carry much of the argument and Lucretius is used to conclude.

Even though Montaigne knew Seneca’s Epistolae morales and some of the moral treatises (for example, De beneficiis, De clementia , and De ira ) well, 52 in this case too his borrowings are strongly concentrated. The chapters with the most translations from Seneca’s Epistolae morales tend to focus especially on one or two of Seneca’s letters: “That to philosophize is to learn to die” (37 borrowings; especially from letters 26, 77); “Of solitude” (33, especially from 7, 28); “A custom of the island of Cea” (16, especially from 70); “Of the inequality that is between us” (15, especially from 76). The relevance of these titles to the philosophical preoccupations of the Epistolae morales is clear. Montaigne used Cornelius Agrippa’s De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum in only two essays but quite heavily in those two. 53

Furthermore, particular sections of the Essays are found in which one source is used consistently. For example, in the section of the “Apology” on the rationality of animals a twenty-five-page passage depends very heavily on Plutarch, Moralia 63, “Whether land or sea animals are more intelligent” and this is the only place where Montaigne uses this work. 54 Some crucial sections of the later chapters in Book 3 rely on the more strictly ethical treatises of Plutarch’s Moralia . Near the end of “Of the disadvantage of greatness” three stories of sycophantic behavior are taken from Moralia 4, “How to tell a flatterer from a friend,” an obvious reference for this topic. 55 In “Of the art of discussion” the crucial move toward accusing oneself of one’s faults is made with a saying from Plato (which Montaigne reinforces from the source in the C text) taken from Moralia 29, “On restraining anger.” 56 After 1588 Montaigne adds five Latin quotations and one exemplum from Cicero’s De officiis to “Of the useful and the honorable” (III, 1), 57 but Cicero’s work, in spite of its closely related subject matter does not seem to have stimulated Montaigne’s argument. Either Montaigne chose to reread this work to enrich his study or his general rereading of Cicero’s philosophy at this point proved especially helpful in embellishing this chapter.

“Of vanity” is by any standards an exceptionally fine chapter. From its agile jokey prologue, which seems to undercut the whole notion of vanity, through its mingling of thoughts on travel, household management, the civil war, death, public life, and writing this chapter can seem like one conspectus of Montaigne’s life and thought. Unlike many of the chapters, “Of vanity” begins and ends with a sustained discussion of its notional topic. The chapter even proclaims a conclusion, that vanity is an inescapable part of human life and that to learn lessons from it requires that we acknowledge its ubiquity as well as deploring some of its effects. Its forty-five pages, in Frame’s translation, include fifty quotations from poetry, chiefly from Virgil, Horace, and Ovid, and twenty-eight from prose, mainly from Cicero and Seneca, and mainly added in the final phase. But few of these quotations make much contribution to the development of the argument. In most cases they provide support and amplification for a position that has already been stated. The longest quotation is Montaigne’s translation of the 1581 bull granting him Roman citizenship, which he includes as an example of the kind of vanity that gives him great pleasure. 58 Almost all the quotations from Latin prose serve to back up or generalize a point that the French text made in 1588. The poetic quotations too often serve the purpose of amplification, making the idea more significant by attaching a weightier linguistic flavor. In the earlier phase of the chapter, allusion and paraphrase are more important to Montaigne’s thought than quotation. The allusion to the proverb of Ecclesiastes I:2 “Vanity of vanities said the preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity” almost literally sets the chapter in motion: “There is perhaps no more obvious vanity than to write of it so vainly. What the Divinity has divinely told us about it ought to be carefully and continually meditated by people of understanding.” 59

The longest narrative of the chapter is a retelling of the story of Pacuvius Calavius from Livy, which Montaigne twists into being a parable against change. Livy had made it clear from the start that Pacuvius’s proposal was a trick intended to give him supreme power in Capua. He persuaded the Senate of the city to let him lock them in their chamber by saying that he had a stratagem that would save their position if they left everything to him. Livy calls him a bad man. 60 Montaigne rewrites the story to emphasize the impasse into which the people’s resentment of their rulers gets them and treats it not as a trick but as an example of the folly of attempting to bring about political change. This all serves to develop the point that even though the present state of France is barely tolerable, attempts at reform are bound to worsen the situation.

While most of the poetic quotations in “Of vanity” repeat the ideas of Montaigne’s French text, there are some cases in which a quotation moves the argument on in an important way. After a very rich passage on the hypocrisy of judges, Montaigne introduces a tale from Guevara and a quotation from Juvenal, Satires , XIV, 233–234, which denounces the viciousness of sons. Montaigne’s response to the story and the quotation drives the essay in a new direction:

“I do not know about their books,” said the courtesan Laïs, “or their wisdom or their philosophy, but these men knock at my door as often as any others.” Since our licentiousness always carries us beyond what is lawful and permitted, men have often made the precepts and laws of our life strict beyond universal reason. None thinks he sins enough unless he sins A little further than the laws permit .

It would be desirable that there should be more proportion between the command and the obedience; and a goal that we cannot reach seems unjust. 61

Guevara’s story is about hypocrisy and Juvenal’s line is in a passage concerned with boundless vice, but the construction of Juvenal’s line (By so much he exceeds … by how much you allow) alerts Montaigne to the idea of proportionality between rule and behavior. Rather than regarding the son’s excess as a matter of vice only he sees (in the sentence he places before the quotation) that reciprocally men set rules that are impossible for them to obey, which leads him to the conclusion that impractically strict rules are part of human vanity. Juvenal would not have imagined such a use for his satire in which parents are urged to a strictness that might nevertheless fail to reform their children, but Montaigne’s reading against the grain (encouraged by the construction) has a strong point.

When Montaigne turns his attention to fortune a quotation from Horace, Odes III 16, 21–23, 42–43 formulates one of the attitudes he might take:

I owe much to Fortune in that up to this point she has done nothing hostile to me, at least nothing beyond my endurance. Might it not be her way to leave in peace those who do not trouble her? The more a man himself denies The more to that man Heaven supplies. Since I am naked, I aspire To join the men who nought desire … For they lack much who much require .

If she continues, she will send me hence well contented and satisfied.

For nothing more do I annoy the gods .

But beware the crash. There are thousands who are wrecked in port. 62

Horace’s rather complacent assertion of a link between moderated desires and happiness offers Montaigne a rational explanation for the safety from disaster that he had previously noted. He embraces the idea long enough to hope that it may continue (and to find another supporting quotation from Horace ( Odes II 18, 11–12). But then his experience intervenes. Many have thought themselves safe from disaster and then foundered. Gratitude to fortune (which carries with it an awareness of future calamity) is here wiser than a rationalizing that might encourage a dangerous sense of security. Here the quotation states a point of view that Montaigne wants to hear but which he decides to reject.

At the end of the chapter, having generalized his discoveries to date he resolves that the choice between looking outside (the common preoccupation) and looking inside must be resolved in favor of trying to know oneself, and he amplifies this Delphic command using Plutarch’s “On the E at Delphi” and proverbs discussed in Erasmus’s Adagia :

The common attitude and habit of looking elsewhere than at ourselves has been very useful for our business. We are an object that fills us with discontent; we see nothing in us but misery and vanity. In order not to dishearten us, Nature has very appropriately thrown the action of our vision outward. We go forward with the current, but to turn our course back toward ourselves is a painful movement: thus the sea grows troubled and turbulent when it is tossed back on itself. Look, says everyone, at the movement of the heavens, look at the public, look at that man’s quarrel, at this man’s pulse, at another man’s will; in short, always look high or low, or to one side, or in front, or behind you. It was a paradoxical command that was given us of old by that god at Delphi: “Look into yourself, know yourself, keep to yourself; bring back your mind and your will, which are spending themselves elsewhere, into themselves: you are running out, you are scattering yourself; concentrate yourself, resist yourself; you are being betrayed, dispersed and stolen away from yourself. Do you not see that this world keeps its sight all concentrated inward and its eyes open to contemplate itself? It is always vanity for you, within and without; but it is less vanity when it is less extensive. Except for you, O man,” said that god, “each thing studies itself first, and, according to its needs, has limits to its labors and desires. There is not a single thing as empty and needy as you, who embrace the universe: you are the investigator without knowledge, the magistrate without jurisdiction, and all in all, the fool of the farce.” 63

One can read that climax as a revisiting of both his own “Apology” and Erasmus’s Praise of Folly . Montaigne made himself a great writer by being a great reader. At the key climaxes of his work he could turn to his reading, which furnished him with a language beyond what he could achieve himself. Yet it is the sequence of logical processes, the apparently endless reconsidering, objecting, rephrasing, and reacting, that makes the Essays what they are. Montaigne stimulates his readers to thought through the depth, persistence, and changeability of his own reflections on what he has written and read. We could learn from him to be more overt in the ways that we reject and refine his ideas even as we are grateful for the way that his expressions stimulate us to recognition and rejection. Montaigne urges us to be wise rather than learned and the desire to know the world and ourselves better through reacting to his ideas may be what keeps us reading him, together with his wit and his astonishing breadth of response. We should find a way to acknowledge this more directly, even if our own pursuit of wisdom is not the task of literary scholarship. 64

Michael Metschies , La Citation et l’art de citer dans les Essais de Montaigne , trans. Jules Brody (Paris: H. Champion, 1997), 92–93 ; Antoine Compagnon , La Seconde main (Paris: Seuil, 1979), esp. 243–352 ; John O’Brien , “Montaigne and Antiquity: Fantasies and Grotesques,” in The Cambridge Companion to Montaigne , ed. Ullrich Langer (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 53–73. Hugo Friedrich points out that Montaigne sometimes cites texts from compilations, Montaigne , ed. Philippe Desan , trans. Dawn Eng (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 34.

Isabelle Konstantinovic , Montaigne et Plutarque (Geneva, Switzerland: Droz, 1989), 20–23, 517.

Ibid. , 26–32 .

Ibid. , 410–417 .

All quotations from Montaigne are taken from The Complete Works of Montaigne , trans. Donald Frame (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1958) , and Les Essais de Michel de Montaigne , ed. Pierre Villey and V. L. Saulnier (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1978). II, 10, 298 [410].

II, 10, 303 [416]: “Les historiens sont ma droitte bale: ils sont plaisans et aysez; et quant et quant l’homme en general, de qui je cherche la cognoissance y paroist plus vif et plus entire qu’en nul autre lieu… . Or ceux qui escrivent les vies, d’autant qu’ils s’amusent plus aux conseils qu’aux evenemens: plus à ce qui part du dedans, qu’à ce qui arrive au dehors: ceux là me sont plus propres. Voylà pourquoy en toutes sortes, c’est mon homme que Plutarque.”

II, 10, 302 [414–415]: “Car j’ay une singuliere curiosité, comme j’ay dit ailleurs, de connoistre l’ame et les naïfs jugemens de mes autheurs… . J’ay mille fois regretté que nous ayons perdu le livre que Brutus avoit escrit de la vertu… . Mais, d’autant que c’est autre chose le presche que le prescheur, j’ayme bien autant voir Brutus chez Plutarque que chez luy mesme. Je choisiroy plustost de sçavoir au vray les devis qu’il tenoit en sa tente à quelqu’un de ses privez amis, la veille d’une bataille, que les propos qu’il tint le lendemain à son armée.”

II, 10, 304 [417]: “Les bien excellens ont la suffisance de choisir ce qui est digne d’estre sçeu, peuvent trier de deux rapports celuy qui est plus vray-semblable; de la condition des Princes et de leurs humeurs, ils en concluent les conseils, et leur attribuent les paroles convenables. Ils ont raison de prendre l’authorité de regler nostre creance à la leur.”

III, 8, 718–719 [940–941]: “Je ne sçache point d’autheur qui mesle à un registre public tant de consideration des meurs et inclinations particulieres… . Cette forme d’Histoire est de beaucoup la plus utile. Les mouvemens publics dependent plus de la conduicte de la fortune, les privez de la nostre. C’est plustot un jugement que deduction d’Histoire; il y a plus de preceptes que de contes. Ce n’est pas un livre à lire, c’est un livre à estudier et apprendre; il est si plein de sentences qu’il y en a à tort et à droict: c’est une pepiniere de discours ethiques et politiques, pour la provision et ornement de ceux qui tiennent quelque rang au maniement du monde. Il plaide tousjours par raisons solides et vigoureuses, d’une façon poinctue et subtile, suyvant le stile affecté du siecle.”

Pierre Villey , Les Sources et l’évolution des Essais de Montaigne , 2 vols. (Paris: Hachette, 1930) , and Les Livres d’histoire moderne utilisés par Montaigne (Paris: Hachette, 1908) ; Ingrid De Smet and Alain Legros , “Un manuscrit de François Baudouin dans la librairie de Montaigne,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 75 (2013): 105–111. The library list is in Montaigne, Essais , ed. Villey-Saulnier, xli–lxii.

III, 12, 808 [1056]: This is where he admits to using collections of quotations as well as citing authors directly.

III, 3, 628–629 [828]: “Chez moy, je me destourne un peu plus souvent à ma librairie, d’où tout d’une main je commande à mon mesnage. Je suis sur l’entrée et vois soubs moy mon jardin, ma basse court, ma court, et dans la pluspart des membres de ma maison. Là, je feuillette à cette heure un livre, à cette heure un autre, sans ordre et sans dessein, à pieces descousues; tantost je resve, tantost j’enregistre et dicte, en me promenant, mes songes que voicy… . Si quelqu’un me dict que c’est avillir les muses de s’en server seulement de jouet et passe-temps, il ne sçait pas, comme moy, combine vaut le plaisir, le jeu et le passetemps. A peine que je ne die toute autre fin estre ridicule.”

II, 17, 494 [651]: “Je feuillette les livres, je ne les estudie pas.”

II, 10, 297 [409]: “Je ne cherche aux livres qu’à m’y donner du plaisir par un honneste amusement.” But he continues: “ou, si j’estudie, je n’y cherche que la science qui traicte de moy mesmes, et qui m’instruise à bien mourir et à bien vivre.”

II, 10, 297 [409]: “Les difficultez, si j’en rencontre en lisant, je n’en ronge pas mes ongles; je les laisse là, apres avoir fait un charge ou deux… . Si ce livre me fasche, j’en prens un autre.”

Richard A. Sayce , The Essays of Montaigne (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1972), 25–28 ; James Supple , Arms versus Letters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 240–242 .

E.g., in the notes in his copy of Caesar and Lucretius ( Essais , ed. Balsamo, et al. [Paris: Gallimard, coll. “La Pléiade,” 2007], 1188–1297) or his judgment of Guicciardini (II, 10, 305).

III, 3, 622 [819]: “La lecture me sert specialement à esveiller par divers objects mon discours, à embesongner mon jugement, non ma memoyre.”

I, 24, 93 [127]: “descouvre souvent ès escrits d’autruy des perfections autres que celles que l’autheur y a mises et apperceües, et y preste des sens et des visages plus riches.”

I, 26, 115 [156]: “J’ay leu en Tite-Live cent choses que tel n’y a pas leu. Plutarque en y a leu cent, outre ce que j’y ay sceu lire, et, à l’adventure, outre ce que l’autheur y avoit mis.”

III, 9, 761 [994–995].

II, 12, 442 [585]: “Cette opinion me ramentoit l’experience que nous avons, qu’il n’est aucun sens ny visage, ou droict, ou amer, ou doux, ou courbe, que l’esprit humain ne trouve aux escrits qu’il entreprend de fouiller.”

III, 5, 666 [874]: “Quand j’escris, je me passe bien de la compagnie et souvenance des livres, de peur qu’ils interrompent ma forme. Aussi que, à la verité, les bons autheurs m’abattent par trop et rompent le courage.”

I, 26, 108 [148]: “Je ne dis les autres, sinon pour d’autant plus me dire.”

I, 25, 100–101 [136–137]; I, 26, 110–112 [150–152].

I, 26, 111 [151–152]: “Car s’il embrasse les opinions de Xenophon et Platon par son propre discours, ce ne seront plus leurs, ce seront les siennes… . La verité et la raison sont communes à un chacun, et ne sont non plus à qui les a dites premierement, qu’à qui les dict apres… . Les abeilles pillotent deçà delà les fleurs, mais elles en font apres le miel, qui est tout leur; ce n’est plus thin ny marjorlaine: ainsi les pieces empruntées d’autruy, il les transformera et confondera, pour en faire un ouvrage tout sien: à sçavoir son jugement. Son institution, son travail et estude ne vise qu’à le former.”

Horace, Odes , IV 2, Seneca, Epistolae , 84; Konstantinovic, Montaigne et Plutarque , 175.

III, 2, 610-611 [805]: “Je ne puis asseurer mon object: il va trouble et chancelant, d’une yvresse naturelle. Je le prens en ce poinct, comme il est, en l’instant que je m’amuse à luy. Je ne peinds pas l’estre, je peinds le passage: non un passage d’aage en autre, ou comme dict le peuple, de sept en sept ans, mais de jour en jour, de minute en minute. Il faut accommoder mon histoire à l’heure. Je pourray tantost changer, non de fortune seulement, mais aussi d’intention: C’est un contrerolle de divers et muables accidens, et d’imaginations irresoluës, et quand il y eschet, contraires: soit que je sois autre moy-mesme, soit que je saisisse les subjects, par autres circonstances, et considerations.”

II, 12, 425–426 [566]: “Quand je prens des livres, j’auray apperceu en tel passage des graces excellentes et qui auront feru mon ame; qu’un’autre fois j’y retombe, j’ay beau le tourner et virer, j’ay beau le plier et le manier, c’est une masse incognue et informe pour moy. En mes escris mesmes je ne retrouve pas tousjours l’air de ma premiere imagination: je ne sçay ce que j’ay voulu dire, et m’eschaude souvent à corriger et y mettre un nouveau sens, pour avoir perdu le premier, qui valloit mieux.”

The syllabus of the Collège de Guyenne is published in Elie Vinet , Schola Aquitanica (1583), ed. L. Massebieau (Paris: Musée Pédagogique, 1886) , disputations at 28–31, 38. De Grouchy’s manual of dialectic is also mentioned, 26.

III, 8, 705 [924]: “Les contradictions donc des jugemens ne m’offencent ny m’alterent; elles m’esveillent seulement et m’exercent. Nous fuyons la correction; il s’y faudroit presenter et produire… . Quand on me contrarie, on esveille mon attention, non pas ma cholere; je m’avance vers celuy qui me contredit, qui m’instruit.”

II, 12, 426 [566]: “Maintes-fois (comme il m’advient de faire volontiers) ayant pris pour exercice et pour esbat à maintenir une contraire opinion à la mienne, mon esprit, s’applicant et tournant de ce costé là, m’y attache si bien que je ne trouve plus la raison de mon premier advis, et m’en despars.”

III, 2, 611 [805].

I, 21, 75 [105]: “Car les Histoires que J’emprunte, je les renvoye sur la conscience de qui je les prens. Les discours sont à moy, et se tiennent par la prevue de la raison, non de l’éxperience.”

I, 36, 166 [226].

I, 23, 79–81 [111–113].

III, 2, 618 [814], Plutarch, “Sayings of Kings and Commanders,” Moralia 15.

III, 6, 696–697 [911–912].

Konstantinovic, Montaigne et Plutarque , 271–273.

I, 39, 175–179 [238–243]. Alberto Grilli , “Su Montaigne e Seneca,” in Studi di letteratura e filosofia in onore di Bruno Revel (Florence: Olschki, 1965), 303–311 , concentrates on this chapter.

II, 3, 251–253 [350–351].

I, 20, 64–68 [92–96].

I, 39, 182–183 [247–248].

II, 12, 455–457 [601–603]; just about acknowledged by “A cette conclusion si religieuse d’un homme payen” (603) at the end of the quotation (whose beginning Montaigne does not mark). He also edits a few references to Apollo out of Plutarch, On the E at Delphi , 392A-393B and introduces a quotation from Lucretius, V, 828–831.

Bernard Weinberg’s excellent study of the sources of “Of cannibals” shows that Montaigne supplements the words of his informant with memories and rereading of travel narratives, B. Weinberg , “Montaigne’s Readings for Des Cannibales ,” in Renaissance and Other Studies in Honour of William Leon Wiley , ed. G. B. Daniel (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 261–279.

Daniel Ménager , “Les citations de Lucrèce chez Montaigne,” in Montaigne in Cambridge , ed. Philip Ford and Gillian Jondorf (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge French Colloquia, 1989), 25–38 ; M. Metschies, La Citation et l’art de citer dans les Essais de Montaigne , 126–129; Alain Legros, “Le Lucrèce de Lambin, annoté par Montaigne, lecteur de commentaires”; and P. Boyde , “Sur des vers de Lucrèce,” in La Librairie de Montaigne , ed. Philip Ford and Neil Kenny (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge French Colloquia, 2012), 81–102, 215–242.

Michael A. Screech , Montaigne’s Annotated Copy of Lucretius (Geneva, Switzerland: Droz, 1998), 9–10. The annotations are edited by Alain Legros in Montaigne, Essais , ed. A. Balsamo, M. Magnien, and C. Magnien-Simonin, 1188–1250.

Simone Fraisse , Une conquête du rationalisme. L’influence de Lucrèce en France au seizième siècle (Paris: A.-G. Nizet, 1962), 171–172 , cited in Screech, Montaigne’s Lucretius , 25; Villey, Les Sources et l’évolution des Essais de Montaigne , I, 188.

Compare Screech, Montaigne’s Lucretius , 149.

II, 12, 443–448 [587–592]; Lucretius, De rerum natura , IV, 478–480, 482–483, 486–488, 489–490, 379–380, 499–510, 397, 389–390, 420–424. This series is recalled and concluded in the long quotation (IV, 513–521; 454 [600]) that leads into the sections from Sextus Empiricus and Plutarch which end the “Apology.”

Screech, Montaigne’s Lucretius , 460–470, notes a series of seventeen quotations from Book 3 (6A; 11B) in a thirteen-page section of the “Apology,” II, 12, 405–416 [542–555].

Villey , Les Sources et l’évolution des Essais de Montaigne , I, 237–242 .

II, 12 and II, 37. Villey , ibid. , I, 61–62 .

II, 12, 333–353 [455–480]; Konstantinovic , Montaigne et Plutarque , 297–334.

III, 7, 702–703 [919–920]; Konstantinovic , ibid. , 478–479 .

III, 8, 709 [929]; Konstantinovic , ibid. , 480 .

III, 1, 604, 607, 608, 609 [795, 796, 799, 801, 802] (quotations), 608 [800] (example).

III, 9, 765 [999–1000].

III, 9, 721 [945]: “Il n’en est à l’avanture aucune plus expresse que d’en escrire si vainement. Ce que la divinité nous en a si divinement exprimé devroit estre soigneusement et continuellement medité par les gens d’entendement.”

III, 9, 732 [958–959]; Livy XXIII, 2–4.

III, 9, 757 [990]: “Je ne sçay quels livres, disoit la courtisane Lays, quelle sapience, quelle philosophie, mais ces gens là battent aussi souvant à ma porte que aucuns autres. D’autant que nostre licence nous porte tousjours au delà de ce qui nous est loisible et permis, on a estressy souvant outre la raison universelle les preceptes et loys de nostre vie. / Nemo satis credit tantum / delinquere quantum Permittas./ Il seroit à desirer qu’il y eust plus de proportion du commandement à l’obeyssance; et semble la visée injuste, à laquelle on ne peut atteindre. Il n’est si homme de bien, qu’il mette à l’examen des loix toutes ses actions et pensées, qui ne soit pendable dix fois en sa vie, voire tel qu’il seroit tres-grand dommage et tres-injuste de punir et de perdre.”

III, 9, 763–764 [998]: “Je doibs beaucoup à la fortune dequoy jusques à cette heure elle n’a rien fait contre moy outrageux au moins au delà de ma portée. Seroit ce pas sa façon de laisser en paix ceux de qui elle n’est point importunée? / Quanto quisque sibi plura negaverit, / A Diis, plura feret. Nil cupientium / Nudus castra peto … / … Multa petentibus / Desunt multa . / Si elle continue, elle m’en envoyera tres-content et satisfaict, / Nihil supra / Deos lacesso . / Mais gare le heurt. Il en est mille qui rompent au port.”

III, 9, 766 [1000–1001]: “Cette opinion et usance commune de regarder ailleurs qu’à nous a bien pourveu à nostre affaire. C’est un objet plein de mescontentement; nous n’y voyons que misere et vanité. Pour ne nous desconforter, nature a rejetté bien à propos l’action de nostre veue au dehors. Nous allons en avant à vau l’eau, mais de rebrousser vers nous nostre course c’est un mouvement penible: la mer se brouille et s’empesche ainsi quand elle est repoussée à soy. Regardez, dict chacun, les branles du ciel, regardez au public, à la querelle de cettuy-là, au pouls d’un tel, au testament de cet autre; somme regardez tousjours haut ou bas, ou à costé, ou devant, ou derriere vous. C’estoit un commandement paradoxe que nous faisoit anciennement ce Dieu à Delphes: Regardez dans vous, reconnoissez vous, tenez vous à vous; vostre esprit et vostre volonté, qui se consomme ailleurs, ramenez la en soy; vous vous escoulez, vous vous respandez; appilez vous, soutenez vous; on vous trahit, on vous dissipe, on vous desrobe à vous. Voy tu pas que ce monde tient toutes ses veues contraintes au dedans et ses yeux ouverts à se contempler soy-mesme? C’est tousjours vanité pour toy, dedans et dehors, mais elle est moins vanité quand elle est moins estendue. Sauf toy, ô homme, disoit ce Dieu, chaque chose s’estudie la premiere et a, selon son besoin, des limites à ses travaux et desirs. Il n’en est une seule si vuide et necessiteuse que toy, qui embrasses l’univers: tu es le scrutateur sans connoissance, le magistrat sans jurisdiction et apres tout le badin de la farce.”

This essay was inspired by reading Terence Cave on “Problems of Reading in the Essais ,” in Montaigne: Essays in Memory of Richard Sayce , ed. I. D. McFarlane and I. Maclean (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 133–166 ; and How to Read Montaigne (London: Granta, 2007) . It includes rewritings of sections from my book Reading and Rhetoric in Montaigne and Shakespeare (London: Bloomsbury, 2010) and two papers given in London in 2014 and Lyon in 2015. I am grateful for permission to reuse this material.

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