Excerpts from Montaigne's 'Apology for Raymond Sebond'

Michel Montaigne. Exceprts from 'Apology for Raymond Sebond'

(from the best, not free translation of the portland professor donald m frame)

 

What good can we suppose it did Varro and Aristotle to know so many things? 

Have they found that sensual pleasure and health are more savory to him who knows astrology and grammar?

If anyone will sum us up by our actions and conduct, a greater number of excellent men will be found among the ignorant than among the learned: I mean in every sort of virtue. The old Rome seems to me to have borne men of greater worth, both for peace and for war, than that learned Rome that ruined itself. Even if the reset were exactly equal, at least worth and innocence would remain on the side of the old, for they dwell singularly well with simplicity.
But I leave this subject, which would lead me father than I would follow. I will add only this, that humility and submissiveness alone can make a good man. The knowledge of his duty should not be left to each man’s judgment; it should be prescribed to him, not left to the choice of his reason. Otherwise, judging by the imbecility and infinite variety of our reasons and opinions, we would finally forge for ourselves duties that would set us to eating one another, as epicurus sways.

The first law that God ever gave to man was a law of pure obedience; it was a naked and simple commandment about which man had mothering to know or dicuss. 

the god’s have health in reality, says philosophy, sickness in thought; man, on the contrary, possesses his goods in fancy, his ills in reality. We have been right to make much of the powers of our imagination, for all our goods exist only in dreams.
Hear this poor calamitous animal boast: “There is nothing, says Cicero, “so sweet as the occupation of letters, of those letters, I mean, by means of which the infinity of things, the immense grandeur of nature, the heavens in this very world, the lands and the seas, are revealed to us. It is they that have taught us religion, moderation, greatheartedness, and that have wrested our soul out of the shadows to make it see all things, high, low, first, last, and middling. It is they that furnish us with means to live well and happily, and guide us to pass our age without displeasure and without pain.” Does not his man seem to be talking about the condition of God, ever-living and almighty? And as for the facts, a thousand little women in their villages have lived a more equable, sweeter, and more consistent life than his. 

Nothing is so common as to encounter cases of similar temerity. There is not one of us who is offended to see himself compared to God as he is to see himself brought down to the rank of the other animals: so much more jealous are we of our own interest than of that of our creator.

“… compare the live of a man enslaved to such imaginings with that of a plowman letting himself follow his natural appetites, measuring things only by the present sensation, without knowledge and without prognostication, who has pain only when he has it. . 
What I say of medicine may be applied generally to all knowledge. Thence came that ancient opinion of the philosophers who located the sovereign good in the recognition of the weakness of our judgment.”
What they tell us of the Brazilians, that they died only of old age, which is attributed to the serenity and tranquility of their air, I attribute rather to the tranquility and serenity of their souls, unburdened with any tense or unpleasant passion or thought or occupation, as people who spent their life in admirable simplicity and ignorance, without letters, without law, without king, without religions of any kind. 
And how does this happen, which we see by experience, that the grossest and coarsest men are the most sturdy and desirable in amorous performances, and that the love of a muleteer often makes itself more acceptable than that of a gentleman; if not that in the latter the agitation of his soul troubles his bodily strength, break it and tires it? As it also usually tires and troubles itself. 
What unseats it, what casts it most commonly into insanity, but its quickness, its keenness, its agility, and in short its very strength?

Countless minds have been ruined by their very power and suppleness. ..Does he not have reason to be grateful to that murderous vivacity of his mind? To that brilliance that has blinded him? To that exact and intent apprehension of his reasons, which has deprived him of reason? To the careful and laborious pursuit of the sciences, which has led him to stupidity? To that rare aptitude for the exercises of the mind, which has left him without exercise and without mind? 

Do you want a man to be healthy, do you want him disciplined and firmly and securely poised? Wrap him in darkness, idleness, and dullness.

As by simplicity life becomes pleasanter, so also does it become better and more innocent, as I was starting to say a while back. The simple and ignorant, says Saint Paul, raise themselves to heaven, and take possession of it; and we, with all our learning, plunge ourselves into the infernal abyss. 

The wisest man that ever was, when they asked him what he knew, answered that he knew this much, that he knew nothing. He was verifying what they say, that the greatest part of what we know is the least of those parts that we do not know; that is to say that the very thing we think we know is a part, and a very small part, of our ignorance. We know things in a dream, says plato, and we are ignorant of them in reality.
“Almost all the ancients have said that nothing can be understood, nothing perceived, nothing know; that our sense are narrow, our minds weak, the course of our life short” Cicero
As for Cicero himself, who owed all his worth to learning, Valerius says that in his old age he began to lose his esteem for letters. And while he practiced them, it was without obligation to any party, following what seemed probable to him n now in one sect, now in another, keeping himself always in Academic doubt. “I must speak, but in such a way as to affirm, nothing; I shall search into all things, doubting most of them and mistrusting myself.”
I should have too easy a time if I wanted to consider man in his ordinary condition and in the mass, and yet I could do so according to his own rule, which judges the truth not by the weight of votes but by the number. Let us leave the people alone,
Who waking snore…
Whose life is dead, although they live and see, Lucretius
Who are not conscious of themselves, who do not judge themselves, who leave most of their natural faculties idle.
I wish to take man in his highest estate. Let us consider him in that small number of excellent and select men who, having been endowed with fine and particular natural ability, have further strengthened and sharpened it by care, by study, and by art, and have raised it to the highest pitch that it can attain. They have fashioned their soul to all directions and all angles, supported and propped it with all the outside assistance that was fit for it, and enriched and adorned it with all they could borrow, for its advantage, from the inside and the outside of the world; it is in them that the utmost height of human nature is found. They have regulated the world with governments and laws; they have instructed it with arts and sciences, and instructed it further by the example of their admirable conduct.
I shall take into account only these people, their testimony, and their experience. Let us see how far they have gone and where they have halted…

… for this matter of establishing the measure of our power, of knowing and judging the difficulty of things, is a great and supreme knowledge, of which they doubt that man is capable:
Whoever thinks that we know nothing does not know
Whether we know enough to say that this is so. Lucretius

Ignorance that knows itself, that judges itself and condemns itself, is not complete ignorance: to be that it must be ignorant of itself...,conduct and fancies different from mine do not so much displease me as instruct me, do not so much swell my pride as humble me when i compare them; ... I feel grateful to the Milesian wench who, seeing the philosopher Thales continually spending his time in contemplation of the heavenly vault and always keeping his eyes raised upward, put something in his way to make him stumble, to warn him that it would be time to amuse his thoughts with things in the clouds when he had seen to those at his feet. Indeed she gave him good counsel, to look rather to himself than to the sky. But our condition makes the knowledge of what we have in our hands as remote from us and as far above the clouds as that of the stars. As Socrates says in Plato, whoever meddles with philosophy may have the same reproach made to him as that woman makes to Thales, that he sees nothing of what is in front of him. For every philosopher is ignorant of what is neighbor is doing, yes and of what he himself is doing, and does not know what they both are, whether beasts or men. 

These people, who think Segond's reasons too weak, who are ignorant of nothnhing, who govern the world, who know everything- 
What causes rule the sea; and what the year,
Whether they stars are governed in their flight;
What makes the moon grow dark or spread her light;
What this concordant strife wills and can do;
Horace
-have they not sometimes sounded, amid their books the difficulties that present themselves in knowing their own being?.. 
But how a spiritual impression can cut such a swath in a massive and solid object, and the nature of the relation and connection between these wonderful springs of action, no man has ever known. All those things are indeterminable by reason and concealed int he majesty of nature, says pliny...
The reason why we doubt hardly anything is that we never test our common impressions. We do not probe the base, where the fault and weakness leis; we dispute only about the branches. WE do not ask whether this is true, but whethris it has been understood this way or that. We do not ask whether Galen said anything worth saying but whether he said thus or otherwise... 
“there is no human judgment so alert but that sometimes it slumbers.”…
The Extremes of our investigations always fall finally into dazzlement; as Plutarch says of the beginning of histories, that as I maps, the farthest limits of known lands are occupied by swamps, and deep forests, deserts, and uninhabitable places. That is why the grossest and most childish daydreams are most often found in those who treat higher things and treat them more deeply, becoming engulfed by their curiosity and presumption. The end and the beginning of knowledge are equal in stupidity. …
We see innumerable similar examples of arguments not only false, but inept and inconsistent- arguments that accuse their authors not so much of ignorance as of witlessness- in the reproaches that the philosophers make to one another regarding the dissensions of their opinions and their schools… Let us judge from this what we are to think of man, his sense and his reason, since in these great men, who carried human capacity so high, are found such gross and apparent weak spots. .. 
By the variety and instability of opinions they lead us as by the hand, tacitly, to this conclusion of their inconclusiveness. By profession they do not always present their opinion openly and apparently; they have hidden it now in the fabulous shades of poetry, now under some other mask... They sometimes obscure their natural opinions and judgments and falsify them to accommodate themselves to public usage. They do not want openly to profess ignorance and the imbecility of human reason; but they reveal it to us clearly enough under the guise of a muddled and inconsistent knowledge…

Man is possessed by an extreme concern with prolonging his existence; he has provided for it with all his faculties. For the preservation of the body there are sepulchers; for the preservation of the name, glory. Impatient with his fortune, he has used all his wits to rebuild himself and prop himself up with his inventions. The soul, through its confusion an weakness being unable to stand on its own feet, goes looking everywhere for consolations, hopes, and foundations in external circumstances where it clings and takes root; sand flimsy and fantastic as its imagination may create them, it rests more assured in them than in itself, and more gladly.
But those most obstinate in this most just and clear persuasion of the immortality of our spirit, it is a marvel how they have fallen short and found themselves powerless to prove it by their human powers; They are dreams, not of a teacher, but of a wisher, an ancient used to say (cicero) man may recognize by this token that he owes to fortune and chance the truth that he discovers by himself; since even when it has fallen into his hand, he has not the ability to grasp it and keep it, and this reason has not the power to take advantage of it. All things produced by our own reason and ability, the true as well as the false, are subject to uncertainty and debate. It was for the chastisement of our pride and the instruction of our wretchedness and incapacity that God produced the disorder and confusion of the ancient tower of Babel.  
All that we undertake without his assistance, all that we see without the lamp of this grace, is only vanity and folly. The very essence of truth, which is uniform and constant, we corrupt and adulterate by our weakness when fortune gives us possession of it. Whatever course man takes by himself, god allows him always to arrive at that same confusion, the picture of which he shows us so vividly by the just chastisement with which he beat down the arrogance of nimrod an annihilated his vain enterprise in building his pyramid. "I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent (1st Corinthians)
The diversity of idioms and languages with which he troubled that work, what else is it but that infinite and perpetual altercation and discordance of opinions and reasons, which occompanies and embroils the vain construction of human knowledge?... To what point of presumption and insolence do we not carry our blindness and our stupidity>?
But to resume my subject, it was really quite right that we should be beholden to God alone, and to the benefit of his grace…
Warning to the princess- you, for whom I have taken the pains to extend so long a work contrary to my custom, Iwill not shrink from upholding your sebond by the ordinary form oif argument in which you are instructed every day, and in that you will execise your mind and your learning. For this final fencer’s trick must not be empoloyed except a an extreme remedy. It is a desperate stroke, in which you must abandon your weapons to make your adversary lose his, and a secret trick that =must be used rarely and reservedly. It is great rasheness to ruin yourself in order to ruin another…
Here we are shaking the barriers and last fences of knowledge, in which extremity is a vice, as in virtue. Stay on the highroad; it is no good to be so subtle and clever. Remember what the Tuscan proverb says: He who gros too keen cuts himself (petrach)
In your opinions and remarks, as we4ll as in your conduct and everything else, I advise moderation and temperance, and avoidance of novelty and strangeness. All eccentric ways irritate me. You wou, by the authority that your greatness brings you, and still more by the avantages which the qualities that are more your own give you, can by the flicer of an eye command whomever you please, should have given this assignment to some professional man of letters, who would have supported and I enriched this theme for you in quite another way. “However, here is enough for your needs. 
Epicurus used to say of the laws that the worst were so necessary that without them men would devour one another.
Our mind is an erratic, dangerous, and heedless tool; it is hard to impose order and moderation upon it. A d in my time those who have some rare excellence beyond the others, and some extraordinary quickness, are nearly all, we see, incontinent in the license of their opinions and conduct. It is a miracle you find a sedate and sociable one. 
People are right to give the tightest possible barriers to the human mind. In study, as in everything else, it steps must be counted and regulated for it, the limits of the chase must be artificially determined for it. They bridle and bind it with religions, laws, customs, science, precepts, mortal and immortal punishments and rewards; and still we see that by its whirling and its incohesiveness it escapes all these bonds. It is an empty body, with nothingby which it can be seized and directed; a varying and formless body, which can be neither tied nor grasped. 
Indeed ther are few souls so orderly, so strong and wellborn that they can be trusted with their own guidance, and that can sail with moderation and without temerity, in the freedom of their judgments, beyond the common opinions. It is more expedient to place them in tutelage. 
The mind is a dangerous blade, even to its possessor, for anyone who does not know how to wield it with order and discretion. 
Wherefore it wil become you better to confine yourself to the accustomed routine, whatever it is, than to fly headlong into this unbridled license.

Thus liberty and wantonness of these ancient minds produced, in philosophy and the knowledge of man, many schools of different opinions, each undertaking to decide and choose in order to take sides. We receive the arts by civil authority and ordinance, men no longer consider what the coins weigh and are worth, but each one in turn accepts them according to the value that common approbation and their currency give them. Men do not argue about the alloy, but about the rate of exchange: Thus all things are accepted equally. They accept medicine as they do geometry, and sleight-of-hand, enchantments, ligatures, communication with the spirits of the dead, prognostications, horoscopy, and even that ridiculous pursuit of the philosopher’s stone, everything is admitted without contradiction.Theophrastus said that human knowledge, forwarded by the senses, could judge the causes of things to a certain extent; but that having reached the ultimate and original causes, it had to stop and be blunted, because of its weakness or the difficulty of things. It is a moderate and pleasant opinion that our capacity can lead us to the knowledge of somethings, and that it has definite limits to its power, beyond which it is temerity to employ it. This opinion is plausible and presented by conciliatory people; but it is not easy to set limits of our mind: it is curious and insatiable, and has no occasion to stop at a thousand paces any more than at fifty. 

Having found by experience that where one man had failed, another has succeeded, and that what was unknown to cone century the following century has made clear, and that the sciences and arts are not cast in a mold, but are formed and shaped little by little, by repeated handling and polishing, as the bears lick their cubs into shape at leisure, I do not leave off sounding an testing what my powers cannot discover; and by handling again and kneading this new material, stirring it and heating it, I open to whoever follows me some facility to enjoy it more at his ease, and make it more supple and manageable, for him: 
As hymettian wax grows softer in the sun, 
Takes many shapes when molded by the thumb,
And thus by usage useful does become
Ovid
The second will do as much for the third; which is the reason by difficulty should not make me despair, nor my impotence either, for it is only my own. 
Man is as capable of all things as he is at any. And if he confesses, as Theophrastus says, ignorance of first causes and principles, let him boldly give up all the rest of his knowledge. If hi foundation is lacking, his argument is flat on the ground. Discussion and inquiry have no other aim and limit but principles; if this terminus does not stop their course, they fling themselves into infinite irresolution. “One thing cannot be more or less understood than another, because there is only one definition of comprehension for everything” Cicero

Whatever they preach to us, whatever we learn, we should always remember that it is man that gives and man that receives; it is a mortal hand that presents it to us, a mortal hand that accepts it. 
We should remember, whatever we receive into our understanding, that we often receive false things there…
The venerable senate of the Areopagus judged by night for fear that the sight of the plaintiffs might corrupt their justice. 
Such are the minds of men as is the fertile light
That Father Jove himself sends down to make earth bright. 
Homer
It is not only the fevers, the potions, and the great accidents that upset our judgment; the slightest things in the world whirl it around. And there is no doubt, even though we do not feel it, that if a continuous fever can prostrate our soul, tertian fever causes some alteration in it, according to its measure and proportion. If apoplexy completely deadens and extinguishes the sight of our intelligence, there is no doubt that a bad cold dazzles it. And consequently, we can hardly find a single hour in our life when our judgment is in its proper seat, our body being subject to so many continual changes, and filled with so many springs of action that I can well believe the doctors wow unlikely it is that there will no always be one of them pulling crooked.
Moreover, this malady is not so easily discovered, unless it is wholly extreme and irremediable; inasmuch as reason always goes its own way, even though crooked, lame and broken-hipped, and with lation and irregularity. I always call reason that semblance of intellect each man fabricates in himself…
I who spy on myself more closely, who have my eyes unceasingly intent on myself, as one who has not much business elsewhere- I would hardly dare tell of the vanity and weakness that I find in myself. My footing is so unsteady and so insecure, I find it so facillating and ready to slip…
Now ia m ready to do anything, now to do nothing; what is a pleasrure to me at this moment will some time be a trouble. A thousand unconsidered an accidental impulses arise in me. Either the melancholic humor grips me, or the choleric; and at this moment sadness predominates in me by itw own private authority, at that moment good cheer.
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…
What differences in sense and reason, what contradictions of ideas are offered us by the diversity of our passions! What assurance can we take of a thing so unstable and mobile, subject by its condition to the mastery of disturbance, if our judgement is in the hands even of sickness and perturbation; if it is from folly and heedlessness that it is bound to receive its impression of things, what certainty can we expect of it? 
Before the principles which Aristotle introduced were in credit, other principles satisfied human reason, as his satisfy us at this moment. What letters-patent have these, what special priviledge, that the course of our invention stops at them, and that to them belongs possession of our believe for all time to come>? They are no more exempt from being thrown out than were their predecessors.
When I am pressed with a new argument, it is for me to think that what I cannot satisfy, another will satisfy; for to believe all likelihoods that we cannot shake off is great simplicity. Thye result of that would be that all the common herd would have its belief as easy to turn as a weathercock; for their soul, being soft and without resistance, would be forced to receive incessantly more and more different impressions, the last one always effacing the traces of the preceding one. He who finds himself weak should answer, following legal practice, that he will discuss it with his counsel, or refer to wiser men, from whom he received his teaching. 
“It is credible that there are natural laws, as may be seen in other creatures; but in us they are lost; that fine human reason butts in everywhere, domineering and commanding, muddling and confusing the face of things in accordance with tis vanity and inconsistency. “Nothing is ours any more; what I call ours is a product of art:” Cicero
Things may be considered in various lights and from various veiwpoints..