The Complete Essays

by Michel de Montaigne

Montaigne is one of the great sages of that modern world which in a sense began with the Renaissance. He is a bridge linking the thought of pagan antiquity and of Christian antiquity with our own. Colourful, practical and direct, and never intentionally obscure, he sets before us his modestly named Essays, his ‘attempts’ at sounding himself and the nature and duties of Man so as to discover a sane and humane manner of living. He enjoys a place apart among French Renaissance authors. Men and women of all sorts are fascinated by what they find in him. Many read him for his wisdom and humanity, for which he may be quoted in a newspaper as readily as in a history of philosophy.

For he knew that opinions are not certainties, and that most human ‘certainties’ are in fact opinions.

He realized that he was so open to influences from the sages of Antiquity that he took on the colour of whichever one he had just read.

Pride is the sin of sins: intellectually it leads to Man’s arrogantly taking mere opinion for knowledge. In terms which were common to many Renaissance writers, Montaigne emphasized that ‘there is a plague (a peste) on Man: the opinion that he knows something.’

Reader, I myself am the subject of my book: it is not reasonable that you should employ your leisure on a topic so frivolous and so vain. Therefore, Farewell: From Montaigne; this first of March, One thousand, five hundred and eighty.

Man is indeed an object miraculously vain, various and wavering. It is difficult to found a judgement on him which is steady and uniform.

Alexander, the staunchest of men and the most generous towards the vanquished, stormed, after great hardship, the town of Gaza and came across Betis who commanded it; of his valour during the siege he had witnessed staggering proofs; now Betis was alone, deserted by his own men, his weapons shattered; all covered with blood and wounds, he was still fighting in the midst of several Macedonians who were slashing at him on every side. Alexander was irritated by so dearly won a victory (among other losses he had received two fresh wounds in his own body); he said to him: ‘You shall not die as you want to, Betis! Take note that you will have to suffer every kind of torture which can be thought up against a prisoner!’ To these menaces Betis (not only looking assured but contemptuous and proud) replied not a word. Then Alexander, seeing his haughty and stubborn silence said: ‘Has he bent his knee? Has he let a word of entreaty slip out? Truly I will overcome that refusal of yours to utter a sound: if I cannot wrench a word from you I will at least wrench a groan.’ And as his anger turned to fury he ordered his heels to be pierced5 and, dragging him alive behind a cart, had him lacerated and dismembered. Was it because [C] bravery was so usual for him6 that [B] he was never struck with wonder by it and therefore respected it less? [C] Or was it because he thought bravery to be so properly his own that he could not

bear to see it at such a height in anyone else without anger arising from an emotion of envy; or did the natural violence

of his anger allow of no ...

‘Only the last of these misfortunes can be expressed by tears’, he replied; ‘the first two are way beyond any means of expression.’

Violent emotions like these have little hold on me. By nature my sense of feeling has a hard skin, which I daily toughen and thicken by arguments.

We are never ‘at home’: we are always outside ourselves. Fear, desire, hope, impel us towards the future; they rob us of feelings and concern for what now is, in order to spend time over what will be – even when we ourselves shall be no more.

‘Do what thou hast to do, and know thyself’ – that great precept is often cited by Plato;2 each clause of it embraces our entire duty, generally, and similarly embraces its fellow. Whoever would do what he has to do would see that the first thing he must learn is to know what he is and what is properly his. And whoever does know himself never considers external things to be his; above all other things he loves and cultivates himself: he rejects excessive concerns as well as useless thoughts and resolutions.

Livy rightly says that the speech of men brought up under monarchies is always full of foolish pomposity and vain testimony, as each one of them elevates his king, regardless of merit, to the ultimate point of valour and sovereign greatness.5

The Emperor Maximilian, the great-grandfather of the present King Philip, was a monarch fully endowed with great advantages; among others, he was singularly handsome. One of his humours was flat contrary to that of princes who, to get through important business, make a throne of their lavatory: he never allowed a valet such intimacy as to see him on his privy. He would even hide away to pass water, being as scrupulous as a [C] maiden [A] about uncovering, for a doctor or anyone else, those parts which are customarily kept hidden.15 [B] I myself, so shameless in speech, have nevertheless in my complexion a touch of such modesty: except when strongly moved by necessity or pleasure I rarely let anyone’s eyes see those members or those actions which our customs ordain to be hidden. I find this all the more constraining in that I do not think it becoming in a man, above all in one of my calling.16 But Maximilian became [A] so scrupulous that he expressly commanded in his will that linen drawers should be tied on him when he was dead. He should have added a codicil saying that the man who pulled them on ought to be blindfold!

[The arranging of funerals, the choosing of tombs and the pomp of obsequies are consolations for the living rather than supports for the dead.] That is why Socrates (when Crito asked him in his final moments how he wanted to be buried) replied, ‘Just as you wish.’

[You ask where you will lie after death? Why, where the unborn lie.]

If I can, I will prevent my death from saying anything not first said by my life.

began to keep a record of them, hoping in time to make my mind ashamed of itself.

poor memory is an evil which has enabled me to correct a worse one which might easily have arisen in me: ambition. A bad memory is an intolerable defect for anyone concerned with worldly affairs.

If, thanks to memory, other people’s discoveries and opinions had been kept ever before me, I would readily have reached a settled mind and judgement by following other men’s footsteps, failing as most people do to exercise my own powers.

It is not for nothing that it is said that he who does not feel his memory to be strong enough has no business lying.4 I am well aware that grammarians make a distinction between ‘to tell an untruth’ and ‘to lie’; they assert that ‘to tell an untruth’ is to say something false which one thinks to be true, and that the definition of mentiri [to lie] in Latin (the source of mentir in French) implies something like, ‘to go against the testimony of one’s knowledge’, and so only applies to those who speak at variance with what they know. They are the people I am talking about.

their words must vary with them. They are obliged to call the very same thing first grey then yellow, saying one thing to this man, quite another to another. If the persons who receive such contrary advice happen to compare their haul, what becomes of their fine diplomacy? Apart from that, they can be like a silly horse casting its own shoe; for what memory could ever suffice them, enabling them to remember all the various moulds they have invented for the same subject matter? In my time I have known several men who hankered after a reputation for this fine sort of prudence: they never can see that to have a reputation for it renders it ineffectual. Lying is an accursed vice. It is only our words which bind us together and make us human. If we realized the horror and weight of lying we would see that it is more worthy of the stake than other crimes. I find that people normally waste time quite inappropriately punishing children for innocent misdemeanours, tormenting them for thoughtless actions which lead nowhere and leave no trace. It seems to me that the only faults which we should vigorously attack as soon as they arise and start to develop are lying and, a little below that, stubbornness. Those faults grow up with the children. Once let the tongue acquire the habit of lying and it is astonishing how impossible it is to make it give it up. That is why some otherwise decent men are abject slaves to it. One of my tailors is a good enough fellow, but I have never heard him...

When one man was being led to the gallows he asked not to be taken through such-and-such a street: there was a tradesman there who might arrest him for an old debt! Another asked the executioner not to touch his throat: he was ticklish and did not want to burst out laughing! When the confessor promised another man that he would sup that day at table with Our Lord, he said, ‘You go instead: I’m on a fast.’ Yet another asked for a drink; when the executioner drank of it first, he declined to drink after him – ‘for fear of the pox’! And everybody knows that tale of the man of Picardy who was on the scaffold when they showed him a young woman who was prepared to marry him to save his life (as our laws sometimes allow): he gazed at her, noticed that she had a limp, and said, ‘Run up the noose: she’s lame!’

the philosopher Pyrrho happened to be aboard ship during a mighty storm; to those about him whom he saw most terrified he pointed out an exemplary pig, quite unconcerned with the storm; he encouraged them to imitate it.

What use is knowledge if, for its sake, we lose the calm and repose which we would enjoy without it and if it makes our condition worse than that of Pyrrho’s pig? Intelligence was given us for our greater good: shall we use it to bring about our downfall by fighting against the design of Nature and the order of the Universe, which require each creature to use its faculties and resources for its advantage? Fair enough, you may say: your rule applies to death, but what about want? And what have you to say about pain which [C] Aristippus, Hieronymus and16 [A] the majority of sages judge to be the [C] ultimate [A] evil?17 Even those who denied this in words accepted it in practice: Possidonius was tormented in the extreme by an acutely painful illness; Pompey came to see him and apologized for having picked on so inappropriate a time for hearing him discourse on philosophy: ‘God forbid,’ said Possidonius, ‘that pain should gain such a hold over me as to hinder me from expounding philosophy or talking about it.’ And he threw himself into the theme of contempt for pain. Meanwhile pain played her part and

The act of dying is the matter of a moment: it is felt only by our powers of reason: Aut fuit, aut veniet, nihil est praesentis in illa; [Death either was or is to come: nothing of the present is in her;]20 Morsque minus poenae quam mora mortis habet. [There is less pain in Death than in waiting for Death.]

Our self-justifications are false: I find from experience that it is our inability to suffer the thought of dying which makes us unable to suffer the pain of it, and that the pain we do suffer is twice as grievous since it threatens us with death. But as reason condemns our cowardice in fearing something so momentary, so unavoidable, so incapable of being felt as death is, we seize upon a more pardonable pretext.

Neither good nor ill is done to us by Fortune: she merely offers us the matter and the seeds: our soul, more powerful than she is, can mould it or sow them as she pleases, being the only cause and mistress of our happy state or our unhappiness. [B] Whatever comes to us from outside takes its savour and its colour from our internal attributes, just as our garments warm us not with their heat but ours, which they serve to preserve and sustain. Shelter a cold body under them and it will draw similar services from them for its coldness: that is how we conserve snow and ice.70 [A] Study to the lazy, like abstinence from wine to the drunkard, is torture; frugal living to the seeker after pleasure, like exercise to the languid idle man, is torment: so too for everything else. Things are not all that painful nor harsh in themselves: it is our weakness, our slackness, which makes them so. To judge great and lofty things we need a mind which is like them: otherwise we attribute to them the viciousness which belongs to ourselves. A straight oar seems bent in water. It is not only seeing which counts: how we see counts too.71

Publius Crassus (the one the Romans considered to be ‘five-times blessed’) was Consul in Asia when he wrote to a Greek engineer ordering him to bring him the larger of two ship’s masts which he had seen in Athens in order to use it in a siege-engine he wanted to make. The engineer, on the strength of his scientific knowledge, permitted himself to decide to bring the smaller one which, by the rules of his art, was the more suitable. Crassus listened to his arguments patiently, then had him soundly flogged, judging that the interests of discipline outweighed those of his machine.

It is fear that I am most afraid of.

I wager that we shall find more who died before thirty-five than after. It is full of reason and piety to take as our example the manhood of Jesus Christ: his life ended at thirty-three.18 The same term applies to Alexander, the greatest man who was simply man.

To begin depriving death of its greatest advantage over us, let us adopt a way clean contrary to that common one; let us deprive death of its strangeness; let us frequent it, let us get used to it; let us have nothing more often in mind than death. At every instant let us evoke it in our imagination under all its aspects. Whenever a horse stumbles, a tile falls or a pin pricks however slightly, let us at once chew over this thought: ‘Supposing that was death itself?’ With that, let us brace ourselves and make an effort. In the midst of joy and feasting let our refrain be one which recalls our human condition. Let us never be carried away by pleasure so strongly that we fail to recall occasionally how many are the ways in which that joy of ours is subject to death or how many are the fashions in which death threatens to snatch it away. That is what the Egyptians did: in the midst of all their banquets and good cheer they would bring in a mummified corpse to serve as a warning to the guests:24 Omnem crede diem tibi diluxisse supremum. Grata superveniet, quæ non sperabitur hora. [Believe that each day was the last to shine on you. If it comes, any unexpected hour will be welcome indeed.]25

We do not know where death awaits us: so let us wait for it everywhere. To practise death is to practise freedom. A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave. Knowing how to die gives us freedom from subjection and constraint.

[C] I am now ready to leave, thank God, whenever He pleases, regretting nothing except life itself – if its loss should happen to weigh heavy on me. I am untying all the knots. I have already half-said my adieus to everyone but myself. No man has ever prepared to leave the world more simply nor more fully than I have. No one has more completely let go of everything than I try to do.

I want Death to find me planting my cabbages, neither worrying about it nor the unfinished gardening. I once saw a man die who, right to the last, kept lamenting that destiny had cut the thread of the history he was writing when he had only got up to our fifteenth or sixteenth king! [B] Illud in his rebus non addunt, nec tibi earum Jam desiderium rerum super insidet una! [They never add, that desire for such things does not linger on in your remains!]33

I have noticed that as an illness gets more and more hold on me I naturally slip into a kind of contempt for life. I find that a determination to die is harder to digest when I am in good health than when I am feverish, especially since I no longer hold so firmly to the pleasures of life once I begin to lose the use and enjoyment of them, and can look on death with a far less terrified gaze. That leads me to hope that the further I get from good health and the nearer I approach to death the more

easily I will come to terms with exchanging one for the other. Just as I have in several other matters assayed the truth of Caesar’s assertion that things often look bigger from afar than close to,38 I have also found that I was much more terrified of illness when I was well than when I felt ill. Being in a happy state, all pleasure and vigour, leads me to get the other state quite out of proportion, so that I mentally increase all its discomforts by half and imagine them heavier than they prove to be when I have to bear them.

If any of us were to be plunged into old age all of a sudden I do not think that the change would be bearable. But, almost imperceptibly, Nature leads us by the hand down a gentle slope; little by little, step by step, she engulfs us in that pitiful state and breaks us in, so that we feel no jolt when youth dies in us, although in essence and in truth that is a harsher death than the total extinction of a languishing life as old age dies. For it is not so grievous a leap from a wretched existence to non-existence

as it is from a sweet existence in full bloom to one full of travail and pain.

Death is inevitable: does it matter when it comes? When Socrates was told that the Thirty Tyrants had condemned him to death, he retorted, ‘And nature, them!’

after death. Or if you prefer it thus: after life you are dead, but during life you are dying: and death touches the dying more harshly than the dead, in more lively a fashion and more essentially.

‘It is no good going on living: it will in no wise shorten the time you will stay dead. It is all for nothing: you will be just as long in that state which you fear as though you had died at the breast;

[No night has ever followed day, no dawn has ever followed night, without hearing, interspersed among the wails of infants, the cries of pain attending death and sombre funerals.]59

Chiron refused immortality when he was told of its characteristics by his father Saturn, the god of time and of duration.61 ‘Truly imagine how much less bearable for Man, and how much more painful, would be a life which lasted for ever rather than the life which I have given you. If you did not have death you would curse me, for ever, for depriving you of it. ‘Seeing what advantages death holds I have deliberately mixed a little anguish into it to stop you from embracing it too avidly or too injudiciously. To lodge you in that moderation which I require of you, neither fleeing from life nor yet fleeing from death, I have tempered them both between the bitter and the sweet. ‘I taught Thales, the foremost of your Sages, that living and dying are things indifferent. So, when asked “why he did not go and die then,” he very wisely replied: “Because it is indifferent.”

We must rip the masks off things as well as off people. Once we have done that we shall find underneath only that same death which a valet and a chambermaid got through recently, without being afraid.64 Blessed65 the death which leaves no time for preparing such gatherings of mourners.

I was travelling though Vitry-le-François7 when I was able to see a man to whom the Bishop of Soissons had given the name of Germain at his confirmation: until the age of twenty-two he had been known by sight to all the townsfolk as a girl called Marie. He was then an old man with a full beard; he remained unmarried. He said that he had been straining to jump when his male organs suddenly appeared. (The girls there still have a song in which they warn each other not to take great strides lest they become boys, ‘like Marie Germain’.)

We are right to note the licence and disobedience of this member which thrusts itself forward so inopportunely when we do not want it to, and which so inopportunely lets us down when we most need it; it imperiously contests for authority with our will: it stubbornly and proudly refuses all our incitements, both mental and manual. Yet if this member were arraigned for rebelliousness, found guilty because

would doubtless cast suspicion on our other members for having deliberately brought a trumped-up charge, plotting to arm everybody against it and maliciously accusing it alone of a defect common to them all. I ask you to reflect whether there is one single part of our body which does not often refuse to function when we want it to, yet does so when we want it not to. Our members have emotions proper to themselves which arouse them or quieten them down without leave from us. How often do compelling facial movements bear witness to thoughts which we were keeping secret, so betraying us to those who are with us? The same causes which animate that member animate – without our knowledge – the heart, the lungs and the pulse: the sight of some pleasant object can imperceptibly spread right through us the flame of a feverish desire. Is it only the veins and muscles of that particular member which rise or fall without the consent of our will or even of our very thoughts?

To show the limitless authority of our wills, Saint Augustine cites the example of a man who could make his behind produce farts whenever he would: