Montaigne's Book

Montaigne’s Essays can also serve us as proof of the power that imaginations have over one another, for this author has a certain free air, he gives such a natural and vivid turn to his thoughts that it is difficult to read him without letting oneself be prejudiced.

The negligence he affects suits him rather well and renders him amiable to most of the world without making him despised; and his pride is a certain pride of an honorable man, if one may speak thus, which makes him respected without making him hated. The air of the world and the cavalier air, supported by some erudition, make so prodigious an effect on the mind that one often admires him and almost always yields to what he decides without daring to examine it, and sometimes even without understanding it.

It is not at all his reasons that persuade; he almost never brings any for the things he advances, or at least he almost never brings any that have solidity. In effect he has no principles upon which he bases his reasonings, and he has no order for making deductions from his principles. A historical anecdote does not prove; a little tale does not demonstrate; two verses of Horace, an apophthegm of Cleomenes or of Caesar should not persuade reasonable people; however these Essays are only a tissue of historical anecdotes, little tales, witticisms, distiches and apophthegms.

One should not regard Montaigne in his Essays as a man who reasons, but as a man who amuses himself, who tries to please and who does not think of teaching; and if those who read him did only amuse themselves with him, one must agree that Montaigne would not be such a bad book for them.

But it is almost impossible not to love what pleases and not to nourish oneself on meats that flatter the taste. The mind cannot take pleasure in reading an author without adopting his sentiments, or at least without receiving some tincture of them, which, mingling with its ideas, renders them confused and obscure.

It is not only dangerous to read Montaigne for amusement, because the pleasure one takes in it insensibly engages one in his sentiments; but also because this pleasure is more criminal than one thinks: for it is certain that this pleasure arises principally from concupiscence, and that it only sustains and fortifies the passions; the manner of writing of this author being agreeable only because it touches us and awakens our passions in an imperceptible manner.

It would be quite useful to prove this in detail, and generally that all diverse styles ordinarily please us only because of the secret corruption of our heart; but this is not the place for it, and it would lead us too far. However, if one wishes to reflect on the connection of ideas and passions of which I have spoken before [31], and on what passes in oneself at the time one reads some well-written piece, one will be able to recognize in some manner that if we love the sublime genre, the noble and free air of certain authors, it is because we have vanity and we love grandeur and independence; and that this taste, which we find in the delicacy of effeminate discourses, has no other source than a secret inclination for softness and voluptuousness; in a word, that it is a certain intelligence for what touches the senses, and not the intelligence of truth, that makes certain authors charm and carry us away as if despite ourselves. But let us return to Montaigne.

His greatest admirers praise him for a certain character of judicious author removed from pedantry, and for having perfectly known nature and the weaknesses of the human mind. If I show therefore that Montaigne, for all his cavalier air, is no less a pedant than many others, and that he had only a very mediocre knowledge of the mind, I will have shown that those who admire him most will not have been persuaded by evident reasons, but will have been gained only by the force of his imagination.

This term pedant is very equivocal, but usage, it seems to me, and even reason, would have it that one calls pedants those who, to make a display of their false learning, cite all sorts of authors at random, who speak simply to speak and to make themselves admired by fools, who amass without judgment and without discernment apophthegms and historical anecdotes to prove or to pretend to prove things that can be proved only by reasons.

Pedant is opposed to reasonable, and what renders pedants odious to persons of wit is that pedants are not reasonable; for, persons of wit loving naturally to reason, they cannot suffer the conversation of those who do not reason at all. Pedants cannot reason because they have small minds or otherwise filled with false erudition; and they do not wish to reason, because they see that certain people respect and admire them more when they cite some unknown author and some sentence of an ancient than when they pretend to reason. Thus their vanity, satisfying itself in the sight of the respect shown them, attaches them to the study of all extraordinary sciences that attract the admiration of common men.

Pedants are therefore vain and proud, of great memory and little judgment, happy and strong in citations, unhappy and weak in reasons, of a vigorous and spacious imagination, but volatile and disordered, and which cannot contain itself within any correctness.

It will not now be very difficult to prove that Montaigne was as much a pedant as many others according to this notion of the word pedant, which seems the most conformable to reason and usage; for I do not speak here of a long-robed pedant, the robe cannot make the pedant. Montaigne, who had so much aversion for pedantry, could well never wear a long robe, but he could not similarly rid himself of his own defects. He worked well to give himself the cavalier air, but he did not work to give himself a sound mind, or at least he did not succeed. Thus he made himself rather a cavalier pedant of a quite singular species, than he rendered himself reasonable, judicious and an honorable man.

Montaigne’s book contains such evident proofs of the vanity and pride of its author that it appears perhaps quite useless to stop to point them out; for one must be very full of oneself to imagine, as he did, that the world would be willing to read a rather large book to have some knowledge of our humors. He must necessarily have separated himself from the common and regarded himself as a quite extraordinary man.

All creatures have an essential obligation to turn the minds of those who wish to adore them toward Him alone who deserves to be adored; and religion teaches us that we should never suffer that the mind and heart of man, who is made only for God, occupy themselves with us and stop to admire and love us. When St. John prostrated himself before the angel of the Lord [32], this angel forbade him to adore him: “I am a servant,” he said to him, “like you and like your brothers; adore God” [33]. Only demons and those who participate in the pride of demons take pleasure in being adored; and it is to wish to be adored not with an exterior and apparent adoration, but with an interior and true adoration, to wish that other men occupy themselves with us: it is to wish to be adored as God wishes to be adored, that is to say, in spirit and in truth.

Montaigne made his book only to paint himself and to represent his humors and inclinations. He admits it himself in the address to the reader, inserted in all editions: “It is myself I paint,” he says, “I am myself the matter of my book.” And this appears enough in reading it; for there are very few chapters in which he does not make some digression to speak of himself, and there are even entire chapters in which he speaks only of himself. But if he composed his book to paint himself therein, he had it printed so that it might be read. He therefore wished that men should look at him and occupy themselves with him, although he says that it is not reasonable that one employ one’s leisure on so frivolous and so vain a subject. These words only condemn him; for if he had believed that it was not reasonable that one employ one’s time reading his book, he would have acted himself against common sense in having it printed. Thus one is obliged to believe either that he did not say what he thought, or that he did not do what he should.

It is also a pleasant excuse for his vanity to say that he wrote only for his relatives and friends; for if that had been so, why did he have three editions made? Was not one enough for his relatives and friends? Whence comes it also that he augmented his book in the last editions he had made, and that he never retrenched anything from it, if not that fortune seconded his intentions? “I add,” he says, “but I do not correct, because he who has mortgaged his work to the world, I find it reasonable that he has no further right to it. Let him say if he can better elsewhere, and not corrupt the work he has sold. From such people one should buy nothing except after their death, let them think well before producing themselves. Who hastens them? My book is always one,” etc. [34]. He therefore wished to produce himself and mortgage his work to the world as well as to his relatives and friends. But his vanity would always be criminal enough even if he had only turned and arrested the mind and heart of his relatives and friends toward his portrait for as much time as it takes to read his book.

If it is a defect to speak often of oneself, it is effrontery or rather a kind of folly to praise oneself at every moment as Montaigne does: for it is not only to sin against Christian humility, but it is also to shock reason.

Men are made to live together and to form bodies and civil societies. But one must note that all the individuals who compose societies do not wish to be regarded as the last part of the body of which they are. Thus, those who praise themselves, placing themselves above others, regarding them as the last parts of their society, and considering themselves as the principal and most honorable, they necessarily render themselves odious to everyone instead of making themselves loved and esteemed.

It is therefore a vanity, and an indiscreet and ridiculous vanity, in Montaigne to speak advantageously of himself at every moment, but it is a vanity still more extravagant in this author to describe his defects; for if one takes heed, one will see that he hardly discovers any defects but those of which one boasts in the world because of the corruption of the age; that he willingly attributes to himself those that can make him pass for a strong mind or give him the cavalier air; and so that by this simulated frankness of confession of his disorders one may more willingly believe him when he speaks to his advantage. He is right to say that praising and despising oneself often arise from the same air of arrogance [35].

It is always a certain mark that one is full of oneself; and Montaigne seems to me still prouder and vainer when he blames himself than when he praises himself, because it is an insupportable pride to draw vanity from one’s defects instead of humiliating oneself for them. I prefer a man who hides his crimes with shame to another who publishes them with effrontery; and it seems to me that one should have some horror of the cavalier and little Christian manner in which Montaigne represents his defects. But let us examine the other qualities of his mind.

If we believe Montaigne on his word, we will persuade ourselves that he was a man of no retention; that he had no storehouse; that memory failed him entirely [36]; but that he did not lack sense and judgment. However if we believe the very portrait he made of his mind, I mean his own book, we will not be entirely of his sentiment. “I cannot receive a charge without tablets,” he says, “and when I have a discourse to hold, if it is of long breath, I am reduced to this vile and miserable necessity of learning by heart word for word what I have to say; otherwise I would have neither manner nor assurance, being in fear that my memory might play me a bad trick” [37]. A man who can well learn by heart word for word discourses of long breath, in order to have some manner and assurance, does he lack more memory than judgment? And can one believe Montaigne when he says of himself: “The people who serve me, I must call them by the name of their offices, or their countries. For it is very difficult for me to retain names: and if I were to live long I do not believe I would not forget my own name” [38]. A simple gentleman, who can retain by heart and word for word with assurance discourses of long breath, has he so great a number of officers that he cannot retain their names? A man who was born and raised in the fields, and among farming, who has affairs and a household in hand, and who says that “to neglect what is at our feet, what we have in our hands, what concerns more closely the use of life, is a thing very far from his dogma” [39], can he forget the French names of his domestics? Can he ignore, as he says, “most of our currencies, the difference of one grain from another in the earth and in the granary, if it is not too apparent, the most elementary principles of agriculture that children know, what leaven serves for in making bread, and what it is to let wine ferment” [40], and however have a mind full of the names of ancient philosophers, and of their principles, of Plato’s ideas, of Epicurus’s atoms, of the plenum and vacuum of Leucippus and Democritus, of Thales’s water, of Anaximander’s infinity of nature, of Diogenes’s air, of Pythagoras’s numbers and symmetry, of Parmenides’s infinite, of Musaeus’s One, of Apollodorus’s water and fire, of Anaxagoras’s similar parts, of Empedocles’s discord and friendship, of Heraclitus’s fire, etc. [41]? A man who in three or four pages of his book reports more than fifty names of different authors with their opinions; who has filled all his work with historical anecdotes and apophthegms heaped without order; who says that history and poetry are his game in matters of books; who contradicts himself at every moment and in the same chapter, even when he speaks of things he claims to know best, I mean when he speaks of the qualities of his mind, should he pride himself on having more judgment than memory?

Let us therefore avow that Montaigne was excellent in forgetting, since Montaigne assures us of it, that he wishes us to have this sentiment of him, and that finally this is not entirely contrary to truth. But let us not persuade ourselves on his word, or by the praises he gives himself, that he was a man of great sense, and of an altogether extraordinary penetration of mind. That could throw us into error, and give too much credit to the false and dangerous opinions he utters with a pride and dominant boldness that only dulls and dazzles weak minds.

The other praise given to Montaigne is that he had a perfect knowledge of the human mind; that he penetrated its depth, its nature, its properties; that he knew its strength and weakness, in a word all that one can know of it. Let us see if he well deserves these praises, and whence it comes that one is so liberal toward him.

Those who have read Montaigne know well enough that this author affected to pass for a Pyrrhonian and that he boasted of doubting everything. “The persuasion of certainty,” he says, “is a certain testimony of folly and extreme uncertainty; and there are no people more foolish and less philosophical than Plato’s philodoxes.” On the contrary, he gives so many praises to the Pyrrhonians in the same chapter, that it is not possible that he was not of this sect: it was necessary in his time, to pass for skillful and for a gentleman, to doubt everything; and the quality of strong mind of which he prided himself engaged him still more in his opinions. Thus, supposing him an academician, one could all at once convict him of being the most ignorant of all men, not only in what concerns the nature of the mind, but even in all other things. For since there is an essential difference between knowing and doubting; if the academicians say what they think, when they assert that they know nothing, one can say that they are the most ignorant of all men.

But they are not only the most ignorant of all men, they are also the defenders of the least reasonable opinions. For not only do they reject everything that is most certain and most universally received, to pass for strong minds; but by the same turn of imagination, they take pleasure in speaking in a decisive manner of the most uncertain and least probable things. Montaigne is visibly struck by this disease of the mind; and one must necessarily say that not only did he ignore the nature of the human mind, but even that he was in very gross errors on this subject: supposing that he told us what he thought of it, as he should have done.

For what can one say of a man who confuses mind with matter; who reports the most extravagant opinions of philosophers on the nature of the soul without despising them, and even with an air that makes it quite clear that he approves more those most opposed to reason; who does not see the necessity of the immortality of our souls; who thinks that human reason cannot recognize it, and who regards the proofs given of it as dreams that desire gives birth to in us: “Somnia non docentis sed optantis” (Dreams not of one teaching but of one wishing); who finds fault with men for separating themselves from the crowd of other creatures, and distinguishing themselves from beasts, which he calls “our brothers and companions” [43], which he believes speak, understand each other, and mock us, just as we speak, understand each other, and mock them; who puts more difference from one man to another man than from a man to a beast; who gives even to spiders deliberation, thought and conclusion; and who after having maintained that the disposition of man’s body has no advantage over that of beasts, willingly accepts this sentiment: “that it is not by reason, by discourse and by the soul that we excel over beasts, but by our beauty, our fair complexion, and our fine disposition of members, for which we must put our intelligence, our prudence and all the rest aside,” etc.? Can one say that a man who uses the most bizarre opinions to conclude that it is not by true discourse but by pride and obstinacy that we prefer ourselves to other animals, had a very exact knowledge of the human mind, and does one think to persuade others of it?

But one must do justice to everyone, and say in good faith what was the character of Montaigne’s mind. He had little memory, even less judgment, it is true; but these two qualities do not together make what is ordinarily called in the world beauty of mind. It is beauty, vivacity and extent of imagination that make one pass for a fine mind. Common men esteem brilliance, and not solidity; because one loves more what touches the senses, than what instructs reason. Thus taking beauty of imagination for beauty of mind, one can say that Montaigne had a beautiful and even extraordinary mind. His ideas are false, but beautiful; his expressions irregular or bold, but agreeable; his discourses poorly reasoned, but well imagined. One sees throughout his book a character of original that pleases infinitely: as much a copyist as he is, he does not smell of his copyist; and his strong and bold imagination always gives the turn of original to the things he copies. He has finally what is necessary to please and to impose; and I think I have sufficiently shown that it is not by convincing reason that he makes himself admired by so many people, but by turning their minds to his advantage by the always victorious vivacity of his dominant imagination.