Two or three years ago they made the year ten days shorter in France, and called it moving heaven and earth at once. Montaigne's neighbours still sow and reap, and keep the hurtful and propitious days, at the hours they had assigned time out of mind. There was no more error in the old use than amendment in the new: so gross, obscure, and obtuse is our perception. Human reason, he says, more willingly studies causes than truth. Men ask how a thing is done when they should ask whether it is done at all, and reason builds as well in the air as on the earth. Truth and lies are faced alike; we offer ourselves to be gulled. The particular error makes the public one, then the public error makes the particular, until the remotest witness knows more than those nearest, and the last informed is better persuaded than the first.
Montaigne, who makes a great conscience of lying, still swells and puffs his subject when heated by opposition, then surrenders the bare truth to whoever asks. A gouty prince travelled to a priest who cured by words; imagination laid the prince's legs asleep for some hours. In a village two leagues from his house, a young fellow counterfeited a spirit for sport, pulled in a country girl and a third of the same understanding, hid under the church altar, and nearly founded a sect before fortune failed them. He has never seen a greater monster or miracle than himself. Great abuses are begotten by fear of professing ignorance. At Rome even an eyewitness spoke in the form it seems to me. Whoever will be cured of ignorance must confess it.
He read Corras's trial of two men who presented themselves the one for the other, and thought the hanging sentence very bold. The witches of his neighbourhood run the hazard of their lives upon every new author. He is not to be cuffed into belief: two men lying is more natural than one flying east to west on a broomstaff. A sovereign prince showed him ten or twelve prisoners, including an old woman famous as a witch; he examined them at length and would rather have prescribed hellebore than hemlock. After all, it is setting a man's conjectures at a very high price to cause a man to be roasted alive.
He warrants no certainty in his talk but that it was what he had then in his thought. An Italian proverb says he knows not Venus in her perfect sweetness who has never lain with a lame mistress; he can invent medical reasons, then admits the proverb once made him believe the pleasure. Torquato Tasso and Suetonius draw opposite conclusions from the same fact of riding. Understanding is the shoe of Theramenes, fit for all feet. Carneades, says Clitomachus, outdid Hercules by eradicating consent. Aesop, set to sale with two slaves who promised they could do everything, said he could do nothing, for the other two had taken up all. The pride that attributes all capacity to the mind creates the opposite extreme, that it is capable of nothing. Man is immoderate throughout, and can never stop but of necessity.
Coming Up in Chapter 106
Almost all our opinions, Montaigne says, come on authority and trust, and in a weak age that may be safer than choosing for ourselves. We will miss Socrates' plain talk, drawn from carters, cobblers, and masons, because we praise only what is puffed out by art.
