Montaigne opens with the Gregorian reform: France shortened the year by ten days and called it moving heaven and earth, yet his neighbours still sowed and reaped on the old seasons. So gross, obscure, and obtuse is our perception that grand official change often leaves ordinary life untouched, and we still cannot agree how other nations measure years.
Human reason, he says, prefers finding causes to ascertaining truth. We slip over presuppositions, love to be gulled, and build public errors hand to hand until the remotest witness seems best informed. He himself, though he hates lying, swells and puffs his subject when opposed, then surrenders plainly to whoever asks the bare truth. The multitude of fools becomes the best test of truth, which is a miserable pass.
Miracles abort yet teach us how rumour would have grown; a village imposture with three silly actors nearly became a sect before fortune failed it. While we hunt weighty causes, the true ones escape by littleness. Montaigne has never seen a greater monster or miracle than himself; familiarity does not make self-knowledge easier.
Great abuses come from being taught to fear professing ignorance. Rome said even eyewitnesses spoke with it seems to me; Montaigne loves peradventure, in some sort, and some, and would train children to inquire rather than decree. Whoever will be cured of ignorance must confess it. He examined alleged witches carefully and would rather have prescribed hellebore than hemlock, while refusing to trust supernatural proofs without supernatural warrant.
He ends by mocking his own reason, which can prove anything, even a proverb about lame mistresses and old medical jokes about sedentary weavers. Torquato Tasso and Suetonius draw opposite conclusions from the same fact; Carneades and the Cynic show that the mind fits every foot like Theramenes' shoe. Admitting ignorance is not weakness here; it is the only guard against a world that punishes doubt and pays for certainty with blood.
Coming Up in Chapter 106
After cripples and skeptical humility, Montaigne opens on physiognomy. Almost all our opinions are taken on authority and trust, and Socrates will appear in the plain speech of carters and cobblers Montaigne opens by admitting that almost all our opinions come on authority and trust, which is not always bad in a weak age, yet it blinds us to simple wisdom. We praise only.
