Montaigne's final essay begins with desire for knowledge. We try every road to truth; where reason fails we use experience, a weaker and cheaper guide, yet truth is too great to disdain any mediation. Reason and experience both multiply forms, and there is no quality so universal in things as diversity and variety.
Examples cascade: eggs differ though we call them alike, cards can be marked though polished, and judgment from comparison is always unsure because events are unlike. He prefers a well-ordered head and would rather understand himself in himself than in Cicero. Of the experience he has of himself he finds enough to make him wise, if he were but a good scholar.
Custom, medicine, and pleasure occupy the long middle. He weighs laws, conscience, pain, and the stories physicians tell; he distrusts elaborate proofs when life offers daily experiments. We punish the hand that offended, argue over stones and bodies, and let opinion run where sensation should suffice. Cheerfulness and ordinary contentment matter more than doctrinal display.
Age, gout, and death draw the essay homeward. Death undermines life little by little; he has willingly suffered himself to be carried away by the common stream, and he sees no reason to quarrel with natural seasons. Philosophy makes men meditate on death, yet he holds life should be lived for itself, not only as preparation for ending.
He returns to orchard walks and solitude, praising actions nature made pleasurable as well as necessary. Books, travel, and rank matter less than how a man bears his own condition from day to day. Experience teaches him to take things as they come, neither inflating nor fleeing the ordinary.
The book closes on a prayer, not a system. He asks Apollo for health of mind and body, honourable old age, and music at the end: enjoy what he has while sound, without a dishonorable senility. After three books of self-portraiture, the last word is modest continuance, letting experience, not performance, finish the account.
