Montaigne's last essay opens on a desire so ordinary it hardly looks like a method. There is no desire more natural than that of knowledge. We try every road that can lead us to it. Where reason is wanting he employs experience, a weaker and cheaper guide, yet truth is too great to disdain any mediation. Reason has so many forms that we do not know which to take. Experience has no fewer. The consequence drawn from comparing events is unsure, because events are always unlike. There is no quality so universal in this image of things as diversity and variety. Greeks, Latins, and we take eggs for the express example of similitude, and still a man at Delphos could tell which hen had laid which egg. Perrozet cannot polish and blanch the backs of his cards so carefully that gamesters will not distinguish them in a shuffle. Resemblance does not so much make one as difference makes another. Nature has obliged herself to make nothing that was not unlike. That is why he is not pleased with the man who thought a multitude of laws would curb judges by cutting out their parcels. There is as much liberty in interpretation as in form. France has more laws than all the rest of the world put together, more than would govern all the worlds of Epicurus, and has still left so much to the opinions of judges that there was never so full a liberty. A hundred thousand particular cases and a hundred thousand laws still cannot tally with the infinite diversity of human actions. The most desirable laws are the rarest, simplest, and most general. He would rather have none at all than this prodigious number. Some mountain people take the first passer-by for their only judge. Others, on market day, choose someone on the spot. For every foot its own shoe. King Ferdinand, sending colonies to the Indies, kept students of jurisprudence at home, fearing suits would take footing in that new world. Plato called lawyers and physicians bad institutions of a country. Children press a mass of quicksilver into parts and only irritate the metal into more bodies. So, in subdividing subtilties, we teach men to increase their doubts. The hundredth commentator passes the book on still more knotty than he found it. Aesop's dogs drink the sea to reach a floating body and choke. There is more ado to interpret interpretations than to interpret things. Every place swarms with commentaries; of authors there is great scarcity. Country people run from a wounded man in Montaigne's own forest, lest officers of justice ruin them for having been found near a murdered person. In his time, judges hang the first accused after others confess the same murder, because the sentence is already passed and they will not reverse it. Philip can repay a fine from his own purse. These men are irreparably hanged. In China the prince's officers reward those who have done better than the common sort, not only punish those who have done ill. No judge has yet spoken to him in the quality of a judge. If the laws under which he lives should shake a finger at him, he would go seek others. The laws keep their credit not for being just but because they are laws. What fruit we extract from foreign examples will little advantage us if we make so little profit of our own. He studies himself more than any other subject. It is his metaphysic and his physic. In this universality he suffers himself to be ignorantly and negligently led by the general law of the world. His learning cannot make it alter its course. The most simply to commit one's self to nature is to do it most wisely. What a soft, easy, and wholesome pillow is ignorance and incuriosity, whereon to repose a well-ordered head. He would rather understand himself well 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.
Whoever will call to mind the excess of his past anger will see the deformity of that passion better than in Aristotle. The life of Caesar has no greater example for us than our own. Whoever remembers how many times he has been mistaken in his own judgment is a great fool if he does not ever after suspect it. When another man's reason convinces Montaigne of a false opinion, he does not so much learn the new particular as the treachery of his understanding, and from that he extracts a reformation of the whole mass. He regards not the species and individual as a stone he has stumbled at. He learns to suspect his steps throughout. To learn that a man has said a foolish thing is nothing. A man must learn that he is nothing but a fool. Memory swears and assures him. He shakes his ears. The first opposition puts him into suspense. Judgment holds in him a magisterial seat. It leaves his appetites to take their own course and plays its game apart. The god of wisdom caused know themselves to be written on the front of his temple. Plato says prudence is no other thing than the execution of that ordinance. Affirmation and obstinacy are express signs of want of wit. It is by his own experience that he accuses human ignorance, the surest part of the world's school. That long attention he employs in considering himself also fits him to judge others. He has astonished friends with the pertinence of his description. Asked what he should have been fit for, he said for nothing, yet he would have told the truth to his master, not by scholastic lessons but as an eye-witness, one nameless office limited to one person, requiring the fidelity of silence. All this hodge-podge he scribbles is a register of the essays of his own life. As to bodily health, no man can furnish out more profitable experience, presented pure and no way corrupted by art. Experience is properly upon its own dunghill in physic, where reason wholly gives it place. Tiberius said whoever had lived twenty years ought to be responsible to himself for what was hurtful or wholesome. Socrates, advising his disciples to be solicitous of their health, added that a man of sense, having a care to exercise and diet, should know better than any physician what was good or ill for him. Plato said a right physician should first have passed through all the diseases he pretends to cure. They make such a description of our maladies as a town crier does of a lost horse or dog: such a colour, such a height, such an ear. Bring it to him and he knows it not. Those who make profession of these arts sell medicinal drugs. That they are physicians, a man cannot say. Montaigne has lived long enough to give an account of the custom that has carried him so far. His form of life is the same in sickness as in health: the same bed, the same hours, the same meat, even the same drink. He adds nothing but the moderation of more or less. Sickness puts him off on one side. If he will be ruled by the physicians, they will put him off on the other. Custom is the potion of Circe, that varies our nature as she best pleases. A German at Augsburg finds fault with French hearths by the same arguments the French use against German stoves, and pities him for the heaviness of head chimneys elsewhere will bring. He no more disbelieves a man's mouth than his pen. He as often quotes a friend as Aulus Gellius or Macrobius. A gentleman has ridden from Madrid to Lisbon in the heat of summer without any drink at all. A learned man in France studies in a corner of a hall, a rabble of servants about him, and, like Seneca, makes an advantage of the hubbub. Being a student at Padua, that man had his study amid the rattle of coaches until he formed himself to the use of noise. Montaigne is quite otherwise. He has a tender head and easily discomposed. When it is bent upon anything, the least buzzing of a fly murders it.
He records the fouler offices of nature as he records the rest: a punctual assignation at leaping out of bed, not to be interrupted. Sick men cannot better place themselves than in sitting still in the course of life wherein they have been bred. Change, be it what it will, disturbs. Speaking is half his who speaks and half his who hears. As with tennis-players, he who receives the ball shifts according as he sees him move who strikes. Experience has taught him this: we ruin ourselves by impatience. Evils have their life and limits, their diseases and their recovery. The constitution of maladies is formed by the pattern of animals. He who attempts imperiously to cut them short in the middle of their course lengthens and multiplies them. He is of Crantor's opinion: neither obstinately oppose evils nor succumb from want of courage, but give way according to their condition and our own. Let us a little permit Nature to take her own way. How many have not escaped dying who have had three physicians at their tails? He has suffered colds, gouty defluxions, palpitations, and megrims to grow old and die a natural death. They are sooner prevailed upon by courtesy than huffing. The Mexicans salute a newborn: thou art come into the world, child, to endure; endure, suffer, and say nothing. Others, with greater kindness than his pain was sharp, present him half of theirs. They pay a thousand vows to Aesculapius and as many crowns to their physicians for the voiding of a little gravel, which he often does by the aid of nature, without disturbing the decorum of his countenance. The fear of this disease, says his mind, formerly affrighted him when it was unknown. It is an infirmity that punishes the members by which he has most offended. He is a conscientious fellow. Ovid says we are entitled to complain of a punishment we have not deserved. This chastisement, the voice continues, is very easy in comparison of others, inflicted with a paternal tenderness, late, seizing only that part of life which is already sterile and lost. Since he has been troubled with the stone, he finds himself freed from all other accidents, and has never had any fever since. He argues that the vomitings purge him and that nature, with those stones, voids whatever is superfluous. When he has the stone he looks upon it as physic. When free from it, as an absolute deliverance. If physicians do no other good, they do this at least: they prepare patients betimes for death, by little and little undermining and cutting off the use of life. Both well and sick, he has ever willingly suffered himself to obey the appetites that pressed upon him. He does not love to cure one disease by another. To be subject to the colic and subject to abstain from eating oysters are two evils instead of one. Since we are ever in danger of mistaking, let us rather run the hazard of a mistake after we have had the pleasure. The world thinks nothing profitable that is not painful. Whatever he takes against his liking does him harm. Nothing hurts him that he eats with appetite and delight. He usually eats salt meats, yet prefers bread that has no salt in it. In infancy they had most to correct in him the refusal of sugar, sweetmeats, and march-panes. Whoever cures a child of an obstinate liking for brown bread, bacon, or garlic, cures him also of pampering his palate. Some affect temperance and plainness by wishing for beef and ham amongst the partridges. That is the delicacy of the delicate, the taste of an effeminate fortune that disrelishes ordinary things.
Death mixes and confounds itself throughout with life. Decay anticipates its hour and shoulders itself even into the course of our advance. He has portraits of himself taken at five-and-twenty and five-and-thirty years of age. He compares them with that lately drawn: how many times is it no longer he; how much more is his present image unlike the former than unlike his dying one. It is too much to abuse nature, to make her trot so far that she must leave eyes, teeth, and legs to the mercy of a foreign countenance. He is not excessively fond of salads or fruits, except melons. His father hated all sorts of sauces. He loves them all. At the age of fifty-four he is still ignorant of the use of spectacles, and can see as far as ever he did. In the evening a little weakness finds him if he reads. Here is one step back, and a very manifest one. He shall retire another, from the second to the third, and so to the fourth, so gently that he shall be stark blind before he shall be sensible of the decay of his sight. So artificially do the Fatal Sisters untwist our lives. He doubts whether his hearing begins to grow thick, and will have half lost it when he still lays the fault on the voices of those who speak to him. A man must screw up his soul to a high pitch to make it sensible how it ebbs away. Aristippus maintained nothing but the body, as if we had no soul. Zeno comprehended only the soul, as if we had no body. Both of them faultily. The true temperament is found in Socrates. When he dances, he dances. When he sleeps, he sleeps. Nay, when he walks alone in a beautiful orchard, if his thoughts are some part of the time taken up with external occurrences, he some part of the time calls them back again to his walk, to the orchard, to the sweetness of that solitude, and to himself. Nature has mother-like observed this, that the actions she has enjoined us for our necessity should be also pleasurable to us. She invites us to them not only by reason but also by appetite, and it is injustice to infringe her laws. When he sees Caesar and Alexander, in the midst of their greatest business, so fully enjoy human and corporal pleasures, he does not say that they relaxed the mind. He says they strengthened it, subjecting those violent employments to the ordinary usage of life. We are great fools. He has passed his life in idleness, say we: I have done nothing to-day. What? have you not lived? That is not only the fundamental, but the most illustrious, of your occupations. The life of a fool is thankless, timorous, and wholly bent upon the future. He composes himself to lose his own without regret, as a thing perishable by its condition, not because it molests him. There is good husbandry in enjoying it. He enjoys it double to what others do. In proportion as the possession of life is more short, he must make it so much deeper and fuller. To the end that even sleep should not stupidly escape him, he has formerly caused himself to be disturbed in his sleep, so that he might more sensibly relish it. Intemperance is the pest of pleasure. Temperance is not its scourge, but rather its seasoning. He enjoins his soul to look upon pain and pleasure with an eye equally regulated. Socrates values bodily pleasure as he ought, but prefers that of the mind. Temperance with him is the moderatrix, not the adversary, of pleasure. Nature is a gentle guide, but not more sweet and gentle than prudent and just. Montaigne hunts after her foot throughout. The schools have confounded it with artificial traces. He asks, in Horace's words, that Apollo grant him to enjoy his possessions in good health, that he be sound in mind, that he not lead a dishonourable old age, nor want the cittern. After three books of self-portraiture the last word is still a request, not a system. The prayer does not say whether the music will be there. It only leaves him asking to enjoy what he already has while he is sound.
