Don't Judge by Your Own Limits — The Essays of Montaigne

Montaigne opens with the ease of belief in simple souls, then turns on his younger self, who mocked ghosts, prophecies, and miracles. He now sees that to condemn as false whatever exceeds our understanding is to limit God and nature by our own small capacity.

What we call monstrous is often only unfamiliar; custom, not knowledge, makes the strange look ordinary. He urges reverence before the impossible and unusual, citing Plutarch, Caesar, and Augustine without surrendering judgment entirely.

Even schoolboys now lecture Pliny; wholesale disbelief is as arrogant as wholesale credulity. Montaigne ends warning Catholics who yield articles of faith for tactical moderation, and names glory and curiosity as scourges that drive us to pronounce on what we cannot know.