What Makes Us Different Makes Us Human — The Essays of Montaigne

Two days ago Montaigne saw a fourteen-month child that two men and a nurse, who said they were the father, the uncle, and the aunt of it, carried about to get money by showing it, by reason it was so strange a creature. As to all the rest it was of a common form: it could stand upon its feet, go, and gabble much like other children of the same age, and had never taken any nourishment but from the nurse's breasts. Under the breast it was joined to another child without a head, as if a lesser child sought to throw its arms about the neck of one something bigger. The nurse said it urined at both bodies, and that the imperfect members were nourished, sensible, and in the same plight with that she gave suck to, only shorter and less.

This double body and several limbs relating to one head might be interpreted a favourable prognostic to the king of maintaining the various parts of the state under the union of his laws. Montaigne will not run that reading. Lest the event should prove otherwise, it is better to let it alone, for in things already past there needs no divination. Epimenides, he says, always prophesied backward. He has just seen a herdsman in Medoc, of about thirty years of age, who has no sign of any genital parts, three holes by which he incessantly voids his water. He is bearded, has desire, and seeks contact with women.

Those that we call monsters are not so to God, who sees in the immensity of His work the infinite forms that He has comprehended therein. This figure which astonishes us has relation to some other figure of the same kind unknown to man. From His all wisdom nothing but good, common, and regular proceeds, but we do not discern the disposition and relation. What a man often sees he does not admire, though he be ignorant how it comes to pass. When a thing happens he never saw before, he thinks it is a portent. Whatever falls out contrary to custom we say is contrary to nature, but nothing, whatever it be, is contrary to her. Universal and natural reason is left to expel the error and astonishment that novelty brings along with it.