Essays of Montaigne

Of philosophical opinions, I preferably embrace those that are most solid, that is to say, the most human and most our own: my discourse is, suitable to my manners, low and humble: philosophy plays the child, to my thinking, when it puts itself upon its Ergos to preach to us that 'tis a barbarous alliance to marry the divine with the earthly, the reasonable with the unreasonable, the severe with the indulgent, the honest with the dishonest. That pleasure is a brutish quality, unworthy to be tasted by a wise man; that the sole pleasure he extracts from the enjoyment of a fair young wife is a pleasure of his conscience to perform an action according to order, as to put on his boots for a profitable journey. Oh, that its followers had no more right, nor nerves, nor vigour in getting their wives' maidenheads than in its lesson.

This is not what Socrates says, who is its master and ours: he values, as he ought, bodily pleasure; but he prefers that of the mind as having more force, constancy, facility, variety, and dignity. This, according to him, goes by no means alone—he is not so fantastic—but only it goes first; 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.

"Intrandum est in rerum naturam, et penitus,

quid ea postulet, pervidendum."

["A man must search into the nature of things, and fully examine

what she requires."—Cicero, De Fin., V. 16.]

I hunt after her foot throughout: we have confounded it with artificial traces; and that academic and peripatetic good, which is "to live according to it," becomes on this account hard to limit and explain; and that of the Stoics, neighbour to it, which is "to consent to nature." Is it not an error to esteem any actions less worthy, because they are necessary? And yet they will not take it out of my head, that it is not a very convenient marriage of pleasure with necessity, with which, says an ancient, the gods always conspire. To what end do we dismember by divorce a building united by so close and brotherly a correspondence? Let us, on the contrary, confirm it by mutual offices; let the mind rouse and quicken the heaviness of the body, and the body stay and fix the levity of the soul:

"Qui, velut summum bonum, laudat animac naturam, et, tanquam malum,

naturam carnis accusat, profectd et animam carnatiter appetit, et

carnem carnaliter fugit; quoniam id vanitate sentit humans, non

veritate divina."

["He who commends the nature of the soul as the supreme good, and

condemns the nature of the flesh as evil, at once both carnally

desires the soul, and carnally flies the flesh, because he feels

thus from human vanity, not from divine truth."

—St. Augustin, De Civit. Dei, xiv. 5.]

In this present that God has made us, there is nothing unworthy our care; we stand accountable for it even to a hair; and is it not a commission to man, to conduct man according to his condition; 'tis express, plain, and the very principal one, and the Creator has seriously and strictly prescribed it to us. Authority has power only to work in regard to matters of common judgment, and is of more weight in a foreign language; therefore let us again charge at it in this place:

"Stultitiae proprium quis non dixerit, ignave et contumaciter

facere, quae facienda sunt; et alio corpus impellere, alio animum;

distrahique inter diversissimos motus?"

["Who will not say, that it is the property of folly, slothfully and

contumaciously to perform what is to be done, and to bend the body

one way and the mind another, and to be distracted betwixt wholly

different motions?"—Seneca, Ep., 74.]