# Ives The Essays of Montaigne/Volume 1/Chapter 23

Chapter Introduction by Grace Norton (1834 – 1926)
CHAPTER XXIII
OF CUSTOM, AND THE INADVISABILITY OF CHANGING AN ESTABLISHED LAW
The examples by which, in opening this Essay, Montaigne attempts to show the power of habit are neither very interesting nor very credible. We must remember that he disclaims responsibility for the facts that he relates, and we find here an odd pell-mell of the true and the false.
We are entertained by little personalities about his “perfumed doublet” and the tower in which he lived and the bell that he heard every day. And, later, the excellent remarks on the education of children are a prelude to those that follow in a subsequent Essay, and include a delightful testimony to the effect of education on Montaigne himself. The last sentence deserves to be written in letters of gold: “In every thing and everywhere my eyes are enough to keep me straight; there are no others which watch me so closely, or which I more respect.”
This is a part of a long passage inserted in 1595, which breaks in upon illustrations, not exactly of the force of habit, but of the power of training; and the essayist then passes on to examples of the odd customs of diverse nations — slipping here from one signification of the word coûtume — custom, habit — to another.
We may, with little loss, skip here several pages, and we then find ourselves at one of the most interesting passages we have yet come to in the Essays: “The laws of the conscience.” But this passage, like many others, is made difficult and confused by being written at different periods, and the parts never properly fused together: it is three overlapping “formations.” The first sentence is of 1595, the next of 1588, the next three of 1580. And the next (whole) page of 1595. It is therefore almost impossible, without long, and one may say imaginative, study of such passages, to follow closely Montaigne’s train of thought; but even a hasty, if not a careless, reading may discover something of the largeness, the freedom, the vitality of his thought, and its force of subtle observation.
From these graver matters Montaigne passes to the consideration of the fantasticalness of custom in dress; but he soon swings back into matters of state, considering the question whether it is of use to change laws that have been established by long custom. The passage is of interest, not only in itself (as a discussion of political principles), but historically, as Montaigne’s view of his own time and its conditions of government.
The last pages of the Essay contain Montaigne’s recognition that in cases of extreme necessity the old laws should give way to new regulations; and he quotes Plutarch’s praise of Philopœmen.
​M. Villey remarks that the many compilers of the sixteenth century took evident pleasure, as Montaigne did, in collecting examples of strange customs; and other contemporary writers, who do not give examples, insist on the force of custom. (See La Boëtie in Le Contr’un.) Many, like Montaigne, hold to the necessity of keeping exactly to the usages of one’s native land. In the Italian authors this is especially a law of social intercourse. In others, particularly in the political writers, it is a rule of intellectual prudence and of political conversation. These two points of view are both found in this Essay.
M. Villey’s résumé of the Essay presents its main outlines in a manner greatly to assist the reader:
“This Essay may be divided into two parts: (1) setting forth the power of custom and the strangeness of its effects; (2) declaring the necessity, in spite of the inanity of our usages, of following them and of avoiding all novelty. On one side, as on the other, Montaigne expresses ideas familiar to his contemporaries, and in 1580 he does so by means of examples that are frequently met with in the writings of the time. He only adds to these some facts borrowed from Plutarch’s Lives, which was then his habitual reading. He is here seen to be penetrated by the feeling of relativity, and beginning to formulate his political and religious conservatism. In 1588 both parts have been considerably developed, the first by a great number of illustrations borrowed from Lopez de Gomara, the second extended by very personal developments that would seem to be inspired by the civil troubles. In 1595 both parts receive again numerous and very important additions, which prove how great Montaigne’s interest continued to be in the questions he had here treated of. Herodotus, and works on the expeditions of the Portuguese to the Indies, furnished him with new customs; but especially Montaigne adds some very rich developments, many of which are directly derived from his personal experiences, while others come from abundant reading of ancient authors, as Pliny, Livy, etc., but principally from Cicero, whose conservatism singularly charmed Montaigne.”
THAT man seems to me to have had a just conception of the power of habit who first invented this tale: that a village woman, having been wont to fondle a calf and carry him in her arms from the moment of his birth, continuing always to do so, gained such power by habit, that she still carried him when he was a full-grown ox. For habit is truly a violent and deceitful school-mistress. Little by little, and stealthily, she establishes within us the footing of her authority; but having, by this mild and humble beginning, stayed and rooted it with the ​aid of time, she then displays a fierce and tyrannical countenance, in opposition to which we no longer have liberty even to lift up our eyes. We see her do violence constantly to the laws of nature. (c) Usus efficacissimus rerum omnium magister. (a) I believe, about this, (c) Plato’s cavern in his “Republic,” and I believe (c) the physicians who so often relinquish to her authority the logic of their art; and that king who, by her means, trained his stomach to feed on poison; and the girl who, as Albert tells, was wont to feed on spiders. (c) And in this new world of the Indies there were prosperous races, and in very different climates, who lived on them, and laid in supplies of them, and fed them; and the same with grasshoppers, ants, lizards, bats; and a toad was sold for ten crowns when provisions were scarce. They cook them and dress them with different sauces. There were found there other peoples, to whom our meats and viands were poisonous and fatal. (c) Consuetudinis magna vis est. Pernoctant venatores in nive; in montibus uri se patiuntur. Pugiles cœstibus contusi ne ingemiscunt quidem.
These foreign examples are not foreign to our comprehension, if we consider — a common experience — how accustomedness dulls our senses. We need not go in search of what is said about those who live near the cataracts of the Nile; and what the philosophers think about celestial music, that the bodies in those spheres, being solid and polished, and slipping and rubbing against one another as they revolve, can not fail to produce harmonies by whose ​divisions and variations the evolutions and changes in the dances of the stars are guided; but, as elsewhere in the universe, the ears of the beings of that region, benumbed, like those of the Egyptians, by the continuance of the sound, can not hear it, loud as it may be. Blacksmiths, millers, armourers, could not hold out against the noise that beats upon their ears, if they were dazed by it as we are. My perfumed doublet is perceptible to my nose; but after I have worn it three successive days, it is perceived only by the noses of others. This [other fact] is even stranger — that, notwithstanding long intervals and breaks, accustomedness can span the gap and render permanent the effect of the impression on our senses, as they find who live near church-towers. I sleep at home in a tower in which every day, in the morning and evening, a very large bell rings for the Ave Maria. The racket amazes my whole tower, and whereas, when I am first there, it seems intolerable to me, in a short time it becomes so familiar that I hear it without annoyance, and often without waking.
Plato reproved a child who was gambling for nuts. The child answered: “You reprove me for a small matter.” “Habit,” Plato replied, “is not a small matter.” I find that our greatest vices are contracted in our earliest childhood, and that our chief guidance lies in the hands of our nurses. It is a pastime for a mother to see a child wring a chicken’s neck, and amuse himself by hurting a dog or a cat; and a father may be foolish enough to take it for a good omen of a valorous spirit when he sees his son insulting by a blow a peasant or a servant who does not defend himself; and for a pretty wit when he sees him cheat his comrade by some crafty falsehood and fraud. These are, however, the true seeds and roots of cruelty and of tyranny and of treachery. They sprout there, and afterward grow lustily and greatly thrive at the hands of custom. And it is a very dangerous education to excuse such base tendencies by the feebleness of childhood and the trivial nature of the subject. Firstly, it is Nature who speaks, whose voice is purer and more pierc​ing, as it is shriller. Secondly, the ugliness of deceit does not consist in the difference between crowns and pins: it exists in itself. I find it much truer to argue thus: “Why would he not cheat about crowns, since he cheats about pins?” than, as they do: “It is only about pins; he would be careful not to do so about crowns.” We must sedulously teach children to hate vices for their own texture, and must teach them their natural monstrosity, so that they may shun them, not in their actions only, but, above all, in their hearts; that the mere thought of them may be hateful, whatever mask they wear. I know well that, from having been taught in boyhood to follow always my broad, straight road, and from having always had a repugnance to mingle trickery or cunning in my childish games (indeed, it should be noted that the games of children are not games, and must be judged as their most serious acts), there is no pastime so trivial that I do not bring to it inwardly, and by a natural and unstudied propensity, an extreme aversion to deceit. I play cards for doubles, and keep count as carefully as if they were double doubloons, when gaining or losing against my wife and daughter is a matter of indifference to me, as when I am playing in earnest. In every thing and everywhere my eyes are enough to keep me straight; there are no others which watch me so closely or which I more respect.
(a) I have just seen at my house a little man, a native of Nantes, who was born without arms and who has so well trained his feet for the service which hands ought to perform, that they have in truth half forgotten their natural office. Furthermore, he calls them his hands; he carves, loads a pistol and fires it, threads his needle, sews, writes, takes off his cap, combs his hair, plays at cards and with dice, and handles them as dexterously as anybody else could do. The money that I gave him (for he earned his living by exhibiting himself) he carried away in his foot as we ​do in our hand. I saw another who lost his arms when a child, who wielded a two-handed sword and a halberd in the bend of the neck, for lack of hands, threw them in the air and caught them, cast a dagger, and cracked a whip as well as any carter in France.
But we discern her effects much better in the strange impressions she makes on our minds, where she does not find so much resistance. What is impossible to her regarding our judgements and our beliefs? Is there any opinion so fantastical (I leave out of account the gross imposture of religious belief wherewith so many great nations and so many able personages are seen to be bewildered; for that matter being outside of our human reasonings, it is more excusable for him who is not extraordinarily enlightened by divine favour to lose himself therein) — but of other opinions are there any so strange which she has not planted and established by law in the countries where it has seemed to her well to do so? (c) And that ancient exclamation is very true: Non pudet physicum, id est speculatorem venatoremque naturæ, ab animis consuetudine imbutis quærere testimonium veritatis. (b) I believe that no fancy, however extravagant, ever comes into the human imagination, which does not find example in some public custom, and which consequently our reason does not prop up and support. There are peoples who turn the back on the person saluted, and never look at one to whom they desire to do honour. There are other nations where, when the king spits, the greatest favourite among the women of his court holds out her hand; and in still another the most eminent of those about his person stoop to take up his dirt in a cloth.
(c) Let me find room here for an anecdote. A certain French gentleman always blew his nose with his hand (a ​thing altogether contrary to our custom). Defending this action of his, — and he was famous for keen sayings, — he asked me what distinction that dirty excrement had, that we should provide a fine piece of delicate linen to receive it in, and then, what is more, fold it up and carry it about with us; that that would seem naturally to cause us more disgust and sicken us more than to see it dropped here or there, as we do our other excrements. I found what he said not at all unreasonable; and that habit had prevented my marking this strange act, which, however, we find so odious when it is told of another country. Miracles exist from our ignorance of nature, not in nature herself. Habituation closes the eyes of our judgement. Barbarians are in no wise more astonishing to us than we are to them, nor with more reason, as every one would admit if every one, after having gone through these unfamiliar examples, would consider his own, and compare them judiciously. Our human reason is a dye, infinite in quality, infinite in variety, infused in almost equal degree in all our opinions and manners, of whatever form they may be.
I resume. There are nations (b) where no one save his wife and children speaks to the king except through a speaking-trumpet. In another, the maidens go with their private parts uncovered, while the married women carefully cover and conceal theirs; to which this other custom, found elsewhere, bears some relation: chastity is valued only for the behoof of the marriage tie, for unmarried women can abandon themselves at their pleasure, and, being with child, can cause themselves to abort by taking the proper drugs, in every one’s sight. And elsewhere, if it be a merchant who marries, all the merchants invited to the wedding lie with the bride before he does, and the more of them there are, the more she acquires of honour, and of reputation for endurance and capacity. If a man holding public office marries, the same rule applies; so, if it be a noble; and the same with others, unless it be a labouring man or any one of the common people; for in that case it is the lord’s prerogative; and yet, in that country, they do not fail to enjoin strict fidelity during wedlock. There are other [peoples] where there ​are public brothels for males, and, actually, marriages; where the women go to war along with their husbands, and have their place, not in battle only, but also in command; where not only are rings worn in the nose, the lips, the cheeks, and the big toe, but rods of gold, very heavy, are thrust through the breasts and the buttocks; where, while eating, they wipe their fingers on their thighs, their private parts, and the soles of their feet; where children do not inherit, but brothers and nephews, and elsewhere nephews alone, except in succession to the prince; where, in order to regulate the community of goods which is customary there, certain magistrates with sovereign power have entire charge of the cultivation of the land and of the distribution of crops according to each one’s need; where they weep over the deaths of children and make rejoicing over those of old men; where they lie ten or twelve in a bed with their wives; where women who lose their husbands by a violent death may remarry, but not others; where they think so ill of the condition of women that they kill all the female children who are born there, and buy from their neighbours women for breeding; where husbands can repudiate [their wives] without cause, but not wives [their husbands] for any cause whatsoever; where husbands can lawfully sell their wives if they be sterile; where they have the body of the dead boiled and then pounded until it is like a broth, which they mix with their wine, and drink; where the most desirable sepulture is to be eaten by dogs, elsewhere by birds; where they believe that the souls of the blessed live in perfect freedom, in delightful fields, supplied with all pleasures, and that it is they who make the echo we hear; where they fight in water, and discharge their arrows with sure aim while swimming; where, in token of submission, a man must raise his shoulders and hang his head, and remove his shoes when he enters the king’s palace; where the eunuchs who have the nuns in their charge lack nose and lips as well, so that they cannot be loved, and the priests put out their own eyes in order to become acquainted with the demons and to receive oracles; where every one makes a god of whatever he ​chooses, — the hunter, of a lion or fox, the fisherman, of certain fish, — and idols of every human action or passion: the sun, the moon, and the earth are the chief gods; the manner of making oath is to touch the ground while looking at the sun; and they eat flesh and fish raw. (c) Where the most binding oath is to swear by the name of some dead man who bore a good reputation in the country, placing the hand on his tomb; where the annual gift that the king sends to the princes his vassals is fire; when the ambassador who brings it arrives, the old fire is everywhere put out in the house, and all the people are required to come and supply themselves from this new fire, or be adjudged guilty of lèse-majesté; where, when the king, in order to give himself entirely to religion, as they often do, abdicates his sovereignty, his next successor is obliged to do likewise, and the right of kingship passes to the third in succession; where they vary the form of government as circumstances require: they depose the king when it seems well, and substitute for him elders of the state, to take the helm, and sometimes, too, leave it in the hands of the commonalty; where men and women are circumcised, and likewise baptised; where the soldier who, in one or several battles, has succeeded in presenting to his king the heads of seven foes is ennobled. (b) Where men live under the unusual, uncivilised doctrine of the mortality of the soul; where the women lie in without complaint and without fear. (c) Where the women wear copper rings on both legs, and, if a louse bites them, are bound by the duty of courage, to bite back, and dare not marry until they have offered their virginity to the king if he desires it. (b) Where men salute each other by putting the ​finger to the ground, then raising it toward heaven; where the men carry burdens on their heads, the women on their shoulders: the latter make water standing, the men stooping; where they send some of their blood as a symbol of friendship, and burn incense, as to the gods, to the men whom they wish to honour; where kinship not only in the fourth, but in even more distant degrees, is a bar to marriage; where children are kept four years at nurse, and often twelve, and there too it is considered fatal to give a child the breast during the first day; where fathers have the duty of punishing the male children, and mothers, exclusively, the females; and the punishment is to smoke them while they are hung up by the feet; where the women are circumcised; where they eat all sorts of herbs, without other discrimination than that of refusing those which seem to them to have a bad odour; where every thing is open, and the houses, however beautiful and sumptuous they may be, have neither door nor window nor chest that can be locked, and thieves are punished twice as severely as elsewhere; where they kill lice with their teeth, as monkeys do, and think it horrible to see them crushed by the nails; where they never cut either the hair or the nails during life; other places where they cut the nails of the right hand only, those of the left hand being kept long for prettiness. (c) Where they let all the hair on the right side of the body grow as long as it can, and shave the left side clean; and in neighbouring provinces, in one they let the hair grow in front, in the other, behind, and shave the front. (b) Where fathers lend their children, husbands their wives, to be enjoyed by their guests, for pay; where a man can lawfully have children by his mother, and where fathers forgather with their daughters, and mothers with their sons; (c) where, on festal occasions, they lend their children one to another. (a) In one country human flesh is eaten; in another it is a pious duty to kill your father at a certain age; elsewhere, fathers decree, as to their ​still unborn children, which one they wish brought up and preserved, and which they wish to be cast out and killed; elsewhere, aged husbands lend their wives to young men to be used, and elsewhere they are blamelessly common; indeed, in one land they wear as a badge of honour as many rows of fringe on the edge of their garments as they have known men. And has not custom even caused a separate state of women to exist? has she not put arms in their hands, and caused them to train armies and fight battles? And that which reason and all philosophy can not implant in the heads of the wisest men, does not she teach, solely by her decree, to the dullest of the common people? For we know whole regions where death was not only scorned, but welcomed with rejoicing; where children of seven endured to be whipped to death without changing countenance; where riches were held in such scorn that the meanest citizen in the town would not have deigned to stoop to pick up a purse full of gold. And we know places very fruitful in all sorts of provisions where, none the less, the most usual and most delicate dishes were bread, cresses, and water.
(b) Did not custom work even that miracle in Cio, that seven hundred years passed during which there was no remembrance that either maid or wife there had been false to her honour? (a) In fine, to my thinking, there is nothing which she does not do or could not do; and Pindar justly calls her, as I have been told, the Queen and Empress of the world.
(c) The man who was found beating his father declared that it was the custom of his family: that his father had thus beaten his grandfather, and his grandfather his great- grandfather; and, pointing to his son, he said: “He will . beat me when he has reached my present age.” And that father whose son haled him and tugged him through the ​street bade him stop at a certain door, for he himself had dragged his father only so far; that that was the limit of the hereditary humiliating treatment which, in their family, the children were accustomed to inflict on their fathers. From custom, says Aristotle, as often as from sickness, women tear their hair, gnaw their nails, eat coals and earth; and more from custom than from nature, males cohabit with males. The laws of conscience, which we say are engendered by nature, are born of custom; every man, holding in inward veneration the opinions and fashions approved and received around him, can not depart from them without [self] upbraiding, or conform to them without [self] commendation.
(b) When the Cretans, in old days, wished to curse some one, they besought the gods to involve him in some evil custom. (a) But the principal effect of her authority is to seize and grip us in such wise that it is scarcely in our power to. throw off her clutch, and to return into ourselves to reflect and reason about her decrees. In truth, because we suck these in with the milk of our birth, and because the face of the world presents itself in this guise to our earliest vision, we seem born necessarily to follow this course. And the common ideas that we find in credit around us, and infused in our minds by the seed of our fathers, seem to be universal and natural ideas. (c) Whence it it happens that whatever is unhinged from custom, we believe to be unhinged from reason, God knows how unreasonably in most instances. If, as we who study ourselves have learned to do, every one who hears a wise thought should consider instantly how it applies to his own case, he would find that it was not so much an excellent saying as an excellent blow at the usual stupidity of his judgement. But we receive the warnings of truth and its precepts as addressed to the common people, never to ourselves; and every one, instead of applying them ​to his morals, impresses them on his memory, very foolishly and very uselessly.
Let us return to the authority of custom. Peoples brought up in liberty, and to rule themselves, consider every other form of government monstrous and contrary to nature. Those who are accustomed to monarchy think after the same fashion; and whatever facility for change fortune affords them, even when they have with great difficulty rid themselves of the burden of a master, they hasten to install a new one with the like difficulty, because they can not resolve to regard with detestation the being lorded over. It is through the intervention of custom that every one is content with the place where nature has planted him; and the savages of Scotland have no use for Touraine, nor the Scythians for Thessaly.
(a) Darius asked certain Greeks what would induce them to adopt the Indian custom of eating their deceased fathers (for that was their habit, deeming that they could give them no more propitious sepulture than within themselves); they replied that not for any thing in the world would they do it; but [Darius] having also tried to persuade the Indians to lay aside their custom and adopt that of the Greeks, which was to burn their fathers’ bodies, he horrified them even more. Each one of us acts in the same way, inasmuch as habit conceals from us the true aspect of things.
Nil adeo magnum, nec tam mirabile quicquam
Principio, quod non minuant mirarier omnes
Paulatim.
Having occasion once to to show the value of some one of our regulations, accepted with settled authority on all sides of us; not desiring, as is commonly done, to establish it solely ​by the powers of law and example, but harking back to its origin, I found its basis so weak that I was almost out of conceit with it — I who had to assert it to another.
(c) It is by this remedy (which he considers the chief and most potent one) that Plato undertakes to expel the unnatural [and preposterous] passions of his age: namely, that public opinion condemns them; that the poets, that every one speaks ill of them — a remedy by whose operation the fairest daughters no longer arouse the love of their fathers, nor the brothers who most excel in beauty the love of their sisters; the very legends of Thyestes, of Œdipus, and of Macareus having, with the charm of their music, instilled this profitable belief in the tender brains of children. In truth, chastity is an excellent virtue, whose utility is very well known; but to treat of it and show its value by natural conditions is as difficult as it is easy to show its value in custom, laws, and precepts. The fundamental and universal reasons for it are difficult of investigation, and our masters skim lightly over them, or, not daring even to touch them, throw themselves from the first into the sanctuary of custom, where they can strut and triumph easily. Those who do not choose to let themselves be carried away from the original source err even more, and are subjected to uncivilised opinions: witness Chrysippus, who scattered about in so many places in his writings the small importance he attributed to incestuous unions, of whatever nature they might be. (a) Whoever would make a similar attempt and rid himself of this violent pre-judgement of custom, will find several things to be accepted with unquestioning resolution, which have no support save in the gray beard and wrinkles of the wontedness that is associated with them. But when that mask is torn away, these things being brought into relation with truth and right, he will feel that his judgement has been turned topsy-turvy, but is consequently reëstablished much more surely. For example, I will ask them what can ​be stranger than to see a people obliged to follow laws that it never understands; bound in all its domestic affairs — marriages, donations, testaments, sales, and purchases — by rules of which it can not have knowledge, as they are neither written nor proclaimed in its own language, and of which it must necessarily purchase the interpretation and the practice. (c) Not according to the ingenious conception of Isocrates, who advised his king to make the traffic and negotiations of his subjects free, unrestrained, and lucrative, and their disputes and quarrels burdensome, loading them with heavy penalties, but according to a monstrous conception that the right itself should be made a matter of traffic, and the laws treated as merchandise. (a) I am grateful to fortune that, so our historians say, it was a Gascon gentleman, a countryman of mine, who first opposed Charlemagne when he desired to give us the laws of Rome and the Empire. What is more barbarous than to see a nation where, by a legalised custom, the office of judge is sold, and judgements are bought for ready money, and where justice is legally denied to him who has not the means to pay for it; and where this traffic is in such great repute that there exists in a government a fourth estate of persons dealing in lawsuits, alongside the three ancient estates of the church, the nobility, and the common people; which fourth estate, having the administration of the laws and sovereign authority over property and lives, forms a body apart from that of the nobility. Whence it happens that there are two sorts of laws, in many respects very different — those of honour and those of justice: thus, the former condemn as strictly the lie tamely submitted to, as the latter do the lies revenged; by the decree of arms he is stripped of honour and nobility who submits to an insult, and by civil decree he who takes vengeance for it incurs a disgraceful punishment; he who appeals to the laws to obtain satisfaction for an offence to his honour, dishonours himself, and he who does not so appeal is punished and chastised by the laws. And of these two bodies, so unlike yet connected under one head, those rep​resent peace, these war; those profit, these honour; those learning, these merit; those speech, these action; those justice, these valour; those reason, these force; those have the robe, these the sword for their portion.
As for unimportant things, such as clothes, to whoever may desire to connect them with their true purpose, which is the service and pleasure of the body, upon which their charm and essential seemliness depend — I will suggest to him as, among others, the most fantastic that can be imagined, our square caps, that long tail of folded velvet, with its vari-coloured trimming, which hangs from the heads of our women, and that idle and useless covering of a member which we cannot decently even name, of which none the less we make show and parade in public. These considerations do not, however, turn a man of understanding aside from following the common custom. But, on the other hand, it seems to me that all unusual and peculiar fashions proceed rather from foolishness or ambitious affectation than from right reason; and that the wise man should inwardly withdraw his mind from the crowd and give it liberty and power to judge freely of things; but outwardly he should altogether follow the accepted fashions and forms. Society at large has no concern with our thoughts; but all the rest, as our acts, our work, our fortunes, and our lives, we must lend and abandon to its service and to public opinion: as the great and good Socrates refused to save his life by disobeying the magistrate, and verily a most unjust and most iniquitous magistrate. For it is the rule of rules and the universal law of laws, that every one must obey those of the place where he is: —
Here is a consideration of another sort. There is great doubt if there can be found as manifest advantage in alter​ing an accepted law, whatever it may be, as there is harm in disturbing it; inasmuch as a system of government is like a structure of many parts so closely bound together that it is impossible to move one of them without the whole building feeling it. The law-maker of the Thurians decreed that whoever should desire either to repeal an old law, or to introduce a new one, should present himself before the people with a rope about his neck, so that, if the innovation were not approved by every one, he might be instantly hanged. And he of Lacedæmon spent his life in obtaining from his fellow citizens a firm promise not to violate any of his decrees. The ephor who so harshly cut the two strings that Phrynis had added to his lyre was not concerned as to whether it was bettered by them, or whether the chords were the richer; it was enough for their condemnation that they were a change from the old mode. The same was signified by the rusted sword of justice at Marseilles.
(b) I am disgusted with novelty, whatever aspect it bears; and rightly so, for I have seen most harmful consequences of it. That which has been harrying us for so many years has not seized upon every thing; but we can say with plausibility that incidentally it has produced and given birth to every thing, verily, even to the ills and destruction which in the meantime have taken place without it and in opposition to it; there is good reason for it to blame itself therefor.
Heu! patior telis vulnera facta meis.
They who first shake a state are easily the first to be involved in its ruin. (c) The profit of the disturbance seldom falls to the lot of him who has stirred it up: he lashes and muddies the water for other fishers. (b) The joints and ​framework of this monarchy, this great edifice, notably in its old age, having been displaced and loosened by novelty, afford all the opening and entrance you please to such outrages. (c) The royal majesty is cast down with much more difficulty, says an ancient writer, from the summit to the halfway point, than hurled from that point into the depths. But if the inventors are the more harmful, the imitators are the more vicious in recklessly following examples of which they have perceived and punished the detestableness and the evil; and if there are degrees of honour, even in doing evil, the latter should accord to the others the glory of the invention and the courage of the first attempt.
(b) All sorts of new disorders draw, by luck, from this first and prolific source, devices and models for disturbing our government. We read in our very laws, designed to remedy this original evil, the training and excuse for all sorts of evil undertakings; and there happens to us what Thucydides says of the civil wars of his time — that, favouring the public vices, they created new and gentler words in their excuse, falsifying and softening their true names. And this, howsoever, is to reform our consciences and our beliefs! Honesta oratio est. But the best pretext for innovation is very hazardous. (c) Adeo nihil motum ex antiquo probabile est. (b) And it seems to me, to speak frankly; that there is great self-love and presumption in setting so high a value on one’s opinions that, to establish them, it is necessary to upset public tranquillity and to introduce so many inevitable evils and such shocking corruption of morals as civil wars bring about, and the mutations in the state in a matter of such weight — and to introduce them into one’s own country. (c) Is it not bad management to bring to the front so many certain and known vices, to combat errors denied and debatable? Is there any worse sort of vice than those which offend one’s own conscience and instinctive knowledge? The [Roman] Senate, in the dispute between it and the people as ​to the administration of their religion, ventured to give as satisfaction this excuse: Ad deos id magis quam ad se pertinere; ipsos visuros ne sacra sua polluantur, conformably to what the oracle replied to those of Delphi in the war against the Medes. Fearing the invasion of the Persians, they asked the god what they were to do with the sacred treasures of his temple — whether they should conceal them, or carry them away. He replied that they should move nothing; that they should care for themselves; that he was able to provide for what was his.
(b) The Christian religion has all the marks of the greatest rightness and usefulness; but none more evident than the explicit injunction of obedience to authority, and upholding of the forms of government. What a marvellous example of this, divine wisdom has given us, which, to ensure the salvation Of the human race, and to conduct its glorious victory over death and sin, chose to do this only under sufferance of our political system, and subjected its progress and the guidance toward so high and so salutary a result to the blindness and injustice of our observances and usages, allowing the innocent blood to flow of so many of the elect, its beloved, and permitting the loss of long years in the ripening of this inestimable fruit! There is a vast difference between his cause who follows the customs and laws of his country, and that of him who undertakes to govern them and change them. The first may plead in excuse single-mindedness, obedience, and precedent; whatever he may do, it cannot be from ill intent; at the worst, it is disastrous. (c) Quis est enim quem non moveat clarissimis monumentis testata consignataque antiquitas? Besides what Isocrates says, that falling short is more akin to moderation than excess is.
(b) The other is in a much worse posture; (c) for he who meddles with choosing and changing usurps the authority of ​judging, and should be quite sure that he sees the error of what he rejects and the benefit of what he introduces. This commonplace consideration settled me in my seat, and kept even my more heedless youth in check from burdening my shoulders with so heavy a load as to make myself a surety for knowledge of such importance, and from venturing, in this matter, what in sound discretion I could not venture to do in the simplest of those matters in which I had been instructed, and in which rashness of judgement does no harm. For it seemed to me very wrong to seek to subject public and fixed constitutions and usages to the instability of a private opinion (private judgement has only a private jurisdiction), and to undertake with respect to divine laws what no government would suffer with respect to human laws, which, although human reason has much more connection with them, yet are they sovereign judges of their judges, and the greatest ability serves but to explain and extend the accepted use of them, not to divert it and innovate upon it. If sometimes divine providence has overridden the rules to which it has necessarily subjected us, it is not for us to dispense with them: those are strokes of the divine hand which we must not imitate, but admire; and extraordinary cases, marked with a designed and special warranting of the sort of miracles which it offers us as evidence of its omnipotence, far above our methods and our powers, and which it is folly and impiety to try to reproduce — paths, not for our feet, but for us to contemplate with amazement; acts belonging to the part it plays, not to us. Cotta protests very fitly: Quum de religione agitur, T. Coruncanium, P. Scipionem, P. Scævolam, pontifices maximos, non Zenonem aut Cleanthem aut Chrysippum sequor.
​(b) God knows, in our present quarrel, in which there are a hundred points of dispute to be taken out and put back, — points of great and profound importance, — how many persons there are who can boast of having accurately grasped the arguments of one and the other party. It is a number, if a number there be, which would have no great power to disturb us. But all this other crowd — whither is it going? under what standard does it turn out of the road? It happens with theirs as with other weak and ill-employed drugs: the humours of which it sought to purge us, it has heated and irritated and embittered by the conflict, and still it has remained in our body. It has failed to purge us because of its weakness, and yet it has weakened us so that we can no longer void it, and we get from its operation only intestinal pains long-continued. (a) Yet, however, fortune, retaining always its authority over our judgements, sometimes presents us with so urgent a necessity that there is need for the laws to give way to it somewhat. (b) And when we resist the growth of an innovation which has been introduced by violence, to hold ourselves in every thing and everywhere in check and bound by rule, while our opponents have full liberty, to whom every thing is permissible that can advance their purpose, — who have no other law or rule to follow than their own advantage, — imposes a hazardous obligation and disparity. (c) Aditum nocendi perfido præstat fides. (b) For the ordinary polity of a state in good health does not provide for such extraordinary accidents; it presupposes a body which is composed of its principal members and offices, and a common consent to respect and obey it. (c) Lawful procedure is a cold, heavy, and constrained procedure, and is not fitted to make head against a lawless and unbridled procedure.
(a) We know that it is still matter of reproach to those ​two great men, Octavius and Cato, in the civil wars, — the first with Sylla, the other with Cæsar, — that they allowed their country to incur the utmost extremities rather than succour it at the expense of its laws and by changing any thing. For, in truth, in those extreme emergencies, where to hold one’s ground is the most to be looked for, it would be perchance more wisely done to how the head and give way a little to the blow, rather than, persisting beyond possibility in yielding nothing, to give violence opportunity to trample every thing underfoot; and it would be better to make the laws desire to do what they can, since they can not do what they desire. Thus did he who ordered that they [the laws] should sleep four-and-twenty hours; and he who for that occasion took a day out of the calendar; and that other who of the month of June made a second May. Even the Lacedæmonians, who observed so religiously the laws of their country, being hampered by that one which prohibited the election of the same person twice as admiral, and, on the other hand, their affairs rendering it absolutely necessary that Lysander should again assume that office — they made, indeed, one Aracus admiral, but Lysander superintendent of the navy. And with the same sort of subtlety, one of their ambassadors being sent to the Athenians to secure a change in some decree, and Pericles declaring to him that it was forbidden to take away the tablet on which a law had once been set down, he [the ambassador] advised him merely to turn it over, inasmuch as that was not forbidden. It is for this that Plutarch praises Philopœmen — that, being born to command, he knew, not only how to command according to the laws, but how to command the laws themselves when public necessity required it.
* ↑ La Coûtume here stands for both personal habits and national customs.
* ↑ It can be found in Stobæus, Sermon 29; in Quintilian, I, 9; and in the Adages of Erasmus, I, ii, 51.
* ↑ Custom is the most powerful master of all things. — Pliny, Natural History, XXVI, 2; taken by Montaigne from the Politiques of J. Lipsius.
* ↑ Book VII, at the beginning.
* ↑ Mithridates, King of Pontus. See Aulus Gellius, XVII, 16.
* ↑ D’araignées (spiders’ webs); but the context shows that it must have been spiders. See below, les apastoient (“and fed them”). See Messie, Diverses Leçons, I, 26.
* ↑ This and the following particulars are found in Lopez de Gomara, Histoire Générale des Indes. It was written in Spanish, and a French translation by Martin Fumée was published in 1569.
* ↑ Great is the power of custom; huntsmen pass the night in the snow and endure the sun’s heat in the mountains; boxers, when bruised by the gloves, do not even utter a groan. — Cicero, Tusc. Disp., II, 17.
* ↑ See Idem, Somnium Scipionis, VI, 19.
* ↑ Coupures et muances.
* ↑ Collet de fleurs.
* ↑ Effraye.
* ↑ See Diogenes Laertius, Life of Plato. Laertius says that he reproved a man who was gambling with dice.
* ↑ Plus pure et plus forte qu’elle est plus gresle. Changed in 1596 to: plus pure et plus naifve, qu’elle est plus gresle et plus neuve.
* ↑ Pour m’estre duit.
* ↑ A small copper coin worth one sixth of a sou.
* ↑ This person is mentioned in many journals of this time.
* ↑ The clause in parentheses is omitted in the edition of 1595.
* ↑ J'en vy un autre, estant enfant. A similar case is mentioned by Ambroise Paré, in Des Monstres.
* ↑ That is, those of custom.
* ↑ Is not the natural philosopher, that is, the explorer and the hunter of nature, ashamed to seek evidence of the truth from minds prejudiced by custom! — Cicero, De Nat. Deor., I, 30.
* ↑ This example, and all of those following which were added in 1588 (b), down to line 5 on page 151 infra, are taken, sometimes with slight variations, from Gomara’s Histoire Générale des Indes.
* ↑ Se coucher sur les propres.
* ↑ Gomara does not mention being eaten by birds; but see Plutarch, That vice alone is enough to make a man miserable.
* ↑ See Herodotus, IV, 172. At this point Montaigne wrote on the Bordeaux copy of 1588: Ou le peuple adore certeins Dieus[,] Mars[,] Bacchus[,] Diane[;] Le Roy un dieu particulier pour soi[,] Mercure, which he afterwards struck out, and inserted in chapter 42 of this Book: see infra, page 343.
* ↑ See Goulard, Histoire du Portugal, for this and most of the following examples.
* ↑ See Lopez de Castaneda, Histoire de la decouverte et de la conquête des Indes par les Portugais (book XIV), from which Goulard derived most of his material.
* ↑ See Herodotus, IV, 168.
* ↑ See Herodotus, II, 35.
* ↑ See Idem, IV, 191.
* ↑ See Idem, IV, 180.
* ↑ The edition of 1595 adds here: sans distinction de parenté. We return now for a moment to the text of 1580.
* ↑ See Herodotus, IV, 172.
* ↑ See Idem, IV, 176.
* ↑ An allusion to the republic of the Amazons.
* ↑ Especially the Thracians. See Valerius Maximus, IT, 6, ext. 12. The text of 1580-1588 is here slightly shortened, but without change of meaning.
* ↑ See Xenophon, Cyropædeia, I, 2.
* ↑ See Plutarch, Of the virtuous deeds of women.
* ↑ See Herodotus, III, 38.
* ↑ See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, VII, 5.
* ↑ Ne s’en peut desprendre sans remors, ny s’y appliquer sans applaudissement.
* ↑ See Valerius Maximus, VII, 2, ext. 18.
* ↑ Ce qui est hors des gonds de coutume, on le croit hors des gonds de raison.
* ↑ This last sentence is not found in the Édition Municipale, but was added in 1595.
* ↑ See Herodotus, III, 38.
* ↑ There is nothing so great or so admirable at first, that we do not gradually admire it less. — Lucretius, II, 1028. In modern texts the last two lines are: — Quod non paulatim minuant mirarier omnes. Principio —
* ↑ In 1580-1588: si chetif et si foible.
* ↑ These two words added in 1595.
* ↑ Of their condemnation.
* ↑ See Plato, Laws (Jowett, Amer. Ed., V, 217-221).
* ↑ See Diogenes Laertius, Life of Chrysippus.
* ↑ See Isocrates, Oratio ad Nicoclem, VI, 18.
* ↑ Les loix Latines et Imperiales. See Paulus Jovius.
* ↑ That is, the lawyers and the nobility.
* ↑ The king.
* ↑ Ceux-là la robbe longue, ceux-cy la courte en partage.
* ↑ See Plato, Crito; Diogenes Laertius, Life of Socrates.
* ↑ It is noble to obey the laws of the country in which one dwells. — M. Villey thinks that Montaigne found this in a collection of Greek sentences compiled by Crispin (1569).
* ↑ En voicy d’un autre cuvée.
* ↑ Zaleucus, the legislator of the Locrians. See Diodorus Siculus, XII, 4; Plato, Phædo.
* ↑ Lycurgus. See Plutarch, Life of Lycurgus.
* ↑ See Idem, Apothegms of the Lacedæmonians.
* ↑ See Valerius Maximus, II, 6, ext. 7.
* ↑ In 1588: depuis vingt-cing ou trente ans.
* ↑ C’est à elle à s’en prendre au nez.
* ↑ Alas! I suffer from wounds made by my own weapons. — Ovid, Heroïdes, II, 48 (Epistle of Phyllis to Demophoön).
* ↑ See Thucydides, III, 52. Montaigne probably took it from Plutarch, How to distinguish a flatterer from a friend.
* ↑ The pretext is honourable. — Terence, Andria, I, 1.114.
* ↑ Indeed, no change from ancient customs is worthy of approval. — Livy, XXXIV, 54.
* ↑ This matter concerned the gods more than it did them; the gods themselves would see to it that their sacred rites were not profaned. — Livy, X, 6.
* ↑ See Herodotus, VIII, 36.
* ↑ For who is not moved by antiquity, witnessed and attested by the most glorious monuments? — Cicero, De Divin., I, 40.
* ↑ See Isocrates, Oratio ad Nicoclem.
* ↑ Et que nous ne devons pas suivre, mais contempler avec estonnement; actes de son personnage, non pas du nostre.
* ↑ In religious matters I follow T. Coruncanius, P. Scipio, and P. Scævola, high pontiffs, and not Zeno or Cleanthes, or Chrysippus. — Cicero, De Nat. Deor., III, 2. This addition of the Édition Municipale, beginning in the last line but one of p. 161, appears in only a few copies of 1595; in some copies it was inserted by Mademoiselle de Gournay by a carton. It first appeared properly in the edition of 1602.
* ↑ Soubs quelle enseigne se jette elle à quartier?
* ↑ In the editions prior to 1588, this immediately followed “the rusted sword of justice at Marseilles,” page 159 supra.
* ↑ Contre ceux qui ont la clef des champs.
* ↑ He who puts faith in a treacherous man gives entrance to harm. — Seneca, Œdipus, III, 686.
* ↑ This was not Octavius, afterward Augustus, but Octavius who was consul with Cinna, and of whom Plutarch speaks at some length in the Life of Marius.
* ↑ Agesilaus. See Idem, Life of Agesilaus.
* ↑ Alexander the Great. See Idem, Life of Alexander.
* ↑ See Idem, Life of Lysander.
* ↑ Really, to stay the breaking out of the Peloponnesian War. The ambassador was Polyarces. See Idem, Life of Pericles.
* ↑ See Idem, Parallel between Flaminius and Philopœmen.