



Produced by David Widger





ESSAYS OF MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE

Translated by Charles Cotton

Edited by William Carew Hazilitt

1877



CONTENTS OF VOLUME 9.

I.        Of the inconstancy of our actions.
II.       Of drunkenness.
III.      A custom of the Isle of Cea.
IV.       To-morrow's a new day.
V.        Of conscience.
VI.       Use makes perfect.



ESSAYS OF MONTAIGNE

BOOK THE SECOND

CHAPTER I

OF THE INCONSTANCY OF OUR ACTIONS

Such as make it their business to oversee human actions, do not find
themselves in anything so much perplexed as to reconcile them and bring
them into the world's eye with the same lustre and reputation; for they
commonly so strangely contradict one another that it seems impossible
they should proceed from one and the same person.  We find the younger
Marius one while a son of Mars and another a son of Venus.  Pope Boniface
VIII. entered, it is said, into his Papacy like a fox, behaved himself in
it like a lion, and died like a dog; and who could believe it to be the
same Nero, the perfect image of all cruelty, who, having the sentence of
a condemned man brought to him to sign, as was the custom, cried out,
"O that I had never been taught to write!" so much it went to his heart
to condemn a man to death.  All story is full of such examples, and every
man is able to produce so many to himself, or out of his own practice or
observation, that I sometimes wonder to see men of understanding give
themselves the trouble of sorting these pieces, considering that
irresolution appears to me to be the most common and manifest vice of our
nature witness the famous verse of the player Publius:

          "Malum consilium est, quod mutari non potest."

          ["'Tis evil counsel that will admit no change."
          --Pub.  Mim., ex Aul. Gell., xvii. 14.]

There seems some reason in forming a judgment of a man from the most
usual methods of his life; but, considering the natural instability of
our manners and opinions, I have often thought even the best authors a
little out in so obstinately endeavouring to make of us any constant and
solid contexture; they choose a general air of a man, and according to
that interpret all his actions, of which, if they cannot bend some to a
uniformity with the rest, they are presently imputed to dissimulation.
Augustus has escaped them, for there was in him so apparent, sudden, and
continual variety of actions all the whole course of his life, that he
has slipped away clear and undecided from the most daring critics.  I can
more hardly believe a man's constancy than any other virtue, and believe
nothing sooner than the contrary.  He that would judge of a man in detail
and distinctly, bit by bit, would oftener be able to speak the truth.  It
is a hard matter, from all antiquity, to pick out a dozen men who have
formed their lives to one certain and constant course, which is the
principal design of wisdom; for to comprise it all in one word, says one
of the ancients, and to contract all the rules of human life into one,
"it is to will, and not to will, always one and the same thing: I will
not vouchsafe," says he, "to add, provided the will be just, for if it be
not just, it is impossible it should be always one."  I have indeed
formerly learned that vice is nothing but irregularity, and want of
measure, and therefore 'tis impossible to fix constancy to it.  'Tis a
saying of.  Demosthenes, "that the beginning oh all virtue is
consultation and deliberation; the end and perfection, constancy."  If we
would resolve on any certain course by reason, we should pitch upon the
best, but nobody has thought on't:

          "Quod petit, spernit; repetit, quod nuper omisit;
          AEstuat, et vitae disconvenit ordine toto."

     ["That which he sought he despises; what he lately lost, he seeks
     again.  He fluctuates, and is inconsistent in the whole order of
     life."--Horace, Ep., i. I, 98.]

Our ordinary practice is to follow the inclinations of our appetite, be
it to the left or right, upwards or downwards, according as we are wafted
by the breath of occasion.  We never meditate what we would have till the
instant we have a mind to have it; and change like that little creature
which receives its colour from what it is laid upon.  What we but just
now proposed to ourselves we immediately alter, and presently return
again to it; 'tis nothing but shifting and inconsistency:

               "Ducimur, ut nervis alienis mobile lignum."

     ["We are turned about like the top with the thong of others."
     --Idem, Sat., ii. 7, 82.]

We do not go, we are driven; like things that float, now leisurely, then
with violence,