ESSAYS OF MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE

Translated by Charles Cotton

Edited by William Carew Hazilitt

1877

CONTENTS OF VOLUME 19.

XIII.  Of Experience.

CHAPTER XIII

OF EXPERIENCE

There is no desire more natural than that of knowledge.  We try all ways that can lead us to it; where reason is wanting, we therein employ experience,

              “Per varios usus artem experientia fecit,
               Exemplo monstrante viam,”

["By various trials experience created art, example shewing the
way.”—­Manilius, i. 59.]

which is a means much more weak and cheap; but truth is so great a thing that we ought not to disdain any mediation that will guide us to it.  Reason has so many forms that we know not to which to take; experience has no fewer; the consequence we would draw from the comparison of events is unsure, by reason they are always unlike.  There is no quality so universal in this image of things as diversity and variety.  Both the Greeks and the Latins and we, for the most express example of similitude, employ that of eggs; and yet there have been men, particularly one at Delphos, who could distinguish marks of difference amongst eggs so well that he never mistook one for another, and having many hens, could tell which had laid it.

Dissimilitude intrudes itself of itself in our works; no art can arrive at perfect similitude:  neither Perrozet nor any other can so carefully polish and blanch the backs of his cards that some gamesters will not distinguish them by seeing them only shuffled by another.  Resemblance does not so much make one as difference makes another.  Nature has obliged herself to make nothing other that was not unlike.

And yet I am not much pleased with his opinion, who thought by the multitude of laws to curb the authority of judges in cutting out for them their several parcels; he was not aware that there is as much liberty and latitude in the interpretation of laws as in their form; and they but fool themselves, who think to lessen and stop our disputes by recalling us to the express words of the Bible:  forasmuch as our mind does not find the field less spacious wherein to controvert the sense of another than to deliver his own; and as if there were less animosity and tartness in commentary than in invention.  We see how much he was mistaken, for we have more laws in France than all the rest of the world put together, and more than would be necessary for the government of all the worlds of Epicurus: 

          “Ut olim flagitiis, sic nunc legibus, laboramus.”

     ["As we were formerly by crimes, so we are now overburdened by
     laws.”—­Tacitus, Annal., iii. 25.]