The Complete Essays (26 page)

We are right to note the licence and disobedience of this member which thrusts itself forward so inopportunely when we do not want it to, and which so inopportunely lets us down when we most need it; it imperiously contests for authority with our will: it stubbornly and proudly refuses all our incitements, both mental and manual. Yet if this member were arraigned for rebelliousness, found guilty because of it and then retained me to plead its cause, I would doubtless cast suspicion on our other members for having deliberately brought a trumped-up charge, plotting to arm everybody against it and maliciously accusing it alone of a defect common to them all. I ask you to reflect whether there is one single part of our body which does not often refuse to function when we want it to, yet does so when we want it not to. Our members have emotions proper to themselves which arouse them or quieten them down without leave from us. How often do compelling facial movements bear witness to thoughts which we were keeping secret, so betraying us to those who are with us? The same causes which animate that member animate – without our knowledge – the heart, the lungs and the pulse: the sight of some pleasant object can imperceptibly spread right through us the flame of a feverish desire. Is it only the veins and muscles of that particular member which rise or fall without the consent of our will or even of our very thoughts? We do not command our hair to stand on end with fear nor our flesh to quiver with desire. Our hands often go where we do not tell them; our tongues can fail, our voices congeal, when
they
want to. Even when we have nothing for the pot and would fain order our hunger and thirst not to do so, they never fail to stir up those members which are subject to them, just as that other appetite does: it also deserts us, inopportunely, whenever it wants to. That sphincter which serves to discharge our stomachs has dilations and contractions proper to itself, independent of our wishes or even opposed to them; so do those members which are destined to discharge the kidneys.

To show the limitless authority of our wills, Saint Augustine cites the example of a man who could make his behind produce farts whenever he would: Vives in his glosses goes one better with a contemporary example of a man who could arrange to fart in tune with verses recited to him; but that does not prove the pure obedience of that member, since it is normally
most indiscreet and disorderly.
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In addition I know one Behind so stormy and churlish that it has obliged its master to fart forth wind constantly and unremittingly for forty years and is thus bringing him to his death.
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Yet against our very will (on behalf of whose rights we have drawn up this bill of accusation) can be brought a prima-facie charge of sedition and rebellion because of its own unruliness and disobedience. Does it always wish what we want it to? Does it not often wish what we forbid it to – and that to our evident prejudice? Is it any more subject to the determinations of our reason? Finally, on behalf of my noble client, may it please the Court to consider that, in this matter, my client’s case is indissolubly conjoined to a consort from whom he cannot be separated. Yet the suit is addressed to my client alone, employing arguments and making charges which (granted the properties of the Parties) can in no wise be brought against the aforesaid consort.
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By which it can be seen the manifest animosity and legal impropriety of the accusers. The contrary notwithstanding, Nature registers a protest against the barristers’ accusations and the judges’ sentences, and will meanwhile proceed as usual, as one who acted rightly when she endowed the aforesaid member with its own peculiar privilege to be the author of the only immortal achievement known to mortals. For which reason, generation is held by Socrates to be god-like, and Love, that desire for immortality, to be himself.
Daemon
and immortal.
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[A] One man, perhaps by the power of his imagination, leaves in France the very scrofula which his fellow then takes back into Spain.
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That is why it is customary to insist in such matters that the soul lend her consent. Why do doctors first work on the confidence of their patient with so many fake promises of a cure if not to allow the action of the imagination to make up for the trickery of their potions? They know that
one of the masters of their craft told them in writing that there are men for whom it is enough merely to look at a medicine for it to prove effective.
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That sudden whim of mine all came back to me because of a tale told me by one of my late father’s servants who was an apothecary. He was a simple man – a Swiss (a people little given to vanity and lying). He had had a long acquaintance with a sickly merchant in Toulouse who suffered from the stone; he had frequent need of enemas and made his doctors prescribe him various kinds, depending on the symptoms of his illness. When the enemas were brought in, none of the usual formalities were omitted: he often used to finger them to see if they were too hot. There he was, lying down and turned on his side; all the usual preliminaries were gone through… except that no clyster was injected! After this ceremony the apothecary withdrew; the patient was treated as though he had taken the clyster and the result was the same as for those who had. If the doctor found that the treatment did not prove effective he gave him two or three other enemas – all of the same kind! Now my informant swears that the sick man’s wife (in order to cut down expenses, since he paid for these clysters as though he had really had them) assayed simply injecting warm water; that proved to have no effect: the trickery was therefore discovered but he was obliged to return to the first kind.

There was a woman who believed she had swallowed a pin in her bread; she yelled and screamed as though she felt an insufferable pain in her throat where she thought she could feel it stuck; but since there was no swelling nor external symptoms, one clever fellow concluded that it was all imagination and opinion occasioned by a crust that had jabbed her on the way down; he made her vomit and secretly tossed a bent pin into what she had brought up. That woman believed that she had vomited it out and immediately felt relieved of the pain.

I know of a squire who had entertained a goodly company in his hall and then, four or five days later, boasted as a joke (for there was no truth in it) that he had made them eat cat pie; one of the young ladies in the party was struck with such horror at this that she collapsed with a serious stomach disorder and a fever: it was impossible to save her.

Even the very beasts are subject to the power of the imagination just as we are. Witness dogs, which grieve to death when they lose their masters. We can also see dogs yapping and twitching in their dreams, while horses whinny and struggle about.
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But all this can be attributed to the close stitching of mind to body, each communicating its fortunes to the other. It is quite a different matter that the imagination should sometimes act not merely upon its own body but on someone else’s. One body can inflict an illness on a neighbouring one (as can be seen in the case of the plague, the pox and conjunctivitis which are passed on from person to person):

Dum spectant oculi læsos, læduntur et ipsi:
Multaque corporibus transitione nocent
.

[Looking at sore eyes can make your own eyes sore; and many ills are spread by bodily infection.]
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Similarly when the imagination is vehemently shaken it sends forth darts which may strike an outside object. In antiquity it was held that when certain Scythian women were animated by anger against anybody they could kill him simply by looking at him. Tortoises and ostriches hatch out their eggs by sight alone – a sign that they emit certain occult influences.
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And as for witches, they are said to have eyes which can strike and harm:

Nescio quis teneros oculus mihi fascinat agnos
[An eye, I know not whose, has bewitched my tender lambs.]
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For me magicians provide poor authority. All the same we know from experience that mothers can transmit to the bodies of children in their womb marks connected with their thoughts – witness that woman who gave birth to a blackamoor. And near Pisa there was presented to the Emperor Charles, King of Bohemia, a girl all bristly and hairy whom her mother claimed to have conceived like this because of a portrait of John the Baptist hanging above her bed. It is the same with animals: witness Jacob’s sheep and those partridges and hares which are turned white by the snow in the mountains.
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In my own place recently a cat was seen watching a bird perched high up a tree; they stared fixedly at each other for some little time when the bird tumbled dead between the paws of the cat: either its own imagination had poisoned it or else it had been drawn by the cat’s
force of attraction. Those who are fond of hawking know the tale of the falconer who fixed his gaze purposefully on a kite as it flew and bet he could bring it down by the sheer power of his sight. And he did.

Or so they say: for when I borrow
exempla
I commit them to the consciences of those I took them from. [B] The discursive reflexions are my own and depend on rational proof not on experience: everyone can add his own examples; if anyone has none of his own he should not stop believing that such
exempla
exist, given the number and variety of occurrences.
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[C] If my
exempla
do not fit, supply your own for me. In the study I am making of our manners and motives, fabulous testimonies – provided they remain possible – can do service as well as true ones. Whether it happened or not, to Peter or John, in Rome or in Paris, it still remains within the compass of what human beings are capable of; it tells me something useful about that. I can see this and profit by it equally in semblance as in reality. There are often different versions of a story: I make use of the one which is rarest and most memorable. There are some authors whose aim is to relate what happened: mine (if I could manage it) would be to relate what can happen. When details are lacking Schoolmen are rightly permitted to posit probabilities. I do not: where this is concerned I excel all historical fidelity in my devoted scrupulousness. Whenever my
exempla
concern what I have heard, what I have said or what I have done, I have not dared to allow myself to change even the most useless or trivial of circumstances. I do not know about my science, but not one jot has been consciously falsified.

While on this topic I often wonder how Theologians or philosophers and their like, with their exquisite consciences and their exacting wisdom, can properly write history. How can they pledge their own trustworthiness on the trustworthiness of ordinary people? How can they vouch for the thoughts of people they have never known and offer their own conjectures as sound coinage? They would refuse to bear sworn witness in Court about complex actions which actually occurred in their presence; there is no man so intimate with them that they would undertake to give a full account of all his thoughts.

I think it less risky to write about the past than the present, since the author has only to account for borrowed truth. Some have invited me to write about contemporary events, reckoning that I see them with eyes less vitiated by passion than others do and that I have a closer view than they, since Fortune has given me access to the various leaders of the contending
parties. What they do not say is that I would not inflict such pain upon myself for all the fame of Sallust (being as I am the sworn enemy of binding obligations, continuous toil and perseverance), nor that nothing is so foreign to my mode of writing than extended narration. I have to break off so often from shortness of wind that neither the structure of my works nor their development is worth anything at all; and I have a more-than-childish ignorance of the words and phrases used in the most ordinary affairs. That is why I have undertaken to talk about only what I know how to talk about, fitting the subject-matter to my capacities. Were I to choose a subject where I had to be led, my capacities might prove inadequate to it. They do not say either that, since my freedom is so very free, I could have published judgements which even I would reasonably and readily hold to be unlawful and deserving of punishment. Of his own achievement Plutarch would be the first to admit that if his
exempla
are wholly and entirely true that is the work of his sources: his own work consisted in making them useful to posterity, presenting them with a splendour which lightens our path towards virtue.

An ancient account is not like a doctor’s prescription, every item in it being tother or which.

22. One man’s profit is another man’s loss

[Montaigne’s principal source in this short chapter is Seneca’s treatise
De beneficiis.
]

[A] Demades condemned a fellow Athenian whose trade was to sell funeral requisites on the grounds that he wanted too much profit from it and that this profit could only be made out of the deaths of a great many people.
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That judgement seems ill-founded since no profit is ever made except at somebody else’s loss: by his reckoning you would have to condemn earnings of every sort. The merchant can only thrive by tempting youth to extravagance; the husbandman, by the high price of grain; the architect, by the collapse of buildings; legal officials, by lawsuits and quarrels between men; the very honorariums and the fees of the clergy are drawn from our deaths and our vices. ‘No doctor derives any pleasure from the good health even of his friends’ (as was said by an ancient author of Greek comedies);
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‘neither does the soldier from peace in his city’: and so on for all the others. And what is worse, if each of us were to sound our inner depths he would find that most of our desires are born and nurtured at other people’s expense.

When I reflected on this the thought came to me that Nature here was not belying her general polity, for natural philosophers hold that the birth, nurture and increase of each thing is at the expense and corruption of another.

Nam quodcunque suis mutatum finibus exit,
Continuo hoc mors est illius, quod fuit ante
.

[For when anything is changed and sallies forth from its confines, it is at once the death of something which previously existed.]
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