The Complete Essays (65 page)

5. On conscience

[Conscience originally meant connivance. Conscience in the sense of our individual consciousness of right and wrong or of our own guilt or rectitude fascinated Montaigne. It became a vital concern of his during the Wars of Religion with their cruelties, their false accusations and their use of torture on prisoners. Such moral basis as there was for the ‘question’ (judicial torture) seems, curiously enough, to have been a respect for the power of conscience – of a man’s inner sense of his guilt or innocence which would strengthen or weaken his power to withstand pain. A major source of Montaigne’s ideas here is St Augustine and a passionate note by Juan Luis Vives in his edition of the
City of God
designed to undermine confidence in torture.]

[A] During our civil wars I was travelling one day with my brother the Sieur de la Brousse when we met a gentleman
¹
of good appearance who was on the other side from us; I did not know anything about that since he feigned otherwise. The worst of these wars is that the cards are so mixed up, with your enemy indistinguishable from you by any clear indication of language or deportment, being brought up under the same laws, manners and climate, that it is not easy to avoid confusion and disorder. That made me fear that I myself would come upon our own troops in a place where I was not known, be obliged to state my name and wait for the worst. [B] That did happen to me on another occasion: for, from just such a mishap, I lost men and horses. Among others, they killed one of my pages, pitifully: an Italian of good family whom I was carefully training; in him was extinguished a young life, beautiful and full of great promise.

[A] But that man of mine was so madly afraid! I noticed that he nearly died every time we met any horsemen or passed through towns loyal to the King; I finally guessed that his alarm arose from his conscience. It seemed to that wretched man that you could read right into the very secret thoughts of his mind through his mask and the crosses on his greatcoat.
²
So
wondrous is the power of conscience! It makes us betray, accuse and fight against ourselves. In default of an outside testimony it leads us to witness against ourselves:

Occultum quatiens animo tortore flagellum
.

[Lashing us with invisible whips, our soul torments us.]
³

The following story is on the lips of children: a Paeonian called Bessus was rebuked for having deliberately destroyed a nest of swallows, killing them all. He said he was right to do so: those little birds kept falsely accusing him of having murdered his father! Until then this act of parricide had been hidden and unknown; but the avenging Furies of his conscience made him who was to pay the penalty reveal the crime.
⁴

Hesiod corrects that saying of Plato’s, that the punishment follows hard upon the sin. He says it is born at the same instant, with the sin itself; to expect punishment is to suffer it: to merit it is to expect it. Wickedness forges torments for itself,

Malum consilium consultori pessimum
,

[Who counsels evil, suffers evil most,]
⁵

just as the wasp harms others when it stings but especially itself, for it loses sting and strength for ever:

Vitasque in vulnere ponunt
.

[In that wound they lay down their lives.]
⁶

The Spanish blister-fly secretes an antidote to its poison, by some mutual antipathy within nature. So too, just when we take pleasure in vice, there is born in our conscience an opposite displeasure, which tortures us, sleeping and waking, with many painful thoughts.
⁷

[B]
Quippe ubi se multi, per somnia sæpe loquentes,
Aut morbo delirantes, procraxe ferantur,
Et celata diu in medium peccata dedisse
.

[Many indeed, often talking in their sleep or delirious in illness, have proclaimed, it is said, and betrayed long-hidden sins.]
⁸

[A] Apollodorus dreamed that he saw himself being flayed by the Scythians then boiled in a pot while his heart kept muttering, ‘I am the cause of all these ills.’ No hiding-place awaits the wicked, said Epicurus, for they can never be certain of hiding there while their conscience gives them away.
⁹

                                            
Prima est hæc ultio, quod se
Judice nemo nocens absolvitur
.

[This is the principal vengeance: no guilty man is absolved: he is his own judge.]
¹⁰

Conscience can fill us with fear, but she can also fill us with assurance and confidence. [B] And I can say that I have walked more firmly through some dangers by reflecting on the secret knowledge I had of my own will and the innocence of my designs.

[A]
Conscia mens ut cuique sua est, ita concipit intra
Pectora pro facto spemque metumque suo
.

[A mind conscious of what we have done conceives within our breast either hope or fear, according to our deeds.]
¹¹

There are hundreds of examples: it will suffice to cite three of them about the same great man.

When Scipio was arraigned one day before the Roman people on a grave indictment, instead of defending himself and flattering his judges he said: ‘Your wishing to judge, on a capital charge, a man through whom you have authority to judge the Roman world, becomes you well!’

Another time his only reply to the accusations made against him by a Tribune of the People was not to plead his cause but to say: ‘Come, fellow citizens! Let us go and give thanks to the gods for the victory they gave me over the Carthaginians on just such a day as this!’ Then as he started to walk towards the temple all the assembled people could be seen following after him – even his prosecutor.

Again when Petilius, under the instigation of Cato, demanded that Scipio account for the monies that had passed through his hands in the province of Antioch, Scipio came to the Senate for this purpose, took his account-book from under his toga and declared that it contained the truth about his receipts and expenditure; but when he was told to produce it as evidence he refused to do so, saying that he had no wish to act so shamefully towards himself; in the presence of the Senate he tore it up with his own hands. I do not believe that a soul with seared scars could have counterfeited such assurance. [C] He had, says Livy, a mind too great by nature, a mind too elevated by Fortune, even to know how to be a criminal or to condescend to the baseness of defending his innocence.
¹²

[A] Torture is a dangerous innovation; it would appear that it is an assay not of the truth but of a man’s endurance. [C] The man who can endure it hides the truth: so does he who cannot. [A] For why should pain make me confess what is true rather than force me to say what is not true? And on the contrary if a man who has not done what he is accused of is able to support such torment, why should a man who has done it be unable to support it, when so beautiful a reward as life itself is offered him?

I think that this innovation is founded on the importance of the power of conscience. It would seem that in the case of the guilty man it would weaken him and assist the torture in making him confess his fault, whereas it strengthens the innocent man against the torture. But to speak the truth, it is a method full of danger and uncertainty. What would you
not
say, what would you
not
do, to avoid such grievous pain?

[C]
Etiam innocentes cogit mentiri dolor
.

[Pain compels even the innocent to lie.]

This results in a man whom the judge has put to the torture lest he die innocent being condemned to die both innocent and tortured.
¹³
[B] Thousands upon thousands have falsely confessed to capital charges. Among them, after considering the details of the trial
which Alexander made him face and the way he was tortured, I place Philotas.
¹⁴

[A] All the same it is [C], so they say, [B] the least bad
¹⁵
[A] method that human frailty has been able to discover. [C] Very inhumanely, however, and very ineffectually in my opinion. Many peoples less barbarous in this respect than the Greeks and the Romans who call them the Barbarians reckon it horrifying and cruel to torture and smash a man of whose crime you are still in doubt.
¹⁶
That ignorant doubt is yours: what has it to do with him? You are the unjust one, are you not? who do worse than kill a man so as not to kill him without due cause! You can prove that by seeing how frequently a man prefers to die for no reason at all rather than to pass through such a questioning which is more painful than the death-penalty itself and which by its harshness often anticipates that penalty by carrying it out.

I do not know where I heard this from, but it exactly represents the conscience of our own Justice: a village woman accused a soldier before his commanding general – a great man for justice – of having wrenched from her little children such sops as she had left to feed them with, the army having laid waste all the surrounding villages. As for proof, there was none. That general first summoned the woman to think carefully what she was saying, especially since she would be guilty of perjury if she were lying; she persisted, so he had the soldier’s belly slit open in order to throw the light of truth on to the fact. The woman was found to be right.
¹⁷
An investigatory condemnation!

6. On practice

[This chapter discusses a key event in Montaigne’s life: the brave but stupid act of one of his labourers who knocked him senseless from his horse in a minor encounter during the Wars of Religion. Reflecting on it led him to lose that philosophic fear of the act of dying which had obsessed him (and so many others before him). The major addition at the end shows that evil self-love (
philautia
as it was called) is the essence of pride; ‘knowing oneself, on the contrary, is the essence of wisdom. Philosophy was conceived by Socrates as ‘practising dying’ (that is, by training, to practise the separation of the soul from the body, which will be achieved in death). Montaigne, while still claiming to follow Socrates, shifts the ground towards ‘practising living’.]

[A] Even when our trust is readily placed in them, reasoning and education cannot easily prove powerful enough to bring us actually to do anything, unless in addition we train and form our Soul by experience for the course on which we would set her; if we do not, when the time comes for action she will undoubtedly find herself impeded.
¹
That explains why those among the philosophers who wished to attain to some greater excellence were never content to await the rigours of Fortune in shelter and repose for fear that Fortune might take them unawares, inexperienced and untried in battle; they preferred to go forth to meet her and deliberately threw themselves into the trial of hardships. Some renounced wealth to practise voluntary poverty; some sought toil and the austerity of a laborious life so as to harden themselves against ills and travail; some stripped themselves of those parts of their bodies which were most dear – their eyes, say, or their organs of generation – fearing that their use, being too pleasurable and too enervating, might weaken and relax the firmness of their souls. But practice is no help in the greatest task we have to perform: dying. We can by habit and practice strengthen ourselves against pain, shame, dire poverty and other occurrences: but as for dying, we can only assay that once; we are all apprentices when it comes to that.

Men were found in ancient days so excellent at using their time that they even assayed tasting and savouring their own death: they bent their minds
on discovering what that crossing-over really was: but they have not come back to tell us about it.

Nemo expergitus extat
Frigida quem semel est vitai pausa sequuta
.

[Who once has felt the icy end of life awakes not again.]

Canius Julius, a noble Roman of particular virtue and steadfastness, was condemned to death by that [C] blackguard
²
[A] Caligula; apart from the many wondrous proofs he gave of his determination, there was the moment when he was about to feel the hand of his executioner: one of his philosopher friends asked him, ‘Well, Canius, how goes it with your Soul at present? What is she doing? What are your thoughts dwelling on?’ – ‘What I am thinking about is preparing and bracing myself with all my might to see whether, in that short brief moment of death, I can perceive anything of the Soul’s departure and whether she herself has any sensation of issuing forth, so that if I do find out anything I may come back if I can to inform my friends.’ He was philosophizing not merely unto death but into death. What assurance was that, what a proud mind, to wish that even his death could teach him something and to feel free to think of anything else but that great event!

[B]
Jus hoc animi morientis habebat
.

[Even when dying he had such sway over his mind.]
³

[A] Yet it does seem that we have some means of breaking ourselves in for death and to some extent of making an assay of it. We can have experience of it, not whole and complete but at least such as not to be useless and to make us more strong and steadfast. If we cannot join battle with death we can advance towards it; we can make reconnaissances and if we cannot drive right up to its stronghold we can at least glimpse it and explore the approaches to it. It is not without good cause that we are brought to look to sleep itself for similarities with death.

[C] How easily we pass from waking to falling asleep! And how little we lose when we become unconscious of the light and of ourselves! It could perhaps even seem that our ability to fall asleep, which deprives us of all action and sensation, is useless and unnatural were it not that Nature by
sleep teaches us that she has made us as much for dying as for living and, already in this life, shows us that everlasting state which she is keeping for us when life is over, to get us accustomed to it and to take away our terror.

[A] But those who have fallen into a swoon after some violent accident and have lost all sensation, have been in my opinion very close to seeing Death’s true and natural face, for it is not to be feared that the fleeting moment at which we pass away comports any hardship or distress, since we cannot have sensation without duration. For us, suffering needs time; and time is so short and precipitate when we die that death must be indiscernible. What we have to fear is Death’s approaches: they can indeed fall within our experience.

Many things appear greater in thought than in fact. I have spent a large part of my life in perfect good health: it was not only perfect but vivacious and boiling over. That state, so full of sap and festivity, made thinking of illness so horrifying that when I came to experience it I found its stabbing pains to be mild and weak compared with my fears.

[B] Here is an everyday experience of mine: if I am sheltered and warm in a pleasant room during a night of storm and tempest, I am dumb-struck with affliction for those then caught out in the open; yet when I am out there myself I never even want to be anywhere else.

[A] The mere thought of being always shut up indoors used to seem quite unbearable to me. Suddenly I was directed to remain there for a week or a month, all restless, distempered and feeble; but I have found that I used to pity the sick much more than I find myself deserving of pity now I am sick myself, and that the power of my imagination made the true essence of actual sickness bigger by half. I hope the same thing will happen with death and that it will not be worth all the trouble I am taking to prepare for it, nor all the aids I am gathering together and invoking to sustain my struggle. But whatever may happen, we can never give ourselves too many vantages!

During the third of our disturbances (or was it the second, I do not remember which) I was out riding one day about one league from my home, which is situated at the very hub of the disturbances in our French Civil Wars; I reckoned I was quite safe and so near my dwelling that I had no need of better protection and had taken an undemanding but not very reliable horse. On my way back there suddenly arose an occasion to use that horse for a task to which it was not much accustomed; one of my men, a big strong fellow, was on a powerful farm-horse with a hopeless mouth but also fresh and vigorous. He wanted to show off and to get
ahead of the others, but he happened to ride it full pelt right in my tracks and came down like a colossus upon me, a little man on a little horse, striking us like a thunderbolt with all his roughness and weight, knocking us over with our legs in the air. So there was my horse thrown down and lying stunned, and me, ten or twelve yards beyond, stretched out dead on my back, my face all bruised and cut about, the sword I had been holding lying more than ten yards beyond that, my belt torn to shreds; and me with no more movement or sensation than a log.

To this day that is the only time I have ever lost consciousness. Those who were with me, having assayed every means in their power to bring me round, thought I was dead; they took me in their arms and struggled back with me to the house, which was about half a French league away.

After having been taken for dead for two good hours, on the way I began to make movements and to inhale because such a great quantity of blood had been discharged into my stomach that my natural powers had to be restored for me to void it. They got me on my feet, when I threw up a bucketful of pure clotted blood; and I had to do the same several times on the way. With that I began to get a bit of life back into me, but only little by little and over so long a stretch of time that at first my sensations were closer to death than to life:

[B]
Perche, dubbiosa anchor del suo ritomo,
Non s’assecura attonita la mente
.

[Because the mind, struck with astonishment, still doubts it will return and remains unsure.]

[A] The memory of this, being deeply planted in my soul, paints for me the face of Death and her portrait so close to nature that it somewhat reconciles me to her.

When I did begin to see anything, my sight was so dead and so weak that I could make out nothing but light:

come quel ch’or apre or chiude
Gli occhi, mezzo tra’l sonno è l’esser desto
.

[as one who now opens his eyes, now shuts them, half sleeping, half awake.]
⁴

As for the faculties of my soul, they progressively came back to life with those of my body. I could see myself covered with blood since my doublet was spattered with the blood I had brought up. The first thought that
occurred to me was that I had been shot in the head by a volley of harquebuses; and indeed several were being fired around us. To me it seemed as though my life was merely clinging to my lips. It seemed, as I shut my eyes, as though I was helping to push it out, and I found it pleasant to languish and to let myself go. It was a thought which only floated on the surface of my soul, as feeble and delicate as everything else, but it was, truly, not merely free from unpleasantness but tinged with that gentle feeling which is felt by those who let themselves glide into sleep.

I believe that those whom we see failing from weakness in the throes of death find themselves in that same state, and I maintain that we pity them without cause, thinking that they are troubled by grievous pains or have their souls full of distressing thoughts. It has always been my belief (despite the opinion of others including Etienne de La Boëtie) that those whom we see lying prostrate in a coma at the approach of death, or overwhelmed by the length of their illness or by an apoplectic fit or by the falling sickness –

[B]    …
vi morbi sæpe coactus
Ante oculos aliquis nostros, ut fulminis ictu,
Concidit, et spumas agit; ingemit, et fremit artus;
Desipit, extentat nervos, torquetur, anhelat,
Inconstanter et in jactando membra fatigat
;

[often, before our very eyes, a man is struck down by illness as if by lightning; he foams at the mouth; he groans and he twitches; he is delirious; he stretches out his legs, he twists and turns; he pants for breath and tires his limbs as he throws himself about;]
⁵

– [A] or by a wound in the head, and whom we can hear groaning and sometimes uttering penetrating sighs which we take for signs indicating that they seem to retain some remnant of consciousness, have, I repeat – no matter what bodily movements they make – both their body and soul buried in stupor.

[B]
Vivit, et est vitæ nescius ipse suæ
.

[He lives, unconscious of his own life.]
⁶

[A] And I could never believe, after so great a stunning of the limbs and so great a weakening of the senses, that their souls could sustain any inward
powers of self-cognition; and consequently that those men had any thoughts to torment them and to make them feel, or be aware of, their miserable condition; and that in consequence they were not much to be pitied.

[B] I can think of no state more horrifying or more intolerable for me than to have my Soul alive and afflicted but with no means of expressing herself; I would say the same of those who are sent to be executed with their tongues cut out, were it not that the most becoming death of that sort is one that is mute, provided that it is accompanied by a firm and grave countenance; the same applies to those wretched prisoners-of-war who fall into the clutches of those vile hangmen–soldiers of these times, by whom they are tortured with every kind of cruel mistreatment to compel them to pay some huge impossible ransom, being held meanwhile under such conditions and in such a place that they have no means of expressing their thoughts or of giving sign of their misery.