He designates her as a guide as
mild as she is just, whose footprints, blurred over as they are by
artificial ones, we ought everywhere to trace anew. 'Is it not folly,'
he asks with Seneca, [4] 'to bend the body this way, and the mind that
way, and thus to stand distorted between two movements utterly at
variance with each other?'
To bring up and to guide man in accordance with his capacities, is
with him a supreme law. 'Le glorieux chef-d'oeuvre de l'homme,
c'est de vivre a propos.' He, the sage, is already so much in advance
of his century that he yearns for laws and religions which are not
arbitrarily founded, but drawn from the roots and the buds of a
universal Reason, contained in every person not degenerate or
divorced from nature _desnature_. A mass of passages in the
Essays strengthen the opinion that Montaigne was an upright,
noble-minded Humanist, a disciple of free thought, who wished to
fathom human nature, and was anxious to help in delivering mankind
from the fetters of manifold superstitions. Read his Essay on Education;
and the conviction will force itself upon you that in many things he
was far in advance of his time.
But now to the reverse of the medal--to Montaigne as the adherent of
Romanist dogmas!
'The bond,' he says--and here we quote Florio's translation, [5] only
slightly changed into modern orthography--'which should bind our
judgment, tie our will, enforce and join our souls to our Creator,
should be a bond taking his doublings and forces, not from our
considerations, reasons, and passions, but from a divine and
supernatural compulsion, having but one form; one countenance, and
one grace; which is the authority and grace of God.
Pages:
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54