His imagination, he says, has occupied itself with these thoughts
of death more than with anything else. Referring to a saying of
Lykurgos, he approves of graveyards being laid out close to churches
and in the most frequented places of a city, so as to accustom the
common people, women, and children not to be scared at the sight of
a dead person, and to forewarn everyone, by this continual spectacle
of bones, tombs, and funerals, as to our real condition.
Montaigne also, like Hamlet, ponders over suicide. He devotes a whole
Essay [26] to it. Life, he observes, would be a tyranny if the liberty
to die were wanting. For this liberty, he thinks, we have to thank
Nature, as for the most favourable gift which, indeed, deprives us
of all right to complain of our condition. If--as Boiocal, the German
chieftain, [27] said--earth is wanting to us whereon to live, earth
is never wanting to us for death. [28]
That is the wisdom of Montaigne, the admirer of antiquity. But
Montaigne, the modern man, introduces the Essay in which he dares to
utter such bold thoughts with the following restriction:--
'If, as it is said, to philosophise be to doubt, with much more reason
to play pranks (_niaiser_) and to rave, as I do, must be to doubt.
For, to inquire and to discuss, behoves the disciples. The decision
belongs to the chairman (_cathedrant_). My chairman is the
authority of the divine will which regulates us without contradiction,
and which occupies its rank above those human and vain disputes.
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