Page:Essays Vol 1 (Ives, 1925).pdf/257

This is one of the Essays which are important as expressing Montaigne’s power of criticism. It must be compared and contrasted with a later one, “Of Cripples” (Book III, chapter ii), if we would know Montaigne’s mind. Here he is feeling his way, there he has found it; here he is as a bird beating against the walls of the room into which he has accidentally entered; later he has flown out of the window and is at ease in the space and freedom that are his natural elements. The subject of his discourse in both these Essays is miracles; and it was of these two that Pascal was thinking when he wrote: “How I condemn those who question about miracles! Montaigne speaks in a right manner of them in two places. In one [the later Essay] we see how prudent he is; none the less in the other he is a believer, and throws scorn on the incredulous.”

This is quite true; and yet I think it would be a mistake to draw the inference from these or any other of Montaigne’s writings that he believed less in his later days than in his earlier. He was never, often as he is so called, a sceptic; he only was more clearly aware of his own ignorance, of the necessary limitations of human knowledge, than most men — and by just that was wiser than most men. “Montaigne — the Sceptic” Emerson writes of; but he defines “scepticism” as “the attitude assumed by the thinker in relation to the particulars which society adores, but which he sees to be reverend only in their tendency and spirit. The ground occupied by the sceptic is the vestibule of the temple.”

Montaigne’s thought clarified with years; he saw more and more distinctly the essential principles of life, and more and more definitely and unquestioningly believed in them. How far at any time he believed in the dogmas of the church he never left, I think he himself hardly knew, and very little cared. It was principles of action, not dogmas of faith, that seemed to him of importance. For these he cared almost passionately, strange as the word may sound to some ears when applied to his conditions of feeling. And here, to my apprehension, lies one of the great differences between him and a man of recent days, who has sometimes been compared to him — Renan. Renan’s philosophical detachment from the usual objects of ambition was not due to an absence of ambition, but to peculiar ambitions; whereas Montaigne’s sole ambition was to appear in his own eyes “un honnête homme.” This may be called a common ambition, but few men have felt it with Montaigne’s ardour and intensity, and for very few has it been their sole ambition, as with