Page:Essays Vol 1 (Ives, 1925).pdf/260

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
240
ESSAYS OF MONTAIGNE

He who had never seen a river thought that the first he came to was the ocean; and the largest things with which we are acquainted, we believe them to be the utmost that Nature can do in that kind.

(b) Scilicet et fluvius, qui non est maximus, ei est
Qui non ante aliquem majorem vidit, et ingens
Arbor homoque videtur; (a) et omnia de genere omni
Maxima que vidit quisque, hec ingentia fingit.[1]

(c) Consuetudine oculorum assuescunt animi, neque admirantur, neque requirunt rationes earum rerum quas semper vident.[2] The novelty of things, more than their importance, spurs us on to seek the causes of them.

(a) We must judge things with more reverence for this infinite power of Nature,[3] and with more recognition of our ignorance and weakness. How many improbable things there are, testified to by people worthy of credence, which, if we can not be convinced about them, should at least be left in suspense; for to condemn them as impossible is to pretend, by a rash assumption, to knowledge of the extent of possibility. (c) If we understood clearly the difference there is between the impossible and the unusual, and between what is contrary to the order of the course of nature and what is contrary to the common opinion of mankind, neither believing hastily nor disbelieving lightly, we should observe the rule, “Nothing too much,” enjoined by Chilo.[4]

(a) When we find in Froissart[5] that the comte de Foix learned in Béarn of the defeat of King John of Castile at Juberoth the day after it happened, and the manner of this

  1. ↑ To be sure, a river which is not very great seems so to a man who has not previously seen a greater one; and a tree appears huge, and so does a man; and an object of any kind, if it be greater than has been seen, is supposed to be large. — Lucretius, VI, 674.
  2. ↑ Our minds become accustomed to things from the familiarity of our eyes with them, and feel no wonder, and ask no questions about the causes of things which they continually behold. — Cicero, De Nat. Deor., II, 38.
  3. ↑ In earlier editions, puissance de Dieu.
  4. ↑ This epigram is ascribed to various sages — by Diogenes Laertius to Solon; but it is oftenest given to Chilo. See Diogenes Laertius, Life of Thales; Aristotle, Rhetoric, II, 12; Pliny, Natural History, VII, 32.
  5. ↑ Book III, chap. 17; it was in 1385.
This article is issued from Wikisource. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.