ood sense: honest doubt is a mark of genius almost. In his
reflective moments the reasonable man inclines to believe that reason
can prove nothing--except what he believes. How fearlessly did those
nineteenth-century apostles of Reason make havoc in the parlours of meek
curates and spinsters, thundering against the altogether insufficient
grounds on which were accepted the surprising adventures of Noah and his
Ark! But when they were told that Reason was as unfriendly to their
moral code and the methods of science as to the Book of Genesis, they
clapped her in jail without more ado. Reason affords no solid grounds
for holding a good world better than a bad, and the sacred law of cause
and effect itself admits of no logical demonstration. "Prison or the Mad
House," cried the men of good sense; Montaigne was more
thorough--"Tolerance," said he.

Like the man-in-the-street, Montaigne found refuge from reason in
conviction. Until we have formulated a proposition reason has no excuse
for interference; and emotional convictions precede intellectual
propositions. Only, as we have no means of judging between convictions,
we must remember that the firm and disinterested convictions of others
are as respectable as our own: again we must tolerate. To credit
Montaigne with that sublime liberality which is summed up in the most
sublime of all Christian aphorisms--"Judge not, and thou shalt not be
judged"--would be absurd. Montaigne was a Pagan, and his high conception
of tolerance and humanity was derived entirely from the great pagan
philosophers. Of them he was a profound and sincere disciple, so it is
not surprising that his ideas were far in advance of those of his age,
and of ours. For instance, he hated brutality. Both his own nature and
that fine Athenian humanity which by study he had made his own were
revolted by barbarous punishments. That there may be men too vile to
live seemed to him, doubtless, a tenable opinion--he could forget all
about the fallibility of human judgments--but "Quant a moy," he says,
"en la iustice mesme, tout ce qui est au dela de la mort simple, me
semble pure cruaute." To hurt others for our own good is not, he dimly
perceived, to cut a very magnanimous figure. To call it hurting them for
their own, he would have thought damnable; but that piece of hypocrisy
is the invention of a more enlightened age. Torture he abhorred.
Assuredly Montaigne would have been more at home in the streets of
Periclean