ir own souls and enjoy the rare sensations
permitted to their own physical and psychological susceptibility, as
the great world sweeps by them.

I sometimes think that the wisdom of Montaigne, with its essential
roots in physiological well-being, is best realised and understood
when on some misty autumn morning, full of the smell of leaves,
one lies, just newly awakened out of pleasant dreams, and watches
the sunshine on wall and window and floor, and listens to the traffic
of the town or the noises of the village. It is then, with the sweet
languor of awakening, that one seems conscious of some ineffable
spiritual secret to be drawn from the material sensations of the
nerves of one's body.

Montaigne, with all his gravity, is quite shameless in the assumption
that the details of his bodily habits form an important part, not by
any means to be neglected, of the picture he sets out to give of
himself.

And those who read Montaigne with sympathetic affinity will find
themselves growing into the habit of making much of the sensations
of their bodies. They will not rush foolishly and stupidly, like dull
economic machines, from bedroom to "lunch counter" and from
"lunch counter" to office. They will savour every moment which can
be called _their own_ and they will endeavour to enlarge such
moments by any sort of economic or domestic change.

They will make much of the sensations of waking and bathing and
eating and drinking and going to sleep; just as they make much of
the sensations of reading admirable books. They will cross the road
to the sunny side of the street; they will pause by the toy-shops and
the flower-shops. They will go out into the fields, before breakfast,
to look for mushrooms.

They will miss nothing of the caprices and humours and comedies of
every day of human life; for they will know that in the final issue
none of us are wiser than the day and what the day brings; none of
us wiser than the wisdom of street and field and market-place; the
wisdom of the common people, the wisdom of our mother, the earth.

In the enjoyment of life spent thus fastidiously in the cultivation of
our own sensations, and thus largely and generously in a broad
sympathy with the emotions of the masses of men, there is room for
many kinds of love. But of all the love passions which destiny offers
us, none lends itself better to the peculiar path we have chosen than
the passion of friendship. It is the love of an "alter eg