The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Essays of Montaigne, Volume 19
by Michel de Montaigne

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Title: The Essays of Montaigne, Volume 19

Author: Michel de Montaigne

Release Date: September 17, 2006 [EBook #3599]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ESSAYS OF MONTAIGNE, VOLUME 19 ***

Produced by David Widger

ESSAYS OF MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE

Translated by Charles Cotton

Edited by William Carew Hazilitt

1877

CONTENTS OF VOLUME 19.

XIII. Of Experience.

CHAPTER XIII

OF EXPERIENCE

There is no desire more natural than that of knowledge. We try all ways
that can lead us to it; where reason is wanting, we therein employ
experience,

"Per varios usus artem experientia fecit,
Exemplo monstrante viam,"

["By various trials experience created art, example shewing the
way."--Manilius, i. 59.]

which is a means much more weak and cheap; but truth is so great a thing
that we ought not to disdain any mediation that will guide us to it.
Reason has so many forms that we know not to which to take; experience
has no fewer; the consequence we would draw from the comparison of events
is unsure, by reason they are always unlike. There is no quality so
universal in this image of things as diversity and variety. Both the
Greeks and the Latins and we, for the most express example of similitude,
employ that of eggs; and yet there have been men, particularly one at
Delphos, who could distinguish marks of difference amongst eggs so well
that he never mistook one for another, and having many hens, could tell
which had laid it.

Dissimilitude intrudes itself of itself in our works; no art can arrive
at perfect similitude: neither Perrozet nor any other can so carefully
polish and blanch the backs of his cards that some gamesters will not
distinguish them by seeing them only shuffled by another. Resemblance
does not so much make one as difference makes another. Nature has
obliged herself to make nothing other that was not unlike.

And yet I am not much pleased with his opinion, who thought by the
multitude of laws to curb the authority of judge