The Essays, vol 19 | Page 4

to sample the author's ideas before making
an entire meal of them. D.W.]

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 judges in cutting out for them
their several parcels; he was not aware that there is as much liberty and
latitude in the interpretation of laws as in their form; and they but fool
themselves, who think to lessen and stop our disputes by recalling us to
the express words of the Bible: forasmuch as our mind does not find
the field less spacious wherein to controvert the sense of another than
to deliver his own; and as if there were less animosity and tartness in
commentary than in invention. We see how much he was mistaken, for
we have more laws in France than all the rest of the world put together,
and more than would be necessary for the government of all the worlds
of Epicurus:
"Ut olim flagitiis, sic nunc legibus, laboramus."
["As we were formerly by crimes, so we are now overburdened by
laws."--Tacitus, Annal., iii. 25.]
and yet we have left so much to the opinions and decisions of our
judges that there never was so full a liberty or so full a license. What
have our legislators gained by culling out a hundred thousand particular
cases, and by applying to these a hundred thousand laws? This number
holds no manner of proportion with the infinite diversity of human
actions; the multiplication of our inventions will never arrive at the
variety of examples; add to these a hundred times as many more, it will
still not happen that, of events to come, there shall one be found that, in
this vast number of millions of events so chosen and recorded, shall so
tally with any other one, and be so exactly coupled and matched with it
that there will not remain some circumstance and diversity which will
require a diverse judgment. There is little relation betwixt our actions,
which are in perpetual mutation, and fixed and immutable laws; the
most to be desired are those that are the most rare, the most simple and
general; and I am even of opinion that we had better have none at all
than to have them in so prodigious a number as we have.

Nature always gives them better and happier than those we make
ourselves; witness the picture of the Golden Age of the Poets and the
state wherein we see nations live who have no other. Some there are,
who for their only judge take the first passer-by that travels along their
mountains, to determine their cause; and others who, on their market
day, choose out some one amongst them upon the spot to decide their
controversies. What danger would there be that the wisest amongst us
should so determine ours, according to occurrences and at sight,
without obligation of example and consequence? For every foot its own
shoe. King Ferdinand, sending colonies to the Indies, wisely provided
that they should not carry along with them any students of
jurisprudence, for fear lest