snowflakes, and they leave his world a
white page, with all vestiges of previous writings erased. He neither
asseverates nor denies; he merely, as he puts it himself, "juggles,"
treating of idle subjects which he believes nothing at all, for he has
noticed that as soon one denies the possibility of anything, someone
else will say that he has seen it. In short, truth is a near neighbor
to falsehood, and the wise man can only repeat, "Que sais-je?" Let us
live delicately and quietly, finding the world worth enjoying, but not
worth troubling about.

Wide as are the differences between the Greek thinker and the French,
there is something Socratic in the way in which Montaigne takes up
every subject only to suggest doubts of previously held opinion about
it. If he remained outwardly a Catholic, it was because he saw exactly
as much to doubt in other religions. Almost all opinions, he urges,
are taken on authority, for when men begin to reason they draw
diametrically opposite conclusions from the same observed facts. He
was in the civil wars esteemed an enemy by all parties, though it was
only because he had both Huguenot and Catholic friends. "I have seen
in Germany," he wrote, "that Luther hath left as many {632} divisions
and altercations concerning the doubt of his opinions, yea, and more,
than he himself moveth about the Holy Scriptures." The Reformers, in
fact, had done nothing but reform superficial faults and had either
left the essential ones untouched, or increased them. How foolish they
were to imagine that the people could understand the Bible if they
could only read it in their own language!

Montaigne was the first to feel the full significance of the
multiplicity of sects. [Sidenote: Multiplicity of sects] "Is there
any opinion so fantastical, or conceit so extravagant . . . or opinion
so strange," he asked, "that custom hath not established and planted by
laws in some region?" Usage sanctions every monstrosity, including
incest and parricide in some places, and in others "that unsociable
opinion of the mortality of the soul." Indeed, Montaigne comes back to
the point, a man's belief does not depend on his reason, but on where
he was born and how brought up. "To an atheist all writings make for
atheism." "We receive our religion but according to our fashion. . . .
Another country, other testimonies, equal promises, like menaces, might
sembably imprint a clean contrary religion in us."

Piousl