philosophic construction.

It would be little more difficult to show the debt of the _Esprit des
Lois_ to Montaigne's inspiration, even if we had not Montesquieu's
avowal that "In most authors I see the man who writes: in Montaigne, the
man who thinks."[154] That is precisely Montaigne's significance, in
sociology as in philosophy. His whole activity is a seeking for causes;
and in the very act of undertaking to "humble reason" he proceeds to
instruct and re-edify it by endless corrective comparison of facts. To
be sure, he departed so far from his normal _bonne foi_ as to affect to
think there could be no certainties while parading a hundred of his own,
and with these some which were but pretences; and his pet doctrine of
daimonic fortune is not ostensibly favourable to social science; but in
the concrete, he is more of a seeker after rational law than any
humanist of his day. In discussing sumptuary laws, he anticipates the
economics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as in discussing
ecclesiastical law he anticipates the age of tolerance; in discussing
criminal law, the work of Beccaria; in discussing _a priori_ science,
the protest of Bacon; and in discussing education, many of the ideas of
to-day. And it would be difficult to cite, in humanist literature before
our own century, a more comprehensive expression of the idea of natural
law than this paragraph of the APOLOGY:

"If nature enclose within the limits of her ordinary
progress, as all other things, so the beliefs, the
judgments, the opinions of men, if they have their
revolutions, their seasons, their birth, and their death,
even as cabbages; if heaven doth move, agitate, and roll
them at his pleasure, what powerful and permanent authority
do we ascribe unto them. If, by uncontrolled experience, we
palpably touch [orig. "Si par experience nous touchons a la
main," _i.e._, nous maintenons, nous pretendons: an idiom
which Florio has not understood] that the form of our being
depends of the air, of the climate, and of the soil wherein
we are born, and not only the hair, the stature, the
complexion, and the countenance, but also the soul's
faculties ... in such manner that as fruits and beasts do
spring up diverse and different, so men are born, either
more or less war-like, martial, just, temperate, and docile;
here subject to wine, there to theft and whoredom, here
inclined to superstition, there addicted to misb