tic
metaphysical ones. But the scepticism of Montaigne throws doubt
upon every human attempt to get behind the shifting flowing stream
of sense impressions. The rough and ready clue which it offers to the
confusions of life is not drawn from any individualistic "point
d'appui" of pseudo-psychological personal vision, as are these
modern clues to the mystery. It is drawn from nothing more
recondite than the customary traditions, usages, pieties and customs
of the generations of humanity; habits of mind and moods of hope
which have behind them, not so much the psychological insight of
clever individuals--the William Jameses and Bergsons of past
ages--as the primitive and permanent emotions of the masses of average
men and women themselves, confronting the eternal silence.

What the scepticism of Montaigne does is to clear out of the path all
the individual claims to extraordinary insight of the philosophic
great men of the world, by means of showing how, under the
pressure of obstinate and malicious reality, such explanations of the
universe break down and such great men collapse and become as
blind, helpless, groping and uncertain as all the rest of us. Prophets
and rationalists alike, logicians and soothsayers together, so collapse
and fall away; while in their place the long slow patient wisdom of
the centuries, the old shrewd superstitious wisdom of anonymous
humanity rises up out of the pagan earth, and offers us our only
solution.

Not that what we get in this humble way is really a solution at all.
Rather is it a modest working substitute for such solutions, a dim
lamp flickering in a great darkness, a faint shadow falling on a long
uncertain road; a road of which we can see neither the beginning nor
the end, and along which we have nothing better to guide us than
such pathetic "omens of the way" as old wives' tales repeat and old
traditions hand down from mouth to mouth.

To certain minds the condition of the human race under the burden
of such a twilight may well seem intolerable. To Montaigne it was
not intolerable. It was his element, his pleasant Arcadia, his natural
home. He loved the incongruities and inconsistencies of such a
world; its outrageous Rabelaisian jests, its monstrous changes and
chances, its huge irrelevancy. He loved its roguish and goblinish
refusal to give up its secret to grave and solemn intellects, taking
upon themselves the role of prophets. He loved a world that hides its
treasures