The Complete Essays (100 page)

[A] The jolts and shocks which our soul receives from the passions of the body greatly affect her, but her own proper passions do so even more. They have such a hold on her that it could perhaps be maintained that her motions and propulsion come from her own tempests: without those agitations she would be becalmed like a ship on the open sea, abandoned by the helpful winds.
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Anyone who did maintain that, [C] following
the Peripatetics, [A] would do us little wrong, since it is recognized that most of the finer actions of the soul require – and can only arise from – such passionate impulses. It is said that valour cannot be achieved without the help of anger –

[C]
Semper Ajax fortis, fortissimus tamen in furore
[Ajax was always brave, but bravest when mad with fury]
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–

that we do not attack the wicked or our foes vigorously enough, unless we are angry; and that, to get justice out of judges, counsel must move them to anger. Strong desires motivated Themistocles; they motivated Demosthenes and forced philosophers to travel far and work late: and they lead us too towards useful ends: honour, learning, health.

In addition, our soul’s weakness when faced with pain and suffering serves to nurture repentance and remorse within our conscience and to feel the chastisements with which God scourges us as well as the chastisements of political punishment. [A] Compassion acts as a stimulus to [B] clemency; prudent self-preservation
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[C] and self-control [B] are awakened by our fear; and how many fair actions are awakened by ambition? And how many by arrogance? [A] In short, not one eminent or dashing virtue can exist without some strong, unruly emotion. Was this one of the considerations which moved the Epicureans to relieve God of all care and concern for the affairs of men, since even the very actions of his goodness could not be directed towards us without disturbing his repose with passions – which are the goads and the incitements which drive the soul towards virtuous actions? [C] Or else did they think differently, taking the passions to be like storms, shamefully deflowering the soul of her tranquillity?
‘Ut maris tranquillitas intelligitur, nulla ne minima quidem aura fluctus commovente: sic animi quietus et placatus status cernitur, quum perturbatio nulla est qua moveri queat’
[We know the sea is tranquil when not even the slightest breath of wind ruffles the surface; so too the soul is calm and at peace when there is no emotion seeking to disturb it].
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[A] What varied thoughts and reasons, what conflicting notions, are presented to us by our varied passions! What certainty can we find in something so changeable and unstable as the soul, subject by her condition to the dominance of perturbations, [C] and who never moves except under external constraint. [A] If our judgement is in the hands of illness itself and of turbulence; if it is obliged to receive its impressions from foolhardiness and madness: what certainty can we expect from it?

[C] Is it not somewhat bold of Philosophy to think that men perform their greatest deeds, those nearest to the divine, when they are beside themselves, frenzied and out of their senses? Our amendment comes when our reason slumbers or when we are deprived of it; the two natural ways of entering into the council chamber of the gods and to have foreknowledge of Destiny are sleep and frenzy.
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Here is a pleasant thought: when the passions bring dislocation to our reason, we become virtuous; when reason is driven out by frenzy or by sleep, that image of death, we become prophets and seers. I have never been more inclined to believe Philosophy! It was a pure enthusiasm – breathed into the spirit of Philosophy by holy Truth herself – which wrenched from her, against her normal teaching, that the tranquil state of our soul, the quiet state, the sanest state that Philosophy can obtain for her, is not her best state. Our waking sleeps more than our sleeping; our wisdom is less wise than our folly; our dreams are worth more than our discourse; and to remain inside ourselves is to adopt the worst place of all.

But does Philosophy not realize that we are clever enough to notice that that maxim which makes the spirit so great, so perfect, and so clear-sighted when detached from Man, and yet so dark, so ignorant and so earthy when it remains in Man, is produced by the very spirit which itself forms part of dark, ignorant and earthy Man. And so, for that very cause, is neither to be trusted nor believed?
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[A] Being of a soft and heavy complexion, I do not have much experience of those disturbances which bear the mind away and which mostly take our souls by surprise without giving them time to know
themselves. But there is a passion in the heart of the young (induced, they say, by idleness); those who have assayed resisting its power, even when it takes an untrammelled, moderate course, find that it gives a good idea of the abrupt changes and deteriorations which our judgement can suffer. There was a time when I tensed myself to resist and parry its assaults (for I am so far from being one who welcomes vices, that I never give in to them unless they compel me to); despite my resistance, I would feel it within me as it was born, and as it grew and developed; I was lively: my eyes were open. Yet it would seize me, possess me. It was like a kind of drunkenness; everything took on an unaccustomed appearance; I would see the woman I yearned for becoming manifestly more attractive, her qualities swelling and growing as the wind of my imagination blew upon them; the difficulties facing my courtship would seem to become easy and smooth; my reason and conscience would withdraw into the background. Then, with lightning speed, at the very instant when my fire had burned itself out, my soul would recover another state, another judgement, another way of looking at things; it was now the difficulties of getting out of it which seemed immense and insurmountable; the very same things took on very different tastes and appearances from the ones offered me by inflamed desire.

Which was right? Pyrrho knows nothing about that!

We are never free from illness: fevers blow hot and cold; we drop straight from symptoms of a burning passion into symptoms of a shivery one. [B] The more I jumped forward, the more I now leap back:

Qualis ubi alterno procurrens gurgite pontus
Nunc ruit ad terras, scopulisque superjacit undam,
Spumeus, extremamque sinu perfundit arenam;
Nunc rapidus retro atque aestu revoluta resorbens
Saxa fugit, littusque vado labente relinquit
.

[Thus does the sea with alternate tides now dash up the beach, covering the rocks with its foaming billows, and seeking out the deep recesses of the sand; and then it quickly turns, sucking back the shingle and fleeing the rocks, as its sinking waters relinquish the beach.]
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[A] This very awareness of my mutability has had the secondary effect of engendering a certain constancy in my opinions. I have hardly changed any of my first and natural ones, since whatever likelihood novelty may
appear to have, I do not change easily, for fear of losing in the exchange. As I do not have the capacity for making a choice myself, I accept Another’s choice and remain where God put me. Otherwise I would not know how to save myself from endlessly rolling.

[AI] And thus, by God’s grace, without worry or a troubled conscience, I have kept myself whole, within the ancient beliefs of our religion, through all the sects and schisms that our century has produced. [A] The writings of the Ancients – I mean the good, ample, solid ones – tempt me and stir me almost at will; the one I am reading always seems the most firm. All appear right in their turn, even though they do contradict each other. The ease with which good minds can make anything they wish seem likely, so that there is nothing so strange but that they will set about lending it enough colour to take in a simple man like me, shows how weak their proofs really are. For three thousand years the skies and the stars were all in motion; everyone believed it; then [C] Cleanthes of Samos or, according to Theophrastus, Nicetas of Syracuse [A] decided to maintain that it was the Earth which did the moving,
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[C] revolving on its axis through the oblique circle of the Zodiac; [A] and in our own time Copernicus has given such a good basis to this doctrine that he can legitimately draw all the right astronomical inferences from it. What lesson are we to learn from that, except not to worry about which of the two opinions may be true? For all we know, in a thousand years’ time another opinion will overthrow them both.
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Sic volvenda aetas conmmutat tempora rerum:
Quod fuit in pretio, fit nullo denique honore;
Porro aliud succedit, et e contemptibus exit,
Inque dies magis appetitur, floretque repertum
Laudibus, et miro est mortales inter honore
.

[Thus the rolling years give various things their time; what used to be highly esteemed is now worthless; something else comes out from discredit and succeeds the old; it is daily sought for; everyone praises it and it is wondrously honoured among mortal men.]
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Thus, whenever some new doctrine is offered to us we have good cause for distrusting it and for reflecting that the contrary was in fashion before that was produced; it was overturned by this later one, but some third discovery may overturn that too, one day. Before the principles which Aristotle introduced came into repute, other principles satisfied human reason just as his satisfy us now. What letters-patent do Aristotle’s principles have, what exclusive privilege, that the course of our inquiries should stop with them and that they have the right to our assent for all time? They are not exempt: they can be kicked out as their predecessors were. When some new argument presses me hard, it is up to me to decide whether someone else may find a satisfactory reply even if I cannot; for to believe everything that may look true just because we ourselves cannot refute it, is very simple-minded. From that it would follow that the belief of the common people – [C] and all of us are common people – [A] would blow about like a weathercock: for their minds, soft and non-resistant, would constantly be forced to accept different impressions, each one effacing the trace of the other. Anyone who feels too weak to resist should follow legal practice and reply that he will consult counsel – or refer to the wiser heads who trained him.

How long has medicine been in the world? They say that some newcomer called Paracelsus is changing or reversing the entire order of the old rules, maintaining that, up to the present, medicine has merely served to kill people. He will be able to prove that easily enough, I believe, but it would not be very wise for me, I think, to test his new empiricism at the risk of my life. [AI] ‘Believe nobody,’ as the saying goes. ‘Anyone can
say
anything.’
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One of those men who champion novelties and reformations in natural science told me recently that all the Ancients had evidently been wrong about the nature and movements of the winds; if I would only listen he would make me clearly see the palpable truth. After showing some patience in hearing his arguments (which looked extremely probable) I said, ‘What! Those who were navigating according to the rules of Theophrastus, were they really going West when steering East? Were they sailing sideways or astern?’ – ‘That is as may be,’ he replied, ‘but they certainly got it wrong.’ I then retorted that I would rather be guided by results than by reason – for they are always clashing! I have even been told that in geometry (which claims to have reached the highest degree of
certainty among the sciences) there are irrefutable demonstrations which overturn truth based on experience. Jacques Peletier, for example, in my own home, told me how he had discovered two lines drawing ever closer together but which, as he could prove, would meet only in infinity.
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And the sole use Pyrrhonists have for their arguments and their reason is to undermine whatever experience shows to be probable; it is wonderful how far our supple reason will go along with their project of denying factual evidence: they can prove that we do not move, that we do not speak and that there is no such thing as weight or heat, with the same force of argument as we have when we prove the most likely things to be true.

Ptolemy was a great figure; he established the boundaries of the known world; all the ancient philosophers thought they had the measure of it, save for a few remote islands which might have escaped their knowledge. A thousand years ago, if you had questioned the data of cosmography, you would have been accused of Pyrrhonizing – of doubting opinions accepted by everybody; [B] it used to be heresy to allow the existence of the Antipodes!
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[A] But now that in our century new discoveries have revealed, not the odd island or the odd individual country, but an infinite land-mass, almost equal in size to the part we already knew, geographers today proceed to assure us that everything has really been seen and discovered this time.

Nam quod adest praesto, placet, et pollere videtur
.
[For we are pleased with what is to hand; it works its spell.]
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Since Ptolemy was once mistaken over his basic tenets, would it not be foolish to trust what moderns are saying now?
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[C] Is it not more likely that this huge body which we call the Universe is very different
from what we think? Plato holds that its entire aspect changes – that there comes a point when the heavens, the stars and the sun reverse the motions which we can see there and actually rotate from East to West.
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The Egyptian priests told Herodotus that since the time of their first king, some eleven thousand years ago – (and they showed him the statues of all these kings, portrayed from life) – the Sun had changed its course four times, and the sea and land had changed places. They also said that no date within time can be ascribed to the origin of the world;
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Aristotle and Cicero agree with that; and one of our own people maintained that the world exists from all eternity but has a cycle of deaths and rebirths; he cited Solomon and Isaiah as witnesses, his aim being to counter objections to God’s having been a Creator who had once never created anything, an idle God who only cast aside his idleness when he set his hand to this enterprise and therefore a God subject to change.
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