The Pursuit of Certainty. Shirley Robin Letwin

of being. Montaigne saw human life as Hume had hoped men could. His essays were a continuous lesson in moderation, opposed to every kind of extremism. He taught men to accept themselves for what they were, and to obey the law of their own nature rather than pretend to divinity. Only the subject of holiness and Christian zeal aroused him to severity. Like Hume, he was more offended by Protestantism than by Catholicism because he felt it was less mischievous to bend the knee than the reason. And he, too, warned men to beware of those who bore a sanctified appearance and imposed a burden of austerities. No zeal, he said, produced so much misery as Christian zeal, which moved men to hate and cruelty, never to benignity, goodness, or temperance.

      Montaigne’s descriptions of virtue could hardly have expressed better Hume’s own thoughts, and were echoed again and again in Hume’s work. Virtue was not, Montaigne said, “pitched on the top of a high, steep, or inaccessible hill”; she held her mansion “in a fair, flourishing, and pleasant plain”; she was “lovely, equally delicious and courageous, protesting herself to be a professed and irreconcilable enemy to all sharpness, austerity, fear, and compulsion; having nature for her guide, fortune and voluptuousness for her companions.”¹ The priests had taught men to disdain the joys of life on earth and they had produced as a result nothing but mischief.

      For if men tried to behave like angels, they succeeded only in becoming monsters—“instead of uplifting themselves, they degrade themselves.” They might as well renounce breathing as bodily pleasures. Nature has seen to it that satisfying our necessities should also be pleasurable to us—“it does wrong to the great and all powerful Donor to refuse His gift, to impair it and deface it.”² The most difficult and the first thing for a man to know was how to live the life proper to man:

      It is an absolute perfection, and as it were divine for a man to know how to enjoy his existence loyally. We seek for other conditions because we understand not the use of our own and we go outside of ourselves because we know not what is happening there. Thus it is in vain that we mount upon stilts, for, if we walk upon them, yet must we walk with our own legs; and though we sit upon the highest throne in the world, yet we do but sit upon our own behind.³

      There was a remarkable correspondence, too, between Hume’s antipathy to the Kirk’s commands and to “the eternal and immutable relations” promulgated by the rational moralists, and Montaigne’s dislike of fixity, of general rules, of any rigid schemes. For Montaigne denied that man could commune with the Divine Intellect, or discover any simple coherent theory that could explain or direct human activity. Diversity, Montaigne insisted, was the rule on earth; there were no clear, hard lines between good and bad, virtue and vice, for all virtues were not equally salutary, and some vices were worse than others. Nor did any single set of choices deserve supremacy—that way lay the opposite of life. “We do not live, we only exist, if we hold ourselves bound and driven by necessity to follow one course alone. The finest spirits are those that show the largest choice, the greatest suppleness.”¹ Man’s life was like the wind; and the wind, “more wisely than we, loves to bluster, and to be in agitation and is content with its own functions, without desiring stability, solidity, qualities that are not its own.”²

      Man was and should be a bundle of contradictory things, a flux of impressions—“in everything and everywhere … but patchwork and motley.”³ That was the moral of Montaigne’s essays, where he tried to draw a true man, with all his vacillation and mixture, not a pure, abstract kind of creature. For such a being, ready-made rules of conduct were neither possible nor desirable. He had better rely on experience and example, than on the lofty and elaborate reasonings of philosophers.

      All this in Montaigne showed him to be a kindred spirit. How striking it was then to find his view of human life associated with a unique description of the relation between reason and passion, mind and body. Montaigne did not merely say that passion ruled, or that reason followed more often than the divines admitted. He came near to denying altogether that man was a divided nature, an animal endowed with reason, whose highest affinity was with God. His radical insight was that nature was not split between brutes and spirits, with the uncomfortable human mixture in between, but a continuous line in which spirit or reason played its part at every stage.

      Man as seen by Montaigne had much more in common with the animals than he liked to admit. There was a natural language common to children and animals, and there were many evidences of intelligence in the animals. Man was conceived, born, and fed, he moved, acted, lived and died like the beasts. Only vanity and presumption led him to suppose he had a special place in creation. His true condition was not that of a holy spirit unhappily sullied by its bond with matter; it was a mingled, homely condition, with its own pleasures and privileges, and its own kind of guidance.

      There was no conflict between spirit and matter, indeed nothing more than a narrow seam between mind and body. It was wrong for the soul to draw apart, to despise and desert the body; indeed it could not really do so except through some “ill-shaped, apish trick.” Instead the soul had better “strike fresh alliance with the body, embrace it, cherish it, control and counsel it… marry the body and serve it as a husband to the end that their poverty should not appear to be different and contrary, but one and the same.”¹ Not only passion and desire needed to be controlled; spirit and mind could just as easily exceed their proper limits, and when they did, they produced wild dreams and chimeras. Virtue depended not on suppressing nature, nor on climbing higher and higher toward God, but on knowing how to judge and circumscribe one’s ambitions. Whatever is sufficient is great—“There is nothing so fine and so justifiable as to play the man well and truly.”²

      Thus Montaigne crystallized for Hume what others had suggested—the need to formulate a philosophy based on new assumptions about human nature, a philosophy that would restore man’s wholeness, and undo all the mischief wrought by a long tradition that had divided man between holy reason and brutish passion. Those who knew something more than hypotheses, who took the trouble to look at man as he really was, could see that the established formulas for human life had inflicted useless pain because they were not suited to the true human condition. There is no better statement of Hume’s guiding motive in his philosophical enterprise than his statement opening Book II of the Treatise:

      Nothing is more usual in philosophy and even in common life than to talk of the combat of passion and reason, to give the preference to reason, and to assert that men are only so far virtuous as they conform to its dictates. Every rational creature, ’tis said, is oblig’d to regulate his actions by reason; and if any other motive or principle challenge the direction of his conduct, he ought to oppose it, ’till it be entirely subdu’d or at least brought to conformity with that superior principle … nor is there an ampler field, as well for metaphysical arguments, and popular declamations, than this supposed preeminence of reason above passion. The eternity, invariableness, and divine origin of the former have been display’d to the best advantage: The blindness, unconstancy, and deceitfulness of the latter have been as strongly insisted on. In order to shew the fallacy of all this philosophy, I shall endeavour to prove first, that reason alone can never be a motive to any action of the will; and secondly, that it can never oppose passion in the direction of the will.¹

      In fact, Hume did more in the end. He established the principles of human nature on an entirely new foundation; not content with “taking now and then a castle or village on the frontier,” he marched up “directly to the capital or centre” of the sciences.² He attacked the basis of all traditional notions on which children had been brought up and societies governed, men discussed, praised, and blamed. He did not care to deny the existence of God. What he proposed was far more radical than any declared atheism.

      It was no wonder that he drove himself feverishly, and then suffered depression, illness, and doubt. Shortly before leaving for France he wrote to Dr. Cheyne that at the age of eighteen,

      there seem’d to be open’d up to me a new Scene of Thought which transported me beyond Measure, and made me, with an Ardor natural to young men, throw up every other Pleasure or Business to apply entirely to it.… I found that the moral Philosophy transmitted to us by Antiquity, labor’d under the same Inconvenience that has been found in their natural Philosophy, of being entirely Hypothetical, and depending