Note 39 — Chapter XIII · THE RISE OF MODERN FREETHOUGHT

That philosophy was not, indeed, an original construction: he found it to his hand partly in the deism of his favourite Seneca; partly in the stoical ethic of Epictetus, then so much appreciated in France; and partly in the Hypotyposes of Sextus Empiricus, of which the Latin translation is known to have been among his books; from which he took several of the mottoes inscribed on his library ceiling,39 and from which he frequently quotes towards the end of his Apology. The body of ideas compacted on these bases cannot be called a system: it was not in Montaigne’s nature to frame a logical scheme of thought; and he was far from being the philosophic skeptic he set out to be40 by way of confounding at once the bigots and the atheists. He was essentially ondoyant et divers, as he freely admitted. As he put it in a passage added to the later editions of the Essais,41 he was a kind of métis, belonging neither to the camp of ignorant faith nor to that of philosophic conviction, whether believing or unbelieving. He early avows that, had he written what he thought and knew of the affairs of his times, he would have published judgments “à mon gré mesme et selon raison,” in his opinion true and reasonable, but “illégitimes et punissables.”42 Again, “whatsoever is beyond the compass of custom, we deem likewise to be beyond the compass of reason, God knows how unreasonably, for the most part.”43 Yet in the next breath he will exclaim at those who demand changes. Often he comments keenly on the incredible readiness of men to go to war over trifles; but in another mood he accuses the nobility of his day of unwillingness to take up arms “except upon some urgent and extreme necessity.”44 In the same page he will tell us that he is “easily carried away by the throng,” and that he is yet “not very easy to change, forsomuch as I perceive a like weakness in contrary opinions.”45 “I am very easily to be directed by the world’s public order,”46 is the upshot of his easy meditations. And a conformist he remained in practice to the last, always bearing himself dutifully towards Mother Church, and generally observing the proprieties, though he confesses that he “made it a conscience to eat flesh upon a fish day.”47