Here is one of those sagacious historical scepticisms, in which Montaigne was so fond of poising his mind between opposite views. It occurs in his essay entitled, “Of the Uncertainty of our Judgments:”
Amongst other oversights Pompey is charged withal at the battle of Pharsalia, he is condemned for making his army stand still to receive the enemy’s charge, “by reason that” (I shall here steal Plutarch’s own words, which are better than mine) “he by so doing deprived himself of the violent impression the motion of running adds to the first shock of arms, and hindered that clashing of the combatants against one another, which is wont to give them greater impetuosity and fury, especially when they come to rush in with their utmost vigor, their courages increasing by the shouts and the career; ’tis to render the soldiers’ ardor, as a man may say, more reserved and cold.” This is what he says. But, if Cæsar had come by the worse, why might it not as well have been urged by another, that, on the contrary, the strongest and most steady posture of fighting is that wherein a man stands planted firm, without motion; and that they who are steady upon the march, closing up, and reserving their force within themselves for the push of the business, have a great advantage against those who are disordered, and who have already spent half their breath in running on precipitately to the charge? Besides that, an army is a body made up of so many individual members, it is impossible for it to move in this fury with so exact a motion as not to break the order of battle, and that the best of them are not engaged before their fellows can come on to help them.
The sententiousness of Montaigne may be illustrated by transferring here a page of brief excerpts from the “Essays,” collected by Mr. Bayle St. John in his biography of the author. The apothegmatic or proverbial quality in Montaigne had a very important sequel of fruitful influence on subsequent French writers, as chapters to follow in this volume will abundantly show. In reading the sentences sub-joined, you will have the sensation of coming suddenly upon a treasure-trove of coined proverbial wisdom:
Our minds are never at home, but ever beyond home.
I will take care, if possible, that my death shall say nothing that my life has not said.
Life in itself is neither good nor bad: it is the place of what is good or bad.
Knowledge should not be stuck on to the mind, but incorporated in it.
Irresolution seems to me the most common and apparent vice of our nature.
Age wrinkles the mind more than the face.