beasts goes on to include some marvellous tales, resembling those we shall have to deal with later in the “Apology”; and about these he divests himself of responsibility by closing with a “So they say. For the anecdotes that I borrow, I refer them to the consciences of those from whom I receive them.” He regards his conclusions as founded on reason — as having, as it were, a sort of a priori truth; and if these examples happen to be false, and do not therefore strengthen his arguments, let some one else find others that do; there must be plenty of them, he thinks: “If I do not rightly comment on them, let another comment for me.” The last paragraph of the Essay adds Plutarch’s authority to this theory of the slightness of connection between a text and its illustrations. All the last page was added in 1595.
To return, for a moment, to an earlier page (139): where he now says: “Some one saw lately at my home a cat watching a bird,” he said in 1580, not “some one,” but “My father saw one day” — a pleasant little picture of the elder Montaigne walking in his garden with open eyes. And he says that all this Essay — “this vagary” — has arisen from a tale told him “by an apothecary in the household of my late father.”
Very original and interesting considerations of the historical truth in his own writings conclude the Essay.
FORTIS imaginatio generat casum,[1] say the men of learning. I am one of those persons who feel a very great force in the imagination; (c) every one is aware of the shock, but some are overthrown by it.[2] Its thrust transpierces me, and my art is to elude it, for lack of strength to resist it. I should live in the company only of healthy and joyous persons. The sight of another’s anguish causes me physical anguish, and my own sensations have often usurped the sensations of a third person. A cougher constantly coughing irritates my lungs and my throat; I visit more reluctantly sick people in whom duty interests me, than those who less demand my attention, and whom I think of less. I catch the disease I study and give it to myself. I do not think it strange that it[3] brings fevers and death to those who let it have its way and who encourage it.[4]
- ↑ A strong imagination begets the event. — Source unknown.
- ↑ Chacun en est heurté, mais aucuns en sont renversez. In 1580-1588, the sentence read: Chacun en est feru, mais aucuns en sont transformez.
- ↑ That is, the imagination.
- ↑ Later, in chapter 12 of Book II, Montaigne exclaims: Combien en a rendu malades la seule force de l’imagination!
