or irritate them.

    58. You are ungraceful: "Excuse me, pray." Without that excuse I
would not have known there was anything amiss. "With reverence be it
spoken..." The only thing bad is their excuse.

    59. "To extinguish the torch of sedition"; too luxuriant. "The
restlessness of his genius"; two superfluous grand words.

                          SECTION II

                 THE MISERY OF MAN WITHOUT GOD

    60.  First part: Misery of man without God.

        Second part: Happiness of man with God.

     Or, First part: That nature is corrupt. Proved by nature itself.

        Second part: That there is a Redeemer. Proved by Scripture.

    61. Order.- I might well have taken this discourse in an order
like this: to show the vanity of all conditions of men, to show the
vanity of ordinary lives, and then the vanity of philosophic lives,
sceptics, stoics; but the order would not have been kept. I know a
little what it is, and how few people understand it. No human
science can keep it. Saint Thomas did not keep it. Mathematics keep
it, but they are useless on account of their depth.

    62. Preface to the first part.- To speak of those who have treated
of the knowledge of self; of the divisions of Charron, which sadden
and weary us; of the confusion of Montaigne; that he was quite aware
of his want of method and shunned it by jumping from subject to
subject; that he sought to be fashionable.

    His foolish project of describing himself! And this not casually
and against his maxims, since every one makes mistakes, but by his
maxims themselves, and by first and chief design. For to say silly
things by chance and weakness is a common misfortune, but to say
them intentionally is intolerable, and to say such as that...

    63. Montaigne.- Montaigne's faults are great. Lewd words; this
is bad, notwithstanding Mademoiselle de Gournay. Credulous; people
without eyes. Ignorant; squaring the circle, a greater world. His
opinions on suicide, on death. He suggests an indifference about
salvation, without fear and without repentance. As his book was not
written with a religious purpose, he was not bound to mention
religion; but it is always our duty not to turn men from it. One can
excuse his rather free and licentious opinions on some relations of
life; but one cannot excuse his thoroughly pagan views on death, for a
man must renounce piety altogether, if he does not at least wish to
die like a Christian. Now, through the whole of his book his only
conception of death is a cowardly and effeminate one.

    64. It is not in Montaigne, but in myself, that I find all that
I see in him.

    65. What good there is in Montaigne can only have been acquired
with difficulty. The evil that is in him, I mean apart from his
morality, could have been corrected in a moment, if he had been
informed that he made too much of trifles and spoke too much of
himself.

    66. One must know oneself. If this does not serve to discover
truth, it at least serves as a rule of life, and there is nothing
better.

    67. The vanity of the sciences.- Physical science will not console
me for the ignorance of morality in the time of affliction. But the
science of ethics will always console me for the ignorance of the
physical sciences.

    68. Men are never taught to be gentlemen and are taught everything
else; and they never plume themselves so much on the rest of their
knowledge as on knowing how to be gentlemen. They only plume
themselves on knowing the one thing they do not know.

    69. The infinites, the mean.- When we read too fast or too slowly,
we understand nothing.

    70. Nature... - Nature has set us so well in the centre, that if
we change one side of the balance, we change the other also. This
makes me believe that the springs in our brain are so adjusted that he
who touches one touches also its contrary.

    71. Too much and too little wine. Give him none, he cannot find
truth; give him too much, the same.

    72. Man's disproportion.- This is where our innate knowledge leads
us. If it be not true, there is no truth in man; and if it be true, he
finds therein great cause for humiliation, being compelled to abase
himself in one way or another. And since he cannot exist without
this knowledge, I wish that, before entering on deeper researches into
nature, he would consider her both seriously and at leisure, that he
would reflect upon himself also, and knowing what proportion there
is... Let man then contemplate the whole of nature in her full and
grand majesty, and turn his vision from the low objects which surround
him. Let him gaze on that brilliant light, set like an eternal lamp to
illumine the universe; let the earth appear to him a point in
comparison with the vast circle described by the sun; and let him