Based on the text from the pictures. How does Montaigne define a civilized society?
Based on the text from the pictures. How does Montaigne define a civilized society?
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Based on the text from the pictures. How does Montaigne define a civilized society?
Transcribed Image Text:our inventions that we have quite smothered her.
Yet wherever her purity shines forth, she won-
derfully puts to shame our vain and frivolous
This man I had was a simple, crude fellow-a
character fit to bear true witness; for clever people
observe more things and more curiously, but they
interpret them; and to lend weight and conviction
to their interpretation, they cannot help altering
history a little. They never show you things as they
are, but bend aifd disguise them according to the
way they have seen them; and to give credence to
their judgment and attract you to it, they are prone
to add something to their matter, to stretch it out
and amplify it. We need a man either very honest, or
so simple that he has not the stuff to build up false
inventions and give them plausibility; and wedded
to no theory. Such was my man; and besides this, he
at various times brought sailors and merchants,
whom he had known on that trip, to see me. So I
attempts:
Ivy comes readier without our care;
In lonely caves the arbutus grows more fair3;
No art with artless bird song can compare.
Propertius
All our efforts cannot even succeed in reproducing
the nest of the tiniest little bird, its contexture, its
beauty and convenience; or even the web of the
puny spider. All things, says Plato, are produced by
nature, by fortune, or by art; the greatest and most
beautiful by one or the other of the first two, the
least and most imperfect by the last.
These nations, then, seem to me barbarous in
this sense, that they have been fashioned very little
by the human mind, and are still very close to their
original naturalness. The laws of nature still rule
them, very littlee corrupted by ours; and they are in
such a state of purity that I am sometimes vexed
that they were unknown earlier, in the days when
there were men able to judge them better than we.
I am sorry that Lycurgus and Plato did not know of
them, for it seems to me that what we actually see
in these nations surpasses not only all the pictures
in which poets have idealized the golden age and all
their inventions in imagining a happy state of man,
but also the conceptions and the very desire of phi-
losophy. They could not imagine a naturalness so
pure and simple as we see by experience; nor could
they believe that our society could be maintained
with so little artifice and human solder. This is a
nation, I should say to Plato, in which there is no
sort of traffic, no knowledge of letters, no science of
numbers, no name for a magistrate or for political
superiority, no custom of servitude, no riches or
poverty, no contracts, no successions, no parti-
tions, no occupations but leisure ones, no care for
any but common kinship, no clothes, no agricul-
ture, no metal, no use of wine or wheat. The very
words that signify lying, treachery, dissimulation,
avarice, envy, belittling, pardon--unheard of. How
far from this perfection would he find the republic
that he imagined: Men fresh sprung from the gods.
content myself with his information, without
inquiring what the cosmographers say about it.
Now, to return to my subject, I think there is
nothing barbarous and savage in that nation, from
what I have been told, except that each man calls
barbarism whatever is not his own practice; for
indeed it seems we have no other test of truth and
reason than the example and pattern of the opin-
ions and customs of the country we live in. here is
always the perfect religion, the perfect government,
the perfect and accomplished manners in all things.
Those people are wild, just as we call wild the fruits
that Nature has produced by herself and in her nor-
mal course; whereas really it is those that we have
changed artificially and led astray from the com-
mon order, that we should rather call wild. The for-
mer retain alive and vigorous their genuine, their
most useful and natural, virtues and properties,
which we have debased in the latter in adapting
them to gratify our corrupted taste. And yet for all
that, the savor and delicacy of some uncultivated
fruits of those countries is quite as excellent, even
to our taste, as that of our own. It is not reasonable
that art should win the place of honor over our
great and powerful mother Nature. We have so
overloaded the beauty and richness of her works by
Transcribed Image Text:VV of the army that the Romans were send-
hen King Pyrrhus passed over into Italy,
after he had reconnoitered the formation
of the army that the Romans were send-
ing to meet him, he said: "I do not know what bar-
barians these are" (for so the Greeks called all
foreign nations), “but the formation of this army
that I see is not at al barbarous." The Greeks said as
much of the army that Flamininus brought into
their country, and so did Philip, seeing from a knoll
the order and distribution of the Roman camp, in
I had with me for a long time a man who had
lived for ten or twelve years in that other world
which has been discovered in our century, in the
place where Villegaignon landed, and which he
called Antarctic France. This discovery of a bound-
less country seems worthy of consideration. I don't
know if I can guarantee that some other such dis-
covery will not be made in the future, so many
personages greater than ourselves having been
mistaken about this one. I am afraid we have eyes
his kingdom, under Publius Sulpicius Galba. Thus
we should beware of clinging to vulgar opinions,
and judge things by reason's way, not by popular say.
bigger than our stomachs, and more curiosity than
capacity. We embrace e very thing, but we clasp only
wind.
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