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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? 

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: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
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.
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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