on the diversity of individual views, each man's opinion differing from his
fellow's, while truth must be one. There exists no certain, no universally
admitted knowledge. The human reason is feeble and blind in all things,
knowledge is deceptive, especially the philosophy of the day, which clings
to tradition, which fills the memory with learned note-stuff, but leaves
the understanding void and, instead of things, interprets interpretations
only. Both sensuous and rational knowledge are untrustworthy: the former,
because it cannot be ascertained whether its deliverances conform to
reality, and the latter, because its premises, in order to be valid, need
others in turn for their own establishment, etc., _ad infinitum_. Every
advance in inquiry makes our ignorance the more evident; the doubter alone
is free. But though certainty is denied us in regard to truth, it is not
withheld in regard to duty. In fact, a twofold rule of practical life is
set up for us: nature, or life in accordance with nature and founded on
self-knowledge, and supernatural revelation, the Gospel (to be understood
only by the aid of divine grace). Submission to the divine ruler and
benefactor is the first duty of the rational soul. From obedience proceeds
every virtue, from over-subtlety and conceit, which is the product of
fancied knowledge, comes every sin. Montaigne, like all who know men, has
a sharp eye for human frailty. He depicts the universal weakness of human
nature and the corruption of his time with great vivacity and not without a
certain pleasure in the obscene; and besides folly and passion, complains
above all of the fact that so few understand the art of enjoyment, of which
he, a true man of the world, was master.

The skeptico-practical standpoint of Montaigne was developed into a system
by the Paris preacher, Pierre Charron (1541-1603), in his three books _On
Wisdom_ (1601). Doubt has a double object: to keep alive the spirit
of inquiry and to lead us on to faith. From the fact that reason and
experience are liable to deception and that the mind has at its disposal no