PHILOSOPHIC SCIENCES. 



Chateau de Montaigne, in the Perigord, upon the 28th of February, 1533. 

 Though he attended all the classes at the College of Bordeaux, he may be 

 said to have been self-taught, and to have become a philosopher in his own 

 way through his intercourse with the poets, historians, and philosophers of 

 antiquity. He delighted in the works of Seneca and Plutarch, but he would 

 not "bite his nails over Aristotle, the monarch of modern doctrine." In 

 after-years, when he wrote his immortal " Essays," he unhesitatingly declared 

 against the dialectics of the schools against every kind of doctrinal teaching. 

 " It is pitiable," he writes, " that in our century philosophy should be, even 

 for men of intelligence, a vain and fantastic name, which is without use or 

 value in opinion or in fact. I believe that sophistry, by choking up the 

 approaches to it, is the cause. It is a great mistake to depict it as inacces- 

 sible to children, of a forbidding countenance, full of frowns, and fearful to 

 look at. Nothing 'can be more cheerful, sprightly, I was almost saying 

 frolicsome," Michael de Montaigne inaugurated in France the philosophy 

 of the libertines that is to say, of the free-thinkers different in some respects 

 from that which Francois Rabelais professed, fifty years before, in his Pantu- 

 gruelic works, and which John Calvin denounced as a pagan doctrine, accusing 

 the libertines of atheism and impiety. "Scepticism," writes M. Haureau, 

 " had the last word in this propaganda in favour of the sprightly and almost 

 frolicsome philosophy ; and the young, only too easily led away by such 

 remarks, gladly left, under the guidance of this new teacher, the arduous 

 paths of study to revel in the intercourse of poets, and to turn the melancholy 

 eyebrows of the logicians into derision." 



Fig. 55. Seal of the Faculty of Theology, 

 Prague. 



Fig. 56. Seal of the Faculty of Law, 

 Prague. 



