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250 MONTAIGNE'S ESSAYES
there nothing that is Divine; it it be nothing else but
what may appertaine unto this our present condition,
it may not be accounted of. All mortall mens contentment
is mortall. The acknowledging of our
parents, of our children and of our friends, if it cannot
touch, move or tickle us in the other world, if we still
take hold of such a pleasure, we continue in terrestrial
and transitorie commodities. We can not worthily
conceive of these high, mysterious, and divine promises,
if wee can but in any sort conceive them, and so
imagine them aright; they must be thought to be
inimaginable, unspeakeable and incomprehensible, and
absolutely and perfectly other than those of our
miserable experience. ' No eye can behold (saith Saint
Paul) the hap that God prepareth for his elect, nor can
it possibly enter the heart of man.' ¹ And if to make
us capable of it (as thou saist, Plato, by thy purifications),
our being is reformed and essence changed, it
must be by so extreme and universall a change that,
according to philosophicall doctrine, wee shall be no
more ourselves:
Hector erat tunc cum hello certabat, at ille
Tractus ab AEmonio non eiat Hector equo.²
Hector he was, when he in fight us'd force;
Hector he was not, drawne by th'enemies horse.
it shall be some other thing that shall receive these
recompences.
quod mutator, dissolvltur; mterit ergo:
Trajiciuntur enxm partes atque ordtne migrant. 3
What is chang'd is dissolved, therefore dies:
Translated parts in order fall and rise.
For in the Metempsychosis or transmigration of
soules of Pythagoras, and the change of habitation
which he imagined the soules to make, shall we thinke
that the lion in whom abideth the soule of Caesar, doth
wed the passions which concerned Caesar, or that it is
¹ 1 COR. ii. 9. . ² OVID. Trist. 1. iii.; El. xi. 27.
³ Luca. 1. iii. 781.