214044_The_Essa ... rd_Of_Montaigne_Vol_II.pdf - OUDL Home

THE SECOND BOOKE 291
Why followes violence the savage Lyons race ?
Why craft the Foxes ? Why to Deere to five apace V
By parents is it given, when parents feare incites,
Unlesse because a certaine force of inward spirits
With all the body growes,
As seed and seed-spring goes ?
That divine justice is grounded thereupon, punishing
the fathers offences upon the children; forsomuch as
the contagion of the fathers vices is in some sort
printed in childrens soules, and that the misgovernment
of their will toucheth them. Moreover, that if the
soules came from any other place, then by a naturall
consequence, and that out of the body they should have
heene some other thing, they should have some remembrance
of their first being: considering the naturall
faculties which are proper unto him, to discourse, to
reason, and to remember.
si in corpus nascentibns insinuattir,
Cur super anteactam cptatcm memtnise nequimus,
Nec vestigia testatum rerum ulla tenemus ? ¹
If our soule at our birth be in our body cast,
Why can we not remember ages over-past,
Nor any markes retaine of things done first or last ?
For, to make our soules condition to be of that worth
we would, they must all be presupposed wise, even
when they are in their naturall simplicitie and genuine
puritie. So should they have beene such, being freed
from the corporall prison, as well before they entred
the same, as we hope they shall be when they shall be
out of it. And it were necessarie they should (being
yet in the body) remember the said knowledge (as Plato
said) that what we learnt was but a new remembring of
that which we had knowne before: a thing that any
man may by experience maintaine to be false and erroneous.
First, because we doe not precisely remember
what we are taught, and that if memorie did meerely
execute her function, she would at least suggest us with
something besides our learning. Secondly, what she
¹ LUCR. 1. iii, 692.