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 means of distinguishing truth from falsehood, it follows that we are born not to possess truth but to seek it.  Truth dwells alone in the bosom of God; for us doubt and investigation are the only good amid all the error and tribulation which surround us.  Life is all misery.  Man is capable of mediocrity alone; he can neither be entirely good nor entirely evil; he is weak in virtue, weak in vice, and the best degenerates in his hands.  Even religion suffers from the universal imperfection.  It is dependent on nationality and country, and each religion is based on its predecessor; the supernatural origin of which all religions boast belongs in fact to Christianity alone, which is to be accepted with humility and with submission of the reason.  Charron lays chief emphasis, however, on the practical side of Christianity, the fulfillment of duty; and the “wisdom” which forms the subject of his book is synonymous with uprightness (probite), the way to which is opened up by self-knowledge and whose reward is repose of spirit.  And yet we are not to practice it for the sake of the reward, but because nature and reason, i.e., God, absolutely (entirely apart from the pleasurable results of virtue) require us to be good.  True uprightness is more than mere legality, for even when outward action is blameless, the motives may