I find that almost throughout we should say, “there is no such thing,” and should myself often make use of this answer, but I dare not:  for they cry that it is an evasion produced from ignorance and weakness of understanding; and I am fain, for the most part, to juggle for company, and prate of frivolous subjects and tales that I believe not a word of; besides that, in truth, ’tis a little rude and quarrelsome flatly to deny a stated fact; and few people but will affirm, especially in things hard to be believed, that they have seen them, or at least will name witnesses whose authority will stop our mouths from contradiction.  In this way, we know the foundations and means of things that never were; and the world scuffles about a thousand questions, of which both the Pro and the Con are false.

          “Ita finitima sunt falsa veris, ut in praecipitem
          locum non debeat se sapiens committere.”

     ["False things are so near the true, that a wise man should not
     trust himself in a precipitous place”—­Cicero, Acad., ii. 21.]

Truth and lies are faced alike; their port, taste, and proceedings are the same, and we look upon them with the same eye.  I find that we are not only remiss in defending ourselves from deceit, but that we seek and offer ourselves to be gulled; we love to entangle ourselves in vanity, as a thing conformable to our being.

I have seen the birth of many miracles in my time; which, although they were abortive, yet have we not failed to foresee what they would have come to, had they lived their full age.  ’Tis but finding the end of the clew, and a man may wind off as much as he will; and there is a greater distance betwixt nothing and the least thing in the world than there is betwixt this and the greatest.  Now the first that are imbued with this beginning of novelty, when they set out with their tale, find, by the oppositions they meet with, where the difficulty of persuasion lies, and so caulk up that place with some false piece;

[Voltaire says of this passage, “He who would learn to doubt should read this whole chapter of Montaigne, the least methodical of all philosophers, but the wisest and most amiable.”  —­Melanges Historiques, xvii. 694, ed. of Lefevre.]

besides that: 

     “Insita hominibus libido alendi de industria rumores,”

          ["Men having a natural desire to nourish reports.” 
          —­Livy, xxviii. 24.]

we naturally make a conscience of restoring what has been lent us, without some usury and accession of our own.  The particular error first makes the public error, and afterwards, in turn, the public error makes the particular one; and thus all this vast fabric goes forming and piling itself up from hand to hand, so that the remotest witness knows more about it than those who were nearest, and the last informed is better persuaded than the first.