Page:Thoughts from Montaigne.djvu/167

 who try to control human actions Essay I On the Inconstancy of our Actions find that it is all they can do to piece them together and place them under the same light, for they commonly contradict each other in so strange a way that it seems impossible they should proceed from the same origin. The younger Marius sometimes called himself the son of Mars and sometimes the son of Venus;. . . and who would have believed that it was Nerothat true image of cruelty — who, when first presented, according to custom, with the sentence of a condemned criminal to sign, cried, "Would to God I had never learnt to write!" so much did it go to his heart to condemn a man to death! . ..

I believe there is nothing so uncommon among men as constancy, and nothing more common than inconstancy. . . .A word of Demosthenes says, "The commencement of every virtue is consultation and deliberation. The end and perfection is constancy. . . ."

Our ordinary practice is to follow the inclinations of our appetite, to the right or left, up hill or down hill, according as we are wafted by the wind of the moment. We 149