Works - of Michael de Montaigne. Author:Michel de Montaigne Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: of proceeding appears to have been altogether of a most desultory character. He would turn over the leaves, now of one book, then of another, without order or ap... more »parent design; now he noted, then he meditated, and anon dictated, as he walked, what he had thus digested, more or less maturely. He had a memory, rather of ideas, than of words; what remained in his mind he no longer remembered as the property of another. But let us hear his own account of the matter: " I make no doubt but that I often happen to speak of things that are much better, and more truly handled by those who are masters of the trade. You have here purely an essay of my natural, and not acquired, parts; and whoever shall take me tripping in my ignorance, will not in any sort displease me; for I should be very unwilling to become responsible to another for my writings, who am not so to myself, nor satisfied with them. Whoever goes in quest of knowledge, let him fish for it where it is to be found ; there is nothing I so little profess. These are fancies of my own, by which I do not pretend to discover things, but to lay open myself. They may, perhaps, one day be known to me, or have formerly been, according as fortune has put me upon a place where they have been explained ; but I have forgotten them; and if I am a man of some reading, I am a man of no retention; so that I can promise no certainty, if not to make known to what point the knowledge I now have rises. Therefore let nobody insist upon the matter I write, but my method in writing it; let them observe, in what I borrow, if I have known how to choose what is proper to raise or help the invention, which is always my own ; for I make others say for me what, either for want of language or want of sense, I cannot so well myself express. I do not number my bor...« less