those old days, on passing a village [113] church, or at home, in the
little chapel--superstitions, concessions to others, strictly
appropriate recognitions rather, as it might seem, of a certain great
possibility, which might lie among the conditions of so complex a
world. That was a point which could hardly escape so reflective a
mind as Gaston's: and at a later period of his life, at the harvest
of his own second thoughts, as he pondered on the influence over him
of that two-sided thinker, the opinion that things as we find them
would bear a certain old-fashioned construction, seemed to have been
the consistent motive, however secret and subtle in its working, of
Montaigne's sustained intellectual activity. A lowly philosophy of
ignorance would not be likely to disallow or discredit whatever
intimations there might be, in the experience of the wise or of the
simple, in favour of a venerable religion, which from its long
history had come to seem like a growth of nature. Somewhere, among
men's seemingly random and so inexplicable apprehensions, might lie
the grains of a wisdom more precious than gold, or even its priceless
pearl. That "free and roving thing," the human soul--what might it
not have found out for itself, in a world so wide? To deny, at all
events, would be only "to limit the mind, by negation."

It was not however this side of that double philosophy which
recommended itself just now to Gaston. The master's wistful
tolerance, so [114] extraordinary a characteristic in that age,
attracted him, in his present humour, not so much in connexion with
those problematic heavenly lights that might find their way to one
from infinite skies, as with the pleasant, quite finite, objects and
experiences of the indubitable world of sense, so close around him.
Over against the world's challenge to make trial of it, here was that
general licence, which his own warm and curious appetite just then