ABSTRACT
There are numerous indications that Montaigne understood freedom to mean the absence of effective obstacles to and constraints upon thinking and acting. In the last of his essays, “Of Experience,” he says that he is “sick for freedom.” From the surroundings of this remark it is clear that what he is sick of is the incessant actual or threatened interferences with his preferred attentions and activities, interferences produced by the religious and other conflicts of his time and place. He has been obliged to think and act other than he would prefer, to develop and continually practice a “small prudence” so as to keep the warring factions “from interrupting my freedom of coming and going.”1 Generalizing and perhaps deliberately exaggerating the thought, he says “if anyone should forbid me access to some corner of the Indies, I should live distinctly less comfortably. And as long as I find earth or air open elsewhere, I shall not lurk in any place where I have to hide. . . . If those that I serve threatened even the tip of my finger, I should instantly go and find others, wherever it might be” (Ibid.).
