KNOWLEDGE uses Stoic arguments to show the fallibility of the senses, and Epicurean arguments to show the impossibility of non-empirical knowledge Using the negative arguments of each sect, he aims to show against both of them that there is no such thing as real knowledge Montaigne rehearses familiar arguments to show that the senses mislead us Square towers look round from a distance, vision is distorted by pressure on the eyeball, jaundice makes us see things yellow, mountains seem to travel past us when we look at them from shipboard, and so on When two senses contradict each other, there is no way of resolving the diVerence Montaigne quotes a famous passage of Lucretius: Can ears deliver verdict on the eyes? Can touch convict the ears, or taste the touch, of lies? But he does not go on to conclude, with Lucretius, that the senses are infallible Lucretius wrote: If what the senses tell us is not true Then reason’s self is naught but falsehood too.1 Montaigne accepts this conditional; but he concludes, not that the senses tell us true, but rather that reason is equally false (ME II 253) Sense and reason, so far from cooperating to produce knowledge, each work on the other to produce falsehood TerriWed sense, when we look down, prevents us from crossing a narrow plank across a chasm, although reason tells us the plank is quite broad enough for walking On the other hand, passions in our will can aVect what we perceive with our senses: rage and love can make us see things that are not there ‘When we are asleep,’ Montaigne maintains, ‘our soul is alive and active and exercises all its powers neither more nor less than when it is awake.’ The diVerence between sleep and waking is less than that between daylight and darkness (ME II 260–1) We need some criterion to distinguish between our varying and conXicting impressions and beliefs, but no such criterion is possible Just as we cannot Wnd an impartial arbiter to adjudicate the diVerences between Catholic and Protestant, since any competent judge would already be one or the other, similarly no human being could set out to settle the conXicts between the experiences of the young and the old, the healthy and the sick, the asleep and the awake: De Rerum Natura 4.484–7; see vol I, p 166 118