In his essay, "Of the Education of Children," Montaigne, having alluded to the plagiarisms of Chrysippus writes: "To reprove mine own faults in others seems to me no more insufferable than to reprehend (as I often do) those of others in myself. They ought to be accused everywhere and have all places of sanctuary taken from them." He follows up these remarks by a confession of his own sins of plagiarism, so freeing himself from any possible charge of self-righteousness. Then, by emphasizing the pains he has been at to conceal his thefts, he proves his honesty.
In all this, the processes of thought have been scientific: error should be attacked without consideration of personalities; the attack should be wholesale; error is corrected by truth; a dishonest attempt to conceal error is corrected by an open avowal, a true thought put in the place of a false one. But Montaigne was, of course, ambling along the path of the essayist; he was not engaged in any radical warfare with the flesh; indeed, he lacked the main weapon necessary, a knowledge of the unreality of error. But his sentences are a clear expression of the work before us, "to take away all sanctuary from error," and we may be grateful for a formulation of our task.
A sanctuary for error sounds rather like a contradiction in terms, a sanctuary in its original sense being a holy place, a place of refuge from error. When the psalmist sings. "He shall hide me in his pavilion," or of "the secret place of the most High," he alludes to the sanctuary of true consciousness, which error cannot enter. Jeremiah says of the same consciousness, "A glorious high throne from the beginning is the place of our sanctuary." But Montaigne is using the word evidently in its secondary sense of a refuge, or hiding place.
