This is another of Montaigne’s precursor essays to his masterpiece finale On Experience, and that is made clear in the first sentence:
Reasoning and education, though we are willing to put our trust in them, can hardly be powerful enough to lead us to action, unless besides we exercise and form our soul by experience to the way we want it to go; otherwise, when it comes to the time for action, it will undoubtedly find itself at a loss.
Anyone who has ever learned to play a musical instrument will agree with this sentiment completely. You can study music theory for hours and all the chord charts you’d like, if you never sit down and practice songs on a guitar, you’ll learn nothing. Music is an embodied experience. Montaigne argues that so too is life.
Then he proposes that death is one thing you cannot practice for and offers a vivid account of a near-death experience—a collision with a runaway horse that left him unconscious and partially paralyzed for hours—that proposes a way to prepare for the worst. This is the same incident he first described in one of his first and most important essays, On Idleness, where he made the analogy of a mind left to roam free becomes a runaway horse, inventing chimeras:
If we do not keep [our minds] busy with some particular subject which can serve as a bridle to rein them in, they charge ungovernably about, ranging to and fro over the wastelands of our thoughts; then there is no madness, no raving lunacy, which such agitations do not bring forth.
While this essay is often read purely as a reflection on death, I propose it is equally, if not more, an exploration of consciousness, particularly what happens when the human will fades and the self is fragmented. And when seen through the frame of what he first proposed in On Idleness, there emerges a profound meditation on the fragile, layered nature of the self.
The runaway horse metaphor becomes hauntingly literal in On Practice, where Montaigne recalls how a riderless horse, “striking us like a thunderbolt,” left him “stretched out dead on my back, my face all bruised and cut about.” This moment, where his body and consciousness were thrown into chaos, serves as a vivid embodiment of the mind’s fragility.
What stands out in this detailed first person account—a rarity in the Montaigne corpus—is his description of losing conscious control while his body continued to function. After being taken for dead, he recalls:
I began to move and breathe; for so great an abundance of blood had fallen into my stomach that nature had to revive its forces to discharge it.
Here, Montaigne captures a disjunction between the conscious self and the body’s instinctual processes. Today, we have a better understanding of how the body operates on numerous simultaneous levels than Montaigne could know in his own time. We know that basic motor functions persist even when consciousness and the will fades. But through his introspection, Montaigne sensed this:
I do not want to forget this, that the last thing I was able to recover was the memory of this accident…But a long time after, and the next day, when my memory came to open up…it seemed to me that a flash of lightning was striking my soul with a violent shock, and that I was coming back from the other world.
Montaigne’s fragmented recollections suggest that consciousness is not a continuum, but something reconstructed, with memory playing a central role in creating the narrative of the self.
His description of that concussive state anticipates modern debates about the nature of consciousness. The Orch-OR theory, developed by Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff, posits that consciousness arises from quantum processes within microtubules in the brain. While this is a highly controversial theory, there is recent evidence that supports many of its premises. These microtubules are particularly sensitive to disruption, such as from anesthesia or trauma, which could explain the suspended states Montaigne experienced.
If Montaigne’s mind was temporarily disconnected from its usual coherence, his experience might represent a state where consciousness—dependent on these quantum processes—was interrupted but not entirely extinguished. This aligns with his metaphor of the runaway horse: even when the conscious rider is thrown, the body and deeper processes carry on.
I had my own personal experience a little more than 10 years ago that has some similarities to what Montaigne described. I had recently been prescribed a benzodiazepine, known as Klonopin, to treat anxiety. I had something that felt to me like a panic attack a couple of months before and my doctor thought it best if I had access to this medication for times when I sensed an attack might be coming on. I had taken this drug in the morning and then went out with friends for drinks after work—forgetting both my doctor’s strong admonition not to mix the drug with alcohol and even the fact that I had taken it hours before.
I knew something was off when a small amount of alcohol made me feel euphoric almost right away, atypical for me, because alcohol tends to depress me. I do not recall how much I drank, all I remember is that I left the bar after everyone I knew had already gone and my memory of the evening stopped well before I arrived home.
But I did not end up face down in a ditch or an emergency room, I returned to consciousness in my own bed. Apparently I had navigated the return home without an incident, even though I had no memory of how it all happened. How did I get there? I have no idea. This parallels Montaigne’s state: a will temporarily absent, but a deeper layer of self still guiding action.
Such moments force us to question the nature of the self. Is it merely the conscious mind, or does it include the unconscious, instinctual processes that persist when the will is fast asleep? I have also had a couple experiences of sleepwalking in my life, and those too are equally unsettling. This all suggests a layered self, one that operates beyond our conscious understanding.
As he often does, Montaigne then makes an abrupt transition to another subject, ending On Practice by confronting the potential narcissism of his introspective project. It’s an interesting return to the ideas he advanced in On Idleness, even though he doesn’t mention them directly. Here are the thoughts he connects to illustrate his point:
It is a thorny undertaking, and more so than it seems, to follow a movement so wandering as that of our mind, to penetrate the opaque depths of its innermost folds, to pick out and immobilize the innumerable flutterings that agitate it.
What I chiefly portray is my cogitations, a shapeless subject that does not lend itself to expression in actions. It is all I can do to couch my thoughts in this airy medium of words.
The supreme remedy to cure [narcicism] is to do just the opposite of what those people prescribe who, by prohibiting talking about oneself, even more strongly prohibit thinking about oneself.
Excess arises only in those who touch themselves no more than superficially; who observe themselves only after taking care of their business; who call it daydreaming and idleness to be concerned with oneself, and making castles in Spain to furnish and build oneself; who think themselves something alien and foreign to themselves.
The connection to On Idleness is clear: Montaigne argues that the danger of introspection is not self-love but superficiality. To truly know oneself, one must delve deeply, confronting not just the mind’s runaway tendencies but also the moments when reason fails entirely.
His reflections resonate with my own writing process. Drafting often feels like hopping aboard a runaway horse—letting ideas roam freely—only to rein them in through revision. Like Montaigne, I’ve found that introspection is exhausting and must be tempered with periods of detachment. Yet these moments of deep self-examination, however fleeting, are essential for understanding both the self and the world.
In On Practice, Montaigne reminds us that understanding consciousness requires humility and a willingness to confront the unknown—a lesson as relevant today as it was in his time.
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