Modern readers who approach Montaigne asking what he can do for them are asking the same question he himself asked of Seneca, Sextus and Lucretius – and the same question they asked of their predecessors. This is what Virginia Woolf’s chain of minds really means: not a scholarly tradition, but a series of self-interested individuals puzzling over their own lives, yet doing it co-operatively. All share a quality that can simply be thought of as ‘humanity’: the experience of being a thinking, feeling being who must get on with an ordinary human life – though Montaigne willingly extended the
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