If the medal was indeed designed to remind him of his principles, it worked: Scepticism guided him at work, in his home life, and in his writing. The Essays are suffused with it: he filled his pages with words such as ‘perhaps’, ‘to some extent’, ‘I think’, ‘It seems to me’, and so on – words which, as Montaigne said himself, ‘soften and moderate10 the rashness of our propositions’, and which embody what the critic Hugo Friedrich has called his philosophy of ‘unassumingness’.
