Montaigne founded no formal school of thought; he strove for no philosophical rigor, and promoted no dogma. Yet his impact on literature was enormous. The century after his own, the seventeenth, saw an explosion of personal essays written on his model: reflective, skeptical, witty, self-indulgent, sometimes mercilessly critical, and generally dedicated to the spirit of freethinking in the widest sense. The modern world is still filled with such writing.
