Hume resembled Montaigne in other respects, too, notably in his striking combination of the toughest intellectual skepticism with tolerant good humor. One can hear Montaigne’s voice, for example, when Hume tells us, at the end of the devastating first book of the Treatise, that its contents have taken him to such a strange place that he now feels like a monster (“Where am I, or what? From what causes do I derive my existence, and to what condition shall I return? Whose favour shall I court, and whose anger must I dread? What beings surround me?”)—only to then conclude that there is no cause
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