Montaigne

"Montaigne is the frankest and honestest of all writers. His French freedom runs into grossness; but he has anticipated all censure by the bounty of his own confessions."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson, Montaigne
Montaigne, the Skeptic (1833) was the first in a series of addresses Ralph Waldo Emerson gave on the thinkers who most influenced his work and whose biographies eventually became the content of a collection entitled Representative Men (also available from Cosimo Classics). This particular essay discusses the values of contemplation and individualism that Emerson shared with Montaigne and which were to become the bases of his philosophy of transcendentalism.