This "cult of egoism" is obviously not entirely modern. Traces of it, aspects of it, fragments and morsels of it, have existed from all time. It was the latent presence of this quality in his great Romans, much more than their mere "outward triumphs," which led him to brood so incessantly upon their memories. But Montaigne himself was the first of all writers to give palpable intellectual shape to this diffused spiritual temper. In recent times, some of the most fascinating of our literary guides have been philosophical egotists. Whitman, Matthew Arnold, Emerson, Pater, Stendhal, Maurice Barrès (in his earlier work), de Gourmont, D'Annunzio, Oscar Wilde--are all, in their widely different ways, masters of the same cult. The out-looking activities and the out-looking social interests of Voltaire or Renan, or Anatole France, give to these great writers quite a different psychological tone. The three I have just mentioned are all too inveterately spirits of mockery even to take seriously _their own_ "sensations and ideas"; and however ironical and humorous an egoist may be with regard to other people's impressions, with regard to his own he is grave, intent, preoccupied, almost solemn. When one thinks of it, there is a curious solemnity of preoccupation with themselves and their own sensations about Wilde, Pater, Whitman, Stendhal, D'Annunzio and Barrès. And this "gravity of egoism" is precisely the thing which, for all his humorous humanity, distinguished the great Montaigne and which his early critics found so irritating. "What do I care--what does any one care," grumbled the learned Scaliger, "whether he prefers white wine to red wine?" The second element in the compound chemistry of the "modern temper" introduced into the world by Montaigne may be found in his famous scepticism. The formidable levity of that notorious "que sais-je?" "What do I know?" writes itself nowadays across our whole sky. This also--"this film of white light," as some one has called it, floating waveringly beneath each one of our most cherished convictions was, not unknown before his time. All the great sophists--Protagoras especially, with his "man the measure of all things"--were, in a sense, professional teachers of a refined scepticism. Plato himself, with his wavering and gracious hesitations, was more than touched by the same spirit. Scepticism as a natural human philosophy--perhaps as the only natural human philosophy--underlies all the beautiful soft-coloured panorama of pagan poetry and pagan thought. It must have been the habitual temper of mind in any Periclean symposium or Caesarean salon. It is, pre-eminently and especially, the _civilised_ attitude of mind; the attitude of mind most dominant and universal in the great races, the great epochs, the great societies. It is for this reason that France, among all modern nations, is the most sceptical.