ll goes with the peculiar
spontaneity of his mind, his reactions, his style; and it was in virtue
of this undulled spontaneity that he was fitted to be for Shakspere, as
he has since been for so many other great writers, an intellectual
stimulus unique in kind and in potency.

This fact of Montaigne's peculiar influence on other spirits,
comparatively considered, may make it easier for some to conceive that
his influence on Shakspere could be so potent as has been above
asserted. Among those whom we know him to have acted upon in the highest
degree--setting aside the disputed case of Bacon--are Pascal,
Montesquieu, Rousseau, Flaubert, Emerson, and Thoreau. In the case of
Pascal, despite his uneasy assumption that his philosophy was contrary
to Montaigne's, the influence went so far that the _Pensees_ again and
again set forth Pascal's doctrine in passages taken almost literally
from the ESSAYS. Stung by the lack of all positive Christian credence in
Montaigne, Pascal represents him as "putting all things in doubt;"
whereas it is just by first putting all things in doubt that Pascal
justifies his own credence. The only difference is that where Montaigne,
disparaging the powers of reason by the use of that very reason, used
his "doubt" to defend himself alike against the atheists and the
orthodox Christians, Catholic or Protestant, himself standing simply to
the classic theism of antiquity, Pascal seeks to demolish the theists
with the atheists, falling back on the Christian faith after denying the
capacity of the human reason to judge for itself. The two procedures
were of course alike fallacious; but though Pascal, the more austere
thinker of the two, readily saw the invalidity of Montaigne's as a
defence of theism, he could do no more for himself than repeat the
process, disparaging reason in the very language of the essayist, and
setting up in his turn his private predilection in Montaigne's manner.
In sum, his philosophy is just Montaigne's, turned to the needs of a
broken spirit instead of a confident one--to the purposes of a chagrined
and exhausted convertite instead of a theist of the stately school of
Cicero and Seneca and Plutarch. Without Montaigne, one feels, the
_Pensees_ might never have been written: they represent to-day, for all
vigilant readers, rather the painful struggles of a wounded intelligence
to fight down the doubts it has caught from contact with other men's
thought than any coherent or durable