Mimesis

From things he takes the animation which saves him from abstract psychologizing and from empty probing within himself. But he guards himself against becoming subject to the law of any given thing, so that the rhythm of his own inner movement may not be muffled and finally lost.

Villey has shown (Les Sources, etc., 2, p. 3ff.) that the form of the Essays stems from the collections of exempla, quotations, and aphorisms which were a very popular genre in late antiquity and throughout the Middle Ages and which in the sixteenth century helped to spread humanistic material. Montaigne had begun in this vein.

Yet for Montaigne the truth is one, however multiple its manifestations; he may contradict himself, but not truth