"'The more we enquire, the less we can resolve, ' wrote Johnson. Scepticism - a reasoned emphasis on the severe limitations of rationality - would seem to undermine the grounds of belief and action. But in some of the best eighteenth-century literature, a theoretically paralysing critique of the pretensions of reason, precept, and language went hand in hand with a vigorous intellectual, moral, and linguistic confidence. To realize philosophical scepticism as literature was effectively to transform it. Dr. Parker traces the presence of this life-giving irony in works by Pope, Hume, Sterne, and Johnson, discusses its source in Locke and its inspiration in Montaigne, and relates it more broadly to the social self-consciousness of eighteenth-century culture. The argument serves as a reminder that radical scepticism is not the invention of the late twentieth century, and that its strategies and implications have never been more interestingly explored than in the eighteenth."--Jacket.