Hume's scepticism about the self underlies later Modernist explorations of a de-centred self--for instance in Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway or The Waves. More generally, if we only 'know' through sensory experience--such as sight, touch and feeling--then we cannot 'know' and neither can we make metaphysical claims.

Thus, modernism can be driven emotionally by the desire for metaphysical truths, while understanding their impossibility. Some modernist novels, for instance, feature characters like