CHAPTER VI.

THE ‘PENSÉES.’

From Pascal’s finished work we turn to his unfinished Remains. The one

will always be regarded as the chief monument of his literary skill, and

of the executive completeness of his mind. But the other is the worthier

and nobler tribute to the greatness of his soul, and the depth and power

of his moral genius. Few comparatively now read the ‘Provincial Letters’

as a whole; fewer still are interested in the controversy which they

commemorate. But there are hardly any of higher culture—none certainly

of higher thoughtfulness—to whom the ‘Pensées’ are not still attractive,

and who have not sought in them at one time or another some answer to the

obstinate questionings which the deeper scrutiny of human life and

destiny is ever renewing in the human heart. No answer may have been

found in them, but every spiritual mind must have so far met in the

author of the ‘Pensées’ a kindred spirit which, if it has seen no farther

than others, has yet entered keenly upon the great quest, and traversed

with a singular boldness the great lines of higher speculation that

“slope through darkness up to God.”

The literary history of the ‘Pensées’ is a very curious one. They first

appeared in the end of 1669, in a small duodecimo volume, with the

appropriate motto, “Pendent opera interrupta.” Their preparation for the

press had been a subject of much anxiety to Pascal’s friends. What is

known as the “Peace of the Church”—a period of temporary quiet and

prosperity to Port Royal—had begun in 1663; and it was important that

nothing should be done by the Port Royalists to disturb this peace. It

had been agreed, therefore, that all passages bearing on the controversy

with the Jesuits and the Formulary should be omitted; but beyond this

Madame Périer desired that the volume should only contain what proceeded

from her brother, and in the precise form and style in which it had left

his hand. She evidently lacked full confidence in the Committee of

Editors, of whom the Duc de Roannez was the chief, notwithstanding their

professions of strict adherence to the manuscripts. The volume at last

appeared, with a preface by her own son, and no fewer than nine

“approbations,” signed amongst others by three bishops, one archdeacon,

and three doctors of the Sorbonne.

Unhappily Madame Périer had too much cause for alarm. Editors and

Approvers alike had claimed the liberty, not only of arranging but of

modifying both the matter and the style of the ‘Pensées,’ and this

notwithstanding a statement in the preface that, in giving, as they

professed to do, only “the clearest and most finished” of the fragments,

they had given them as they found them, _without adding or changing

anything_. “These fragments,” says M. Faugère, “which sickness and death

had left unfinished, suffered, without ceasing to be immortal, all the

mutilation which an exaggerated prudence or a misdirected zeal could

suggest, with the view not only of guarding their orthodoxy, but of

embellishing their style—the style of the author of the ‘Provincials’!”

“There are not,” he adds, “twenty successive lines which do not present

some alteration, great or small. As for total omissions and partial

suppressions, they are without number.” M. Cousin is equally emphatic.

“There are,” he says, “examples of every kind of alteration—alteration of

words, alteration of phrases, suppressions, substitutions, additions,

arbitrary compositions, and, what is worse, decompositions more arbitrary

still.”

It is impossible to defend the first editors of the ‘Pensées.’ But it

should be remembered that their task was one not only of theological

perplexity, but of great literary difficulty. Pascal’s manuscripts were

a mere mass of confused papers, sometimes written on both sides, and in a

hand for the most part so obscure and imperfectly formed as to be

illegible to all who had not made it a special study. The papers were

pasted or bundled together without any natural connection, parts

containing the same piece being sometimes intersected and sometimes

widely separated from one another. If the editors, therefore, did their

work ill, it was partly no doubt from incompetency, but partly from its

inherent difficulty, and from the fact that being so near to Pascal they

could hardly appreciate the feelings of the modern critic as to the

sacredness of his style, and of all that came from his pen.

The edition of 1669 continued to be reprinted with little alteration for

a century. Various additional fragments were brought to light,

especially the famous conversation between De Saci and Pascal regarding

Epictetus and Montaigne; but the form of the fragments remained

unchanged. It was not till the edition of Condorcet in 1776 that they

can be said to have undergone any new _rédaction_. Unhappily Pascal

suffered in the hands of the Encyclopedists, as he had previously

suffered in the hands of the Jansenists and the Sorbonne. The first

editors had expunged whatever might seem at variance with orthodoxy.

Condorcet suppressed or modified whatever partook of a too lofty

enthusiasm or a too fervent piety. It became a current idea among the

Encyclopedists that the accident at Neuilly had affected Pascal’s brain.

We have already seen how Voltaire spoke of this; and he directed an early

attack (1734) upon the doctrine of human nature contained in the

‘Pensées.’ Now, in his old age, he hailed Condorcet’s edition, and

reissued it two years later, with an Introduction and Notes by himself.

In the following year, 1779, appeared the elaborate and well-known

edition of Pascal’s works by the Abbé Bossut, accompanied by an admirable

“Discours sur la Vie et les Ouvrages de Pascal.” In this edition the

remains are found for the first time in some degree of completeness. All

the fragments published by Port Royal, and all those subsequently brought

to light by Des Molets and others, are included and arranged in a new

order. But meritorious as were Bossut’s editorial labours as a whole,

they did not attempt any restoration of the ‘Pensées’ to their original

text; and even the new fragments published by him were not left

untouched. He embodied, for example, the famous conversation with De

Saci, but without giving De Saci’s part of the dialogue. In short, he

reproduced, as M. Havet says, all the faults of the first editors, and

made others of his own. This is the more remarkable that he is said to

have had in his possession a copy of the original manuscripts.

Condorcet, however, consulted the original manuscripts themselves,

without any thought of doing justice to Pascal’s text.

So matters remained till 1842, when M. Cousin published his famous Report

on the subject to the French Academy. The French public then found to

their astonishment that, with so many editions of the ‘Pensées,’ they had

not the ‘Pensées’ themselves. While philosophers had disputed as to his

ideas, and critics admired his style, the veritable Pascal of the

‘Pensées’ had all the time lain concealed in a mass of manuscripts in the

National Library. Such a story, it may be imagined, did not lack any

force in the manner in which M. Cousin told it; and an eager desire arose

for a new and complete edition of the fragments. Cousin had prepared the

way, but he did not himself undertake this task, which was reserved for

M. Faugère, whose great edition appeared two years later, in 1844.

Nothing can deprive M. Faugère of the credit of being the first editor of

a _complete_ and _authentic_ text of the ‘Pensées.’

Other editions of distinctive merit have since appeared; and it may be

admitted that, in the natural reaction from the laxity of former

editions, he gave a too literal transcript of the manuscripts, including

some things of little importance, and others more properly belonging to

an edition of the ‘Provincial Letters’ than of the ‘Pensées.’ But,

whether it be the result of early association or of greater familiarity

with M. Faugère’s pages, I own still a preference for this edition, while

admitting the admirable perspicuity and intelligence of many of M.

Havet’s notes, and the splendour of the edition of M. Victor Rochet, the

most recent (1873) that has come under my notice.

The principle observed by M. Faugère is strongly defended in his preface.

He allowed himself no discretionary powers of emendation, because “the

limits of such a power might,” he says, “be too easily overstepped, and

would have left room for belief that greater liberties had been taken

than was actually the case.” “The manuscripts,” he adds, “have been

read, or rather studied, page by page, line by line, syllable by

syllable, to the end; and, with the exception of illegible words (which,

however, are carefully indicated), they have passed completely into the

present edition.”

So far, this principle has been adhered to by subsequent editors. There

has been no further tampering with Pascal’s words, but more or less

latitude has been taken in publishing all the manuscript details, and

especially in the arrangement of the several fragments. Faugère fancied

that he could trace in Pascal’s own notes the indication of an interior

arrangement, into which the several parts of his proposed work in defence

of religion were intended to fall; and he has grouped the fragments in

his second volume according to these supposed indications. M. Havet does

not think that it is possible any longer to discover the true order of

the fragments. He does not believe that any such order existed in the

author’s own mind. He had a general design, and certain great divisions;

a preface was sketched here, and a chapter there; but in throwing his

thoughts upon paper as they presented themselves to him, he did not stop

to assort them, or to bring them into any fitting connection. What

Pascal himself did not do, M. Havet does not think it possible any editor

can do. Accordingly, he recurs to the old, if somewhat arbitrary,

arrangement of Bossut, as the most familiar and useful. M. Rochet

follows an elaborate arrangement, professedly founded on the original

plan of Pascal, as sketched by himself in the conversation reported by

his nephew in the preface to the primary edition of the fragments. He

considers that all the Thoughts find their natural place in this plan and

in no other. But M. Rochet’s classifications are, partly at least,

inspired by his own ecclesiastical tendencies; and he is far from just to

the labours of M. Faugère, and the real light and order which these

labours introduced into the development of Pascal’s ideas.

It is unnecessary for us to attempt to hold the balance between Pascal’s

several editors, or to say which of them has most justice on his side.

Of two things there can be no doubt: first, that any special arrangement

of the ‘Pensées,’ so as to give the idea of a connected book in defence

of religion, is, so far, arbitrary—the work, that is to say, of the

editor rather than of the author; and secondly, that there is no

difficulty, from the original preface and otherwise, of gathering the

general order of Pascal’s ideas, and the method which appeared to him the

true one of meeting the irreligion of his day, and vindicating the divine

truth of Christianity—points which shall afterwards come before us.

The special question raised by M. Cousin as to Pascal’s scepticism will

also be best discussed in its true order, in connection with such

passages as have suggested it. Considering Pascal’s traditionary

reputation as the defender of religion, there was a character of surprise

in this question, that forced a lively debate, as soon as it was raised,

in France and Germany, and even England. Vinet and Neander both joined

in it; and the two lectures delivered by the latter before the Royal

Academy of Sciences in Berlin in 1847, are highly deserving of perusal by

all students of philosophy. {164} But the issue is an absurd one, before

the combatants are agreed as to the meaning of the word Scepticism, and

before the reader has before him the views of Pascal, and the manner in

which he defines his own attitude in relation to what he considered the

two great lines of thought opposed to Christianity. When we are in

possession of his own statements, we may find that much of the indignant

rhetoric of M. Cousin is beside the question, and that, although Pascal

was certainly no Cartesian, and has used some strong and rash expressions

about the weakness of human reason, neither is he a sceptic in any usual

sense. He has, in fact, defined his own position with singular clearness

and force.

But before turning to his views on these higher subjects, it will be well

to present our readers with some of Pascal’s more miscellaneous and

general Thoughts. In doing so, it is not necessary, in such a volume as

this, that we indicate throughout the edition from which we take our

quotations. We shall quote from the editions of Faugère or Havet, as may

be most convenient, and take them in such order as suits our own purpose

of exhibiting Pascal’s mind as clearly as we can. For the same reason,

we shall give such passages as appear to us not always the most just or

accurate in thought, but the most characteristic or representative of the

veritable Pascal, whose true words were so long concealed from the world.

We cannot do better, in the first instance, than note what so great a

mathematician has to say of geometry and the “mathematical mind,”

compared with the naturally _acute_ mind (“l’esprit de finesse”), betwixt

which he draws an interesting parallel. The fragment on the

“Mathematical” or “Geometric Mind” was, with the exception of a brief

passage given by Des Molets {165} in 1728, originally published, although

with numerous suppressions, in Condorcet’s edition of the ‘Pensées.’ It

appeared for the first time in its complete form, and under its proper

title, in Faugère’s edition, along with its natural pendant, the

closely-allied fragment, entitled “L’Art de Persuader.” We give a few

passages from the first fragment:—

“We may have three principal objects in the study of truth—one to

discover it when we seek it, another to demonstrate it when we

possess it, and a third and last to discriminate it from the false

when we examine it. . . . Geometry excels in all three, and

especially in the art of discovering unknown truths, which it calls

_analysis_. . . There is a method which excels geometry, but is

impossible to man, _for whatever transcends geometry transcends us_

[in natural science, as he explains elsewhere]. This is the method

of defining everything and proving everything. . . A fine method,

but impossible; since it is evident that the first terms that we wish

to define, suppose precedent terms necessary for their

explanation—and that the first propositions that we wish to prove,

suppose others which precede them; and so it is clear we can never

arrive at absolutely first principles. In pushing our researches to

the utmost, we necessarily reach primitive words that admit of no

further definition, and principles so obvious, that they require no

proof. Man can never, therefore, from natural incompetency, possess

an absolutely complete science. . . . But geometry, while inferior

in its aims, is absolutely certain within its limits. It neither

defines everything, nor attempts to prove everything, and must, so

far, yield its pretension to be an absolute science; but it sets out

from things universally admitted as clear and constant, and is

therefore perfectly true, because in consonance with nature. Its

function is not to define things universally clear and understood,

but to define all others; and not to attempt to prove things

intuitively known to men, but to attempt to prove all others.

Against this, the true order of knowledge, those alike err who

attempt to define and to prove everything, and those who neglect

definition and demonstration where things are not self-evident. This

is what geometry teaches perfectly. It attempts no definition of

such things as _space_, _time_, _motion_, _number_, _equality_, and

the like, because these terms designate so naturally the things which

they signify, that any attempt at making them more clear ends in

making them more obscure. For there is nothing more futile than the

talk of those who would define primitive words. {166}

. . . . . . . .

“In geometry the principles are palpable, but removed from common

use. . . . In the sphere of natural wit or acuteness, the principles

are in common use and before all eyes—it is only a question of having

a good view of them; for they are so subtle and numerous, that some

are almost sure to escape observation. . . . All geometers would be

men of acuteness if they had sufficient insight, for they never

reason falsely on the principles recognised by them. All fine or

acute spirits would be geometers if they could fix their thoughts on

the unwonted principles of geometry. The reason why some finer

spirits are not geometers is, that they cannot turn their attention

at all to the principles of geometry; but geometers fail in finer

perception, because they do not see all that is before them, and

being accustomed to the plain and palpable principles of geometry,

and never reasoning until they have well ascertained and handled

their principles, they lose themselves in matters of intellectual

subtlety, where the principles are not so easily laid hold of. Such

things are seen with difficulty; they are felt rather than seen.

They are so delicate and multitudinous that it requires a very

delicate and neat sense to appreciate them. . . . So it is as rare

for geometers to be men of subtle wit as it is for the latter to be

geometers, because geometers like to treat these nicer matters

geometrically, and so make themselves ridiculous; they like to

commence with definition, and then go on to principles—a mode which

does not at all suit this sort of reasoning. It is not that the mind

does not take this method, but it does so silently, naturally, and

without conscious art. The perception of the process belongs only to

a few minds, and those of the highest order. . . . Geometers, who

are only geometers, are sure to be right, provided the subject come

within their scope, and is capable of explanation by definition and

principles. Otherwise they go wrong altogether, for they only judge

rightly upon principles clearly set forth and established. On the

other hand, subtle men, who are only subtle, lack patience, in

matters of speculation and imagination, to reach first principles

which they have never known in the world, and which are entirely

beyond their beat. . . .

“There are different kinds of sound sense. Some succeed in one order

of things, and not in another, in which they are simply extravagant.

. . . Some minds draw consequences well from a few principles,

others are more at home in drawing conclusions from a great variety

of principles. For example, some understand well the phenomena of

water, with reference to which the principles are few, but the

results extremely delicate, so that only very great accuracy of mind

can trace them. Such men would probably not be great geometers,

because geometry involves a multitude of principles, and because the

mind which may penetrate thoroughly a few principles to their depth

may not be at all able to penetrate things which combine a multitude

of principles. . . . There are two sorts of mind: the one fathoms

rapidly and deeply the consequences of principles—this is the

observant and accurate mind; the other embraces a great multitude of

principles, without confounding them—and this is the mathematical

mind. The one is marked by energy and accuracy, the other by

amplitude. But the one may exist without the other. The mind may be

powerful and narrow, or it may be ample and weak.” {168}

Few of Pascal’s Thoughts are more interesting than those on “Eloquence

and Style.” So great a master of the art of expression had naturally

something to say on these subjects.

“Continued eloquence wearies. Princes and kings amuse themselves

sometimes; they are not always upon their thrones—they tire of these.

Grandeur must be laid aside in order to be realised.

“Eloquence is a picture of thought; and thus those who, after having

drawn a picture, still go on, make a tableau and not a likeness.

“Eloquence is the art of saying things in such a manner—first, that

those to whom they are addressed can understand them without trouble

and with pleasure; and secondly, that they may be interested in them

in such a way that their _amour propre_ may lead them gladly to

reflect upon them. It consists, therefore, in a correspondence

established between the mind and heart of the hearers on the one

side, and the thoughts and expressions used on the other, and so

implies a close study of the human heart in order to know all its

springs, and to find the due measures of speech to address to it. It

must confine itself, as far as possible, to the simplicity of nature,

and not make great what is small, nor small what is great. It is not

enough that a thing be fine, it must be fitting,—neither in excess

nor defect.”

“Eloquence should prevail by gentle suasion, not by constraint. It

should reign, not tyrannise.

“There are some who speak well, and who do not write well. The

place—the assembly—excites them, and draws forth their mind more than

they ever experience without such excitement.”

“Those who make antitheses by forcing the sense are like men who make

false windows for the sake of symmetry. Their rule is not to speak

correctly, but to make correct figures.”

“There should be in eloquence always what is true and real; but that

which is pleasing should itself be the real.”

“When we meet with the natural style we are surprised and delighted,

for we expected to find an author, and we find a man; whilst those of

good taste who in looking into a book think to find a man, are

altogether surprised to find an author. _Plus poetice quam humane

locutus es_. They honour nature most who teach her that she can

speak best on all subjects—even on theology.”

“There are men who always dress up nature. No mere king with them,

but an august monarch. No Paris, but the capital of the kingdom.

There are places in which it is necessary to call Paris Paris;

others, where we must call it the capital of the kingdom.”

“When in composition we find a word repeated, and on trying to

correct it find it so suitable that a change would spoil the sense,

it is better to let it alone. This stamps it as fitting, and it is a

stupid feeling which does not recognise that repetition in such a

case is not a fault; for there is no universal rule.

“The meaning itself changes with the words which express it. The

meaning derives its dignity from the words, instead of imparting it

to them.”

“The last thing that we discover in writing a book is to know what to

put at the beginning.

“When a discourse paints a passion or effect naturally, we find in

ourselves the truth of what we hear, which was there without our

knowing it, so that we are led to like the man who discovers so much

to us. For he does not show us his own good, but ours; and this good

turn makes him lovable. Besides that, the community of intelligence

we have with him necessarily inclines the heart towards him.

“Let none allege that I have said nothing new. The arrangement of

the matter is new. When we play at tennis, both play with the same

ball; but one plays better than the other. They might as well accuse

me of using old words, as if the same thoughts differently arranged

would not form a different discourse; just as the same words

differently arranged express different thoughts.

“There is a definite standard of taste and beauty, which consists in

a certain relation between our nature—it may be weak or strong, but

such as it is—and the thing that pleases us. All that is formed to

this standard delights us,—house, song, writing, verse, prose, women,

buds, rivers, trees, rooms, dress, etc. All that is not formed by

this standard disgusts men of good taste.

“I never judge of the same thing exactly in the same manner. I

cannot judge of my work in the course of doing it. I must do as

painters do, place myself at a distance from it, but not too far.

How then? You may guess.”

We do not look to Pascal especially for worldly insight, or for that

sharp knowledge of men that make the sayings of clever social writers

like Rochefoucauld or Horace Walpole memorable, if not always wise or

kind. But there are many of the Thoughts which show that the penitent of

Port Royal had looked with clear observant eyes below the surface of

Paris society, and that he had a deep sense not only of the moral but the

social weaknesses of humanity.

“When passion leads us towards anything, we forget duty; as we like a

book we read it, while we ought to be doing something else. In order

to be reminded of our duty, it is necessary to propose to do

something that we dislike; then we excuse ourselves on the ground

that we have something else to do, and so we recollect our duty by

this means.

“How wisely are men distinguished by their exterior rather than by

their interior qualifications! Which of us two shall take the lead?

Which shall yield precedence? The man of less talent? But I am as

clever as he. Then we must fight it out. But he has four lackeys

and I have only one. That is a visible difference. We have only to

count the numbers. It is my place then to give way, and I am a fool

to contest the point. In this way peace is kept, which is the

greatest of blessings.

“There is a great advantage in rank, which gives to a man of eighteen

or twenty a degree of acceptance, publicity, and respect which

another can hardly obtain by merit at fifty. It is a gain of thirty

years without any trouble.

“Respect for others requires you to inconvenience yourself. This

seems foolish, yet it is very proper. It seems to say, I would

gladly inconvenience myself if you really required me to do so,

seeing I am ready to do so without serving you.

“‘This is _my_ dog,’ say children; ‘that sunny seat is mine.’ There

is the beginning and type of the usurpation of the whole earth.

“This _I_ is hateful. You, Miton, {171} merely cover it, you do not

take it away; you are therefore always hateful. Not at all, you say;

for if we act obligingly to all men, they have no reason to hate us.

So far true, if there was nothing hateful in the _I_ itself but the

displeasure which it gives. But if I hate it because it is

essentially unjust, because it makes itself the centre of everything,

I shall hate it always. In short, this _I_ has two qualities: it is

unjust in itself, in that it makes itself the centre of everything;

it is an annoyance to others, in that it would serve itself by them.

Each _I_ is the enemy, and would be the tyrant, of all others.

“He who would thoroughly know the vanity of men has only to consider

the causes and effects of love. The cause is a _je ne sais quoi_, an

indefinable trifle—the effects are monstrous. If the nose of

Cleopatra had been a little shorter, it would have changed the

history of the world.

“You have a bad manner—‘excuse me, if you please.’ Without the

apology I should not have known that there was any harm done.

Begging your pardon, the ‘excuse me,’ is all the mischief.

“Do you wish men to speak well of you? Then never speak well of

yourself.

“The more mind we have, the more do we observe men of original mind.

It is your commonplace people that find no difference betwixt one man

and another.

“It is the contest that delights us, and not the victory. It is the

same in play, and the same in search for truth. We love to watch in

argument the conflicts of opinion; but the plain truth we do not care

to look at. To regard it with pleasure, we must see it gradually

emerging from the contest of debate. It is the same with passions:

the struggle of two contending passions has great interest, but the

dominance of one is mere brutality.

“The example of chastity in Alexander has not availed in the same

degree to make men chaste, as his drunkenness has to make them

intemperate. Men are not ashamed not to be so virtuous as he; and it

seems excusable not to be more vicious. A man thinks he is not

altogether sunk in the mud when he follows the vices of great men.

“I have spent much time in the study of the abstract sciences, but

the paucity of persons with whom you can communicate on such

subjects, gave me a distaste for them. When I began to study man, I

saw that these abstract studies are not suited to him, and that in

diving into them I wandered farther from my real object than those

who were ignorant of them, and I forgave men for not having attended

to these things. But I thought at least I should find many

companions in the study of mankind, which is the true and proper

study of man. I was mistaken. There are yet fewer students of man

than of geometry.

“People in general are called neither poets nor geometers, although

they have all that in them, and are capable of being judges of it.

They are not specifically marked out. When they enter a room, they

speak of the subject on hand. They do not show a greater aptitude

for one subject than another, except as circumstances call out their

talents. . . .

“It is poor praise when a man is pointed out on entering a room as

being a clever poet; a bad mark that he should only be referred to

when the question is as to the merit of some verses. . . .

“Man is full of wants, and likes those who can satisfy them. ‘Such a

one is a good mathematician,’ it may be said. But then I must be

doing mathematics; he would turn me into a proposition. Another is a

good soldier; he would take me for a besieged place. Give me your

true man of general talents, who can adapt himself to all my needs.

“If a man sets himself at a window to see the passers-by, and I

happen to pass, can I say that he set himself there to see me? No;

for he does not think of me in particular. But if a man loves a

woman for her beauty, does he love _her_? No; for the smallpox,

which will destroy her beauty without killing her, will cause him to

love her no more. And if any one loves me for my judgment or my

memory, does he really love _me_? No; for I may lose those qualities

without ceasing to be. Where, then, is this _me_, if it is neither

in soul nor body?

“How is it that a lame man does not anger us, but a blundering mind

does? Is it that the cripple admits that we walk straight, but a

crippled mind accuses us of limping? Epictetus asks also, Why are we

not annoyed if any one tells us that we are unwell in the head, and

yet are angry if they tell us that we reason falsely or choose

unwisely? The reason is, that we know certainly nothing ails our

head, or that we are not crippled in body. But we are not so certain

that we have chosen correctly.

“All men naturally hate one another.

“Desire and force are the source of all our actions—desire of our

voluntary, force of our involuntary actions.

“Men are necessarily such fools, that it would be folly of another

kind not to be a fool.

“To make a man a saint, grace is absolutely necessary; and whoever

doubts this does not know what a saint is, nor what a man is.

“The last act is always tragedy, whatever fine comedy there may have

been in the rest of life—We must all die alone.”

“There can only be two kinds of men: the righteous, who believe

themselves sinners; and sinners, who believe themselves righteous.

“Unbelievers are the most credulous; they believe the miracles of

Vespasian to escape believing the miracles of Moses.

“Atheists should speak only of things perfectly clear, but it is not

perfectly clear that the soul is material.

“Atheism indicates force of mind, but only up to a certain point.”

Some of the foregoing Thoughts {174} may appear to our readers sufficient

to warrant the charge of scepticism, already adverted to. Pascal

certainly speaks at times both of human life and human reason in a

contemptuous manner. Even Rochefoucauld could hardly express himself

more bitterly than he does now and then when he fixes his clear gaze upon

the folly, the vanity, the weaknesses which make up man’s customary life,

and the deceits which he practises upon himself and his fellows. All the

world seems to him at such times “in a state of delusion.” If there is

truth, it “is not where men suppose it to be.” The majority are to be

followed, not “because they have more reason, but because they have more

force.”

“The power of kings is founded on the reason and on the folly of the

people, but chiefly on their folly. The greatest and most important

thing in the world has weakness for its basis, and the basis is

wonderfully secure, for there is nothing more certain than that

people will be weak. . . . Our magistrates well understand this

mystery. . . . Save for their crimson robes, ermine, palaces of

justice, fleur-de-lis, they would never have duped the world. Where

would the physician be without his ‘cassock and mule,’ and the

theologian without his ‘square cap and flowing garments’? These vain

adornments impress the imagination, and secure respect. We cannot

look at an advocate in his gown and wig without a favourable

impression of his abilities. The soldier alone needs no disguise,

because he gains his authority by actual force, the others by

grimace.”

In such sentences, as well as in some previously quoted, the cynicism of

both Hobbes and Montaigne seems to speak. Man is really a fool, and

society rests upon force. The further down we go, we come, not to any

natural rights, or essential principles of justice, which reason is

capable of judging, but only to a mass of customs built up out of selfish

instincts, and controlled by external influence. Pascal repeats

Montaigne over and over again, and seems to make many of his cynicisms

his own. This is not to be denied. “Montaigne is right. Custom should

be followed because it is custom, and because it is found to be

established, without inquiry whether it be reasonable or not.” Yet he

puts in a caveat, as we shall see more fully afterwards, just when he

seems most to have identified himself with the representative of

scepticism. In blindly following custom, he reserves “those matters

which are not contrary to natural or divine right;” and the root of

custom, even in the popular mind, he believes to be a dim sense of

justice. Again, in a similar vein, he asks, “Why follow ancient laws and

ancient opinions? _Are they wiser_? _No_. But they stand apart from

present interests; and _thus take away the root of difference_.” Here,

as so often, the moralist supplants the sceptic, and suggests a higher

thought, while seeming to approve of a superficial Pyrrhonism.

It is easy, in one sense, to make out a case of scepticism against

Pascal. He always writes strongly. There is passion in all his thought.

He had a strong and deep sense of human weakness, and incapacity to

attain the highest truth. He spoke of the philosophy of Descartes

without respect. With most of the Port Royalists, indeed, he seems to

have concurred in the Cartesian doctrine of automata, {176} strangely

revived in our day by Professor Huxley. But he repudiated the notion of

“subtle matter,” and even spoke of it with contempt (_dont il se moquait

fort_). “He could not bear,” his niece tells us, in a passage often

quoted and emphasised, “the Cartesian manner of explaining the formation

of all things.” “I cannot forgive Descartes,” he said. “He would

willingly in all his philosophy have done without God, if he could; but

he could not get on without letting him give the world a fillip to set it

agoing: after that, he has nothing more to do with God.” Whether he had

studied Descartes or not, he evidently did not share the enthusiasm of

Arnauld and others for his philosophy. He even spoke of it as “useless,

uncertain, and troublesome—nay, as ridiculous.” {177} He has added, in

that brusque, rapid, forceful style characteristic of many of his

Thoughts, that “he did not think the whole of philosophy worth an hour’s

trouble.” Again: “To set light by philosophy is the true philosophy.”

When we look at such expressions, and many others, it is not to be

wondered at that Pascal has been accused of scepticism. As he could not

forgive Descartes, so Cousin cannot forgive him for his depreciation of

Descartes. One who saw nothing in Cartesianism or philosophy in general

beyond what these rash sentences, freshly restored in all their audacity,

declare, could be nothing but an “enemy of all philosophy.”

It is impossible not to feel that there is some ground for this

accusation, and that, if we were to draw our knowledge of Pascal merely

from such passages, Cousin makes out something of a case against him.

But many other passages, hardly less emphatic, must make every candid

reader pause before he comes to any definite conclusion on the subject,

if it is necessary to come to such a conclusion at all. It must never be

forgotten that we have nowhere the complete mind of Pascal; that it was

of the very nature of thoughts rapidly dashed upon paper—as the very form

of many we have quoted clearly indicates they were—to be one-sided and

often extravagant. Pascal, of all men, is not to be measured by his

strong expressions. His intellectual nature, while profound, was narrow

and intense. He put his whole soul into what moved him for the time; and

a certain excess of passionate intellectual emotion evidently speaks in

some of the most striking of the ‘Pensées.’ We may imagine how in

some—perhaps in many—cases they would have been toned down had he lived

to revise and refashion them into a harmonious whole. That interior

elaboration,—“a kind of second creation of genius,” as M. Faugère

says—which no one else may venture upon,—would undoubtedly have come from

his own masterly hand, if it had been given him to bring fragment to

fragment, and to fit them together into a complete fabric. It would be a

hard thing to judge any student, and especially a student like Pascal, by

the scattered notes of his library table; and precious as these fragments

are, we must remember that this is their character, and nothing else.

The fact that we now have them in all their native _hardiesse_ makes this

caution not the less but all the more necessary.

In passing on to consider more particularly Pascal’s philosophical and

religious attitude, we shall see more fully the bearing of these remarks.

Pascal, in point of fact, embraces many points of view; and, if he leans

sometimes to scepticism, he sees also the strong side of what he calls

dogmatism or rational philosophy. The very exaggerations of his

language, now on this side and now on that, show that he himself is more

than either, as his own words bear. “It is necessary,” he says, “to have

three qualities—those of the Pyrrhonist, of the geometrician (the

dogmatist), and of the humble Christian. These unite with and attemper

one another, so that we doubt when we should, we aim at certainty when we

should, and we submit when we should.” He certainly thought that he had

found a surer road to truth than either Dogmatism or Pyrrhonism. Whether

he succeeded in doing so will appear as we proceed.

The famous conversation with De Saci, when he entered Port Royal, must be

taken as the chief key to Pascal’s own philosophical attitude. There is

nowhere in any of the Thoughts so complete an exhibition of his point of

view; and all the editors who have most entered into Pascal’s

spirit—Sainte-Beuve, Faugère, and Havet alike—have recognised its

importance. It is really, as Havet says, of the nature of an

introduction to the ‘Pensées.’

In this conversation Pascal signalises what he believes to be the two

great opposing systems of human philosophy at all times; the rational,

dogmatic, or Stoical, on the one hand—the sceptical, or Epicurean, on the

other. He takes Epictetus as the representative of the one; Montaigne as

the representative of the other. In depicting dogmatism at other times,

he seems to have Descartes especially in view; but in speaking of

scepticism and Pyrrhonism (which is his own expression), it is always

Montaigne that he has before him. Montaigne is Pyrrhonist _par

excellence_; and undoubtedly the famous Essays had greatly fascinated

Pascal, like many others in his generation. He was constantly drawn to

them as embodying one, and that a deep, phase of his own experience. He

felt his own thought expressed in many pages of Montaigne, and had that

favour for the Essays that every thoughtful man has for the book that

makes his own experience alive, and brings it clearly before him. But he

has, at the same time, made plainly intelligible his own differences from

Montaigne, and marked with his usual boldness the limitations of his

thought. If Pascal is Pyrrhonist, he is certainly not Pyrrhonist after

the manner of Montaigne, deeply as he responds to many of the notes of

the Essays, and at times seems to make them his own.

The conversation with De Saci took place in 1654, when Pascal first went

to Port Royal des Champs, and De Saci became his spiritual director. We

owe its preservation to Fontaine, from whose manuscript ‘Memoirs’ it was

extracted, and first published in 1728 by Des Molets. After all the

labour of Faugère, Havet believes himself to have given for the first

time the correct text of the conversation from the original print of Des

Molets, based on Fontaine’s manuscripts, rather than from the text of the

‘Memoirs’ as afterwards published. Fontaine describes in his _naïve_

manner the impression made by Pascal upon De Saci, and how the brilliancy

of power which had charmed all the world could not be hidden within the

shades of Port Royal. Ignorant of the Fathers of the Church, he had

found by his own mental and spiritual penetration the very truths to be

met with in them; and De Saci seemed to see another St Augustine before

him in the wonderful talk of the gifted penitent. It was his practice in

dealing with his penitents to adapt his conversation to their peculiar

powers. If he spoke with M. Champagne, for example, he talked with him

of painting. If he saw M. Hamon, he inquired about the art of medicine.

If it was the surgeon of the place, he had something to say of surgery.

All was designed to lead the thoughts from all human things up to God.

With Pascal, therefore, it was philosophy upon which his conversation

fell, to try the depths of his mind, and see what special direction he

needed. “Pascal told him that the two books most familiar to him were

Epictetus and Montaigne, and he lavished great praise on both. M. de

Saci had always wished to read these two authors, and asked M. Pascal to

explain them fully.”

“Epictetus,” said Pascal, “is one of the philosophers of the world

who have best known the duties of man. Above all things, he would

have man regard God as his chief object—to be persuaded that He

governs all things with righteousness—to submit to Him cordially, and

to follow Him willingly, as having made all things with perfect

wisdom. Such a disposition would stay all complaints and murmurs,

and prepare the human mind to bear quietly the most troublesome

events. ‘Never say,’ he observes (Enchirid. 11), ‘I have lost that;

say rather, I have restored it. My son is dead; I have surrendered

him. My wife is dead; I have given her up.’ And so of every other

good. . . . While its use is permitted, regard it as a good

belonging to others, as a traveller does in an inn. You should not

wish,’ he adds, ‘that things be as you desire, but you should desire

them to be as they are.’ . . . It is your duty to play well the part

assigned to you, but to choose the part is the act of Another. Have

always death before your eyes, and the evils which are least

supportable, and you would never think meanly of anything, nor desire

anything in excess. He shows in a thousand ways what is the duty of

man. He wishes him to be humble, to conceal his good resolutions,

especially in their beginnings, that he may carry them out in secret.

Nothing is so ruinous to them as publicity. He never ceases to

repeat that the whole duty and desire of man ought to be to

acknowledge the will of God, and to follow it.

“Such were the lights of this great mind, who has so well understood

the duties of man. I venture to say, that he would have deserved to

be adored if he had only known as well human weakness; but in order

to do this, he must have been God Himself. Mere man as he was, after

having so well explained human duty, he loses himself in the

presumption of human capacity. He avers that God has given to every

man the means of acquitting himself of all his obligations; that such

means are always within his own power, that happiness is to be sought

by things within our reach, since God has given us them for this very

end. He points out in what our freedom consists: goods, life, esteem

are not in our power, and therefore do not lead to God; but none can

force the mind to believe what is false, nor the will to love that

which will make it miserable. These two powers are therefore free;

and by these we can render ourselves perfect—know God perfectly, love

Him, obey Him, please Him—vanquish all vices, acquire all virtues,

and so make ourselves holy, and the fellows of God. These

principles, truly diabolic in their pride, lead to other errors—such

as that the soul is a portion of the Divine substance, that grief and

death are not evils, that we may kill ourselves when we are in such

trouble that we may believe God summons us, etc.

“As for Montaigne—of whom you wish me also, my dear sir, to

speak—being born in a Christian country, he makes profession of the

Catholic religion, and so far there is nothing peculiar about him.

But in the search for a system of morals dictated by reason without

the light of faith, he has to lay down his principles on this

supposition, and to consider man apart from revelation. He conceives

things in such a universal uncertainty that doubt itself is seized

with uncertainty, and doubts whether it doubts. His scepticism

returns upon itself in a perpetual circle without repose, opposing

equally those who maintain that all is uncertain, and those who

maintain that nothing is, so utterly indisposed is he to any fixity.

In this doubt which doubts itself, and this ignorance which is

ignorant of itself, is to be found the essence of his thought. He

cannot express it by any positive term; for if he was to say that he

doubts, he betrays himself by making it certain that he doubts; and

this being formally against his intention, he can only explain

himself by an interrogation. Not wishing to say, I do not know, he

can only ask, What do I know? He has made this his device, putting

it under a pair of balances, which, weighted in each scale by a

contradiction, hangs in perfect equilibrium. In other words, he is

pure Pyrrhonist. This is the point round which turn all his

discourses and all his essays. This is the only thing which he

leaves fixed, although he may not always keep it before him. . . .

“It is in this humour, fluctuating and variable as it is, that he

combats with an invincible firmness the heretics of his time, who

assumed to know the exclusive sense of Scripture. From the same

point of view he thunders vigorously against the horrible impiety of

those who dare to be certain that there is no God! He attacks them

especially in the ‘Apology for Raymond de Sebonde.’ Having

voluntarily set aside revelation, and abandoned themselves to their

natural light—all faith set aside—he asks them on what authority

they, who know not the essential reality of anything, dare to judge

of that Sovereign Being who is infinite by His very definition. He

demands upon what principles they rest, and presses them to point

them out. He examines all that they bring forward, and so searches

them by his wonderful penetration as to show the hollowness of what

passes for the most clear and established truths. He inquires if the

soul knows anything whatever—if it knows itself; whether it is

substance or accident, body or spirit; what is each of these things,

and if there is anything belonging to some order different from

either; if the soul knows its own body; if it knows what matter is,

or can distinguish the innumerable varieties of body produced from

matter; how it can reason if it is material, and how it can be united

to a special body, and feel its passions if it be spiritual. When

did it begin to be, with the body or before, and if it ends with it

or not? . . . . The ideas of God and truth are inseparable, and if

the one is or is not, if the one is certain or uncertain, the other

is necessarily the same. Who knows if the common sense (_le sens

commun_) which we take as a judge of the truth is really this,

designed for such a purpose? Who knows what truth is, and how can we

be sure of having it without knowing it? Who knows even what Being

is, since it is impossible to define it; and in trying to do so, it

is necessary to presuppose the very idea itself, and say _it is_? . .

.

“I confess, sir, I might look with joy upon the manner in which the

author invincibly crumples up proud reason with its own arms. I

could love with my whole heart the minister of so mighty a vengeance

if, as a faithful disciple of the Church, he had followed its moral

guidance. But he acts, on the contrary, like a pagan, concluding

that we ought to abandon care for others and dwell in peace, gliding

lightly over such subjects lest we lose ourselves in them, and taking

that to be true and good which at first appears to be so. This is

why he follows everywhere the evidence of the senses and the notions

of the community. . . . In this manner, he says, there is nothing

extravagant in his conduct. He does as others do. Whatever they do

in the foolish thought that they are following the true good, he does

from another principle, that as the probabilities (_vraisemblances_)

are equally on one side and the other, so example and convenience

carry the day with him. He mounts his horse like any one else—not as

a philosopher—because the horse allows him to do so, but without

thinking there is any right in the matter, and not knowing whether

the horse, on the contrary, may not be entitled to make use of him.

He puts constraint to himself in order to shun certain vices; and

even guards marriage faithfully, merely on account of the disorder

which would otherwise follow. . . .

“I cannot dissemble that in reading Montaigne, and comparing him with

Epictetus, I find in them the two greatest defenders of the most

celebrated sects of the world, who profess to follow reason rather

than revelation. We must follow one or other. Either there is a God

and a Sovereign Good, or this is uncertain, and all is

uncertain,—whether there is any true good or not. . . .

“The error in both is, in not seeing that the present state of man

differs from that in which he was created. The one, observing only

the traces of his primitive grandeur, and ignoring his corruption,

has treated human nature as if it were whole, without any need of a

Redeemer—this leads to the height of pride; the other, sensible of

man’s present misery, and ignorant of his original dignity, treats

human nature as necessarily weak and irreparable, and thus, in

despair of attaining any true good, plunges it into a depth of

baseness.” {185}

These two states, Pascal goes on to argue, must be taken together before

the truth can be reached. Apart, they give a false picture of man; and

generate on the one hand pride, on the other hand immorality. It is only

the Gospel which unites them, in a right manner, “by a divine art.” It

brings together the opposites, and explains, by a wondrous, truly

heavenly way, how they may coexist, not as attributes of the same

subject, as systems of human philosophy have made them, but as different

endowments—the one of nature, the other of grace. “Behold the new and

surprising union which God alone could teach and alone accomplish, and

which is only an image and an effect of the ineffable union of two

natures in the one person of the God-man.”

In these latter sentences—which we have been obliged, for the sake of

brevity, to compress—we have the suggestion of Pascal’s philosophy both

of human nature and of Divine revelation. He recurs over and over again

to the same idea, that man is great and yet weak, full of capacity and

yet miserable, and that the Gospel alone holds the key to this enigma of

human nature. This, more than any other, is the pervading thought round

which all the others gather.

“This twofoldness (_duplicité_),” he says, “is so visible, that some

have conceived that man must have two souls—a simple subject

appearing to them incapable of such and so sudden variations; an

immeasurable presumption on the one hand, a horrible abasement on the

other. In spite of all the miseries which cleave to us, and hold us,

as it were, by the throat (_nous tiennent à la gorge_), there is

within us an irrepressible instinct which exalts us. The greatness

of man is so visible that it may be deduced from his very misery.

His very miseries prove his greatness. They are the miseries of a

great lord, of a dethroned sovereign. The greatness of man consists

in his knowledge of his misery. A tree does not know itself to be

miserable. . . . He is miserable—the fact is beyond question; but he

is great in knowing it.” {186}

Again, reverting to the very same line of thought, as in the conversation

with De Saci—

“Philosophers have propounded sentiments not at all adapted to the

twofold condition of man. They have sought to inspire emotions of

pure greatness; but this is not man’s condition. They have sought on

the other hand to inspire sentiments of mere baseness; but neither is

this man’s condition. Man needs abasement, not of nature, however,

but of penitence; not that he remain degraded, but that he may rise

to greatness. He needs to feel within him the emotion of

greatness,—not of merit, however, but of grace. . . . Two sects have

sprung out of this conflict between reason and sense in man. The

one, in renouncing passion, has aspired to divinity; the other, in

renouncing reason, has sunk to mere brutality. . . . The principles

of the respective philosophies are so far true—Pyrrhonism, Stoicism,

Atheism even. But the conclusions are false, because the opposite

principles are equally true. . . . We labour under an incapacity of

demonstrating all things invincible to Dogmatism. We have an innate

idea of truth invincible to all Pyrrhonism. . . . Nature confounds

the Pyrrhonist, and reason the Dogmatist;”—

or, as the passage was originally written,—

“We cannot be Pyrrhonists without violating nature; we cannot be

Dogmatists without renouncing nature.” {187}

These and other passages sufficiently show Pascal’s relation to

philosophy, and to Pyrrhonism in particular. He is no enemy of

philosophy, but he certainly does not believe it capable of explaining

the riddle of human nature. He is so far from being a Pyrrhonist in the

sense of resting on Pyrrhonism, that he seeks to mount on its shoulders

to a higher truth. Nay, he clearly recognises that man has an inborn

faculty for truth which not all the contradictions of his experience can

belie. We may and must doubt as to many things; but there are principles

lying at the root of human life which are invincible to all doubt. We

can demonstrate many things; but there are natural realities beyond our

power of demonstration. On the side of sense, all things seem to

fluctuate and waver in uncertainty; on the side of mere intellect we soon

cross the limit of our powers. But Humanity is more than either sense or

intellect. There is, as he believes, a primitive endowment of spiritual

instinct in man, which looks forth upon a higher world of reality.

Repeatedly, and in various applications, he recurs to these three radical

sides or elements of Humanity; “the sensible—the intellectual, or the

exercise of reason left to itself—and the spiritual or divine.” Pascal

despairs of a philosophy which is either a mere generalisation of

sensible experience, or which aims at demonstrating everything from a

purely rational point of view; but he is so far from resting in mere

intellectual doubt, that he tries to find a ground for human certitude in

a deeper stratum of Humanity than either sense or what he calls “reason.”

Neander and others have vindicated for him a supreme position as a

philosopher on this very account. With them he is not only no sceptic,

but he stands forth among the men who have specially vindicated the

claims of Humanity as endowed with the divine attributes of “spirit” and

“will”—the men of “full mental healthiness” who have recognised in man a

free spiritual life no less than a life of sense and intellect. This may

or may not be. But the mere fact that Pascal has aimed at a deeper

ground of certitude, whether he has made it clear or not, and whether or

not he has spoken with undue depreciation of other sources of knowledge,

should be enough to vindicate him from the charge of even philosophical

scepticism. In the following passage he has explained his views more

fully. More than any other, perhaps, it may be taken as the text of his

philosophy.

“We discover truth,” he says, “not only by reasoning, but by feeling

(_le cœur_); and it is in this latter manner that we discover first

principles—and in vain does reasoning, which has no share in their

production, try to combat these principles. The Pyrrhonists, who

attempt this, labour in vain. We know that we are not deceived,

however incapable we may be of proving so by any power of reasoning.

This incapacity only demonstrates the weakness of our reasoning

faculty, and not the incertitude of all our knowledge, as they

pretend. Nay, our knowledge of first principles, such as the ideas

of _space_, _time_, _motion_, _number_, is as certain as any obtained

by reasoning. It is, in fact, upon such conclusions of feeling and

instinct that Reason must ultimately rest and base all its arguments.

We _feel_ that there are three dimensions in space, and that numbers

are infinite; and reason hence demonstrates that there are no two

square numbers the one of which is double the other. Principles are

felt, propositions deduced, and both with certitude, although in

different ways. And it is as absurd for the ‘reason’ to demand of

the ‘heart’ proofs of its first principles before asserting them, as

it would be for the ‘heart’ to demand of the ‘reason’ a _feeling_ of

all propositions that she demonstrates before accepting them. This

weakness, therefore, should only serve to humble reason in its desire

to make itself judge of everything, but by no means to moderate the

certitude of our conviction, as if reason were alone capable of

instructing us.” {189}

There may be something to object to in Pascal’s mode of expression in the

above passage. Cousin has made the most of his confusion of “reason” and

“reasoning”—“la raison” and “le raisonnement.” The expression “le cœur,”

by which he designates the higher faculty of intuition, may be inadequate

and misleading—complex and disturbing in its association. But withal,

his attitude in favour of a ground of certainty in human knowledge is

unmistakable. So far he is not only not with Montaigne, but he is

clearly against him. The rights of nature, as he says, rise up against

the Pyrrhonist. They make themselves good. And however strongly Pascal

may draw the picture of human weakness, and all the contrarieties which

our nature encloses, he does not mean by this to strike at the roots of

all knowledge, and leave man a prey to helpless doubt. He means merely

to shake the throne of rational security, and to show that no conclusions

of mere philosophy can reach all the exigencies of man’s condition. His

analysis of human nature is the analysis of a moralist, and not of a

psychologist or rational philosopher. He looks at man always as a

spiritual being. It is his spiritual capacity which alone makes him

great, and yet intensifies all the lower contradictions of his nature.

It is “thought alone which makes man’s greatness.” A man can be

conceived “without hands or feet or head, but not without thought.”

“The possession of the earth would not add to my greatness. As to

space, the universe encloses and absorbs me as a mere point, but by

thought I embrace it. . . . Man is but a reed, the feeblest of

created things—but one possessing thought (_un roseau pensant_). It

needs not that the universe should arm itself to crush him. A

breath, a drop of water, suffices for his destruction. But were the

whole universe to rise against him, man is yet greater than the

universe, since man _knows_ that he dies. He knows the universe

prevails against him. The universe knows nothing of its power.”

{190}

It is hardly possible to speak more eloquently of the dignity of human

nature. And if it is the same voice which speaks in such pathetic or it

may be harsh tones of human weakness and misery, and the disproportions

of our natural life, it is the very consciousness of greatness that

inspires the consciousness of misery. Looking from such a height of

human dignity, he sees all the depths of human baseness. It is this

higher spirit which consecrates Pascal as a moralist. Has he rebuked the

presumptions of humanity? has he called upon proud reason to humble

itself? has he gibed human philosophy, and even gloried for a moment in

the contradictions of empiricism? It is never that he may laugh at man,

or that he may rest in the mere contemplation of his follies or

extravagances, but because he himself profoundly realised the height and

the depth of his being—the grandeur to which he could rise, or to which

God could raise him, and the baseness and miseries to which he could

sink. Doubtless, as with all concentrated and meditative natures, Pascal

delights to dwell on the weaker and gloomier side of humanity. This was

partly the result of his Jansenist leanings, but mainly it came from his

own intense reality of feeling. It was bred of his austere sadness of

heart, and is found to run as a note of profound constitutional

melancholy through all his letters, and all his life, as well as his

Thoughts. In the view of eternity, and of the awful issues involved in

religion, the common life and pursuits of man seemed to him not only

frivolous, but criminal. He looked forth, therefore, on this common life

with eyes not only of tears, but of displeasure. He seemed even at times

to derive something of stern satisfaction from its very follies and

absurdities. But this is only the temporary mood of the profound

moralist touched to his heart by pangs that he cannot resist. His true

view of life is never cynical,—but always grave, if bitter—and hopeful,

if stern.

Pascal’s supposed philosophical scepticism admits of something of the

same explanation. He has not only no wish to disturb the fundamental

verities of human thought, but he endeavours to fix them in an

ineradicable instinct or universal “sense,” against which all the

assaults of Pyrrhonism must break. But the while he is himself deeply

moved by the perplexities of human reason. Although no Pyrrhonist in

thought, he knows too well in experience the depths of Pyrrhonism. His

mind is one of those to be met with in all ages, which, while it clings

to faith, and is even strong in the assertion of faith’s claims, is yet

in certain moments utterly distracted by doubt. Constantly searching the

foundations of human knowledge,—sifting them as with lighted glance,—they

seemed to him at times to crumble away before him. Nothing remained

fixed to his piercing look. As few minds have experienced, he felt the

awful darkness which encloses all mortal aspiration, and the keenest

audacities of human speculation. The incapacities of human reason at

such times overwhelmed him, and left him hopeless, or, still worse, in a

half-derisive mood. And these moods, as well as his clearer and more

elaborate thoughts, hastily transferred to paper, are found amongst his

notes. It is quite impossible to vindicate his consistency, and it is

not in the least necessary to do this, as already explained; while we

feel bound to maintain that his higher mood is his true mood, and that

the Pascal of the ‘Pensées’—the veritable Pascal—is to be judged, not by

his weakness but by his strength; by his moments of clear mental sanity

and insight, and not by his moments of despair or of derisive mockery of

all human philosophy.

This seems to us the true light in which to regard the famous wager-essay

on the existence of God, which has been a scandal even to some of his

greatest admirers. It is impossible to defend this essay on any

principle of sound philosophy. Either there is a God or there is not.

Which side of the question shall we take? “Reason,” he says, “cannot

decide.” The fact, he means, cannot be demonstrated according to his

customary use of the word reason. But if it cannot, there must yet be a

balance of reason, and proof on one side or the other. And the only fair

and manly issue of such a question must be, On which side lies this

balance? A valid theistic conclusion can be found in no other way, and

least of all in any calculation of chances, or balance of self-interest.

And yet it is this last which Pascal has put forward with such prominence

in this famous essay. “Wager,” he says. “If you win, you win

everything; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without

hesitation, that God exists. . . . On one side is an eternity of life,

of infinite blessedness to be gained, and what you stake is finite. . . .

Our proposition is, that the finite is to be vested in a wager, in which

there is an equal chance of gain and loss, and _infinitude to gain_.”

The play was hardly worthy of Pascal, and the ‘mystery of the game’ could

certainly never be unravelled in any such way. But not a few minds like

Pascal’s—with deep spiritual intuitions and yet a craving for scientific

certainty constantly mocking these intuitions—have felt in a similar

manner the hazard of the great question, and may have said to themselves,

“We must take our stand, and this is the side which weighs in the

balance. We can lose nothing; we may gain everything.” The mood is not

a lofty one, and it is no higher in Pascal than in any one else; but

there are moments of terrible doubt, when the soul is so borne away on

the surge of the sceptical wave that rises from the depth of all human

speculation, that it can only cling to the Divine by an effort of will,

and with something of the gamester’s thought that this is the winning

side! The thought may be shallow and poor in itself, but in such cases

it comes not out of the shallows but out of the depths of a mind torn by

distracting doubts in the face of the dreadful problems of life.

Out of the same depth of spiritual experience and trenchant moral

analysis comes all that is true and valuable in his so-called ‘Apology.’

That the ‘Pensées’ were more or less designed to form such an Apology—to

be woven into the plan of a treatise in defence of the Christian

religion—seems beyond doubt. He had himself, according to the statement

of his nephew, unfolded such a plan to his friends, in a lengthened

conversation about the year 1657 or 1659. They were charmed with the

loftiness of his design, and listened to his exposition of it for two or

three hours with unabated interest. He was to commence with an analysis

of human nature, and to advance from the contemplation of its mysteries,

obscurities, and perplexities, to the consideration of the various

methods, philosophical and religious, by which reason had endeavoured to

meet the difficulties of thought and life. After explaining the

inconclusiveness and absurdities of these methods—represented by the

diverse philosophies and religions of the world—he was to call attention

to the Jewish religion, and the superiority which it presents to all

others, both in the extraordinary circumstances of its history, and in

the revelation which it gives of one God, Creator and Governor of the

world, and of the origin of man—his primitive innocence and fall. The

idea of the fall, which was a central one in all Pascal’s thoughts, was

to be fully expounded, in its own character and as “the source not only

of whatever is most inexplicable in man’s nature, but also of a multitude

of things, external to him, of which he knows not the causes.” From the

fall he was to pass to the hopes of deliverance revealed in the Old

Testament, and especially the lofty conception which it gives of God as a

God of love, a feature peculiar to it, and “which he deemed the essence

of true religion.”

From such general considerations—of the nature of prolegomena or

“preparation” for the reader’s mind—he proceeded to furnish a brief view

of “the positive proofs of the truths he wanted to establish,—proofs

derived from the authenticity of the books of Moses, especially the

miracles they record, the figures and types they embody.” He then went

on more at length to prove the truth of religion from prophecy, which he

is represented as having studied deeply, and certain views of which, “of

a nature wholly original,” he explained with great clearness. Finally,

“after going through the books of the Old Testament,” he advanced to

those of the New, “and deduced from them his crowning proofs of the

truths of the Gospel.” He began with Christ, whose divine mission he

already supposed to be established by the argument from prophecy, and

added additional force of evidence from His resurrection, His miracles,

His doctrines, and the tenor of His life; then from the character and

mission of the apostles; and lastly, from the style and manner of the New

Testament books, and especially of the Gospels, “the multitude of

miracles, martyrs, and the saints,”—in a word, from all “by which the

Christian religion is so triumphantly established.”

It is needless to say how imperfectly this design was ever accomplished;

and no ingenuity of restoration can make of Pascal’s apologetic plan

anything but a mass of imperfect fragments. Yet he has left us a

definite series of Thoughts on the Jewish religion, on Miracles, Figures,

and Prophecy, and also on Jesus Christ and the general character of the

Christian religion. In these Thoughts, it must be admitted, there is but

little to reward our study in comparison with those of a more

introductory and philosophical nature. Pascal’s genius was in no degree

historical, and but slightly critical—not to mention that the very idea

of historical criticism had not emerged in his time, nor long afterwards.

While realising so profoundly the perplexities of human experience, he

has no conception of the difficulties that beset historical tradition;

nor do his habits of scientific investigation, and the natural severity

and logical rigour of his mind, seem to have suggested to him any

misgivings as to the prevalence of miraculous agency in the world. The

perfect faith with which he accepted the “miracle” of the Holy Thorn is a

sufficient indication of his state of mind in this respect, and how ready

he was to accept evidence the very idea of which merely excites a smile

of wonder in the modern mind.

It cannot be said, therefore, to be any matter of regret that Pascal did

not live to complete the historical portion of his projected work,—what

he seems himself, from the report of his friends, to have considered the

main structure of the defence he intended to rear on behalf of the

religion so dear to him. He expended his real strength on the portico to

the designed temple. His genius fitted him to deal with this, and with

this alone, in any adequate manner. His moral analysis, at once keen and

veracious, enabled him not only to lay bare all the “disproportions” of

humanity, but, moreover, to unfold the adaptation of Christianity as a

spiritual system to meet and remedy these disproportions. This is the

real “apologetic” work of the ‘Pensées,’ and the only one for which

Pascal’s mind pre-eminently fitted him. He sees in the Gospel a Divine

Power which is capable of ministering to man’s higher wants—a power of

infinite compassion towards human weakness and misery, of infinite help

for the one and remedy for the other. The Christian religion, according

to him, alone “understands at once man’s greatness and degradation, and

the reason of both the one and the other.” “It is equally important for

man to know his capacity of being like God and his unworthiness of Him.

To know of God without knowing his misery, or to know his misery without

knowing the Redeemer, who alone can deliver him from it, is alike

dangerous. The one knowledge constitutes the pride of the philosopher,

the other the despair of the atheist. Man must therefore have the double

experience, and so it has pleased God to reveal it. This the Christian

religion does; in this it consists.” Again: “Christ is the centre in

which alone we find at once God and our misery. In Him alone we have a

God whom we must approach without pride, and before whom we may yet bow

without despair.” In another and more lengthened passage he brings the

two ideas of human corruption and divine redemption closely together, the

one as supplementary of the other, and expressly emphasises the

perfection with which Christianity fits so to speak, into all the wards

of the human enigma,—in comparison with every system of human philosophy.

“Without divine knowledge,” he says, “what have men been able to do

save to exalt themselves in the consciousness of their original

greatness, or abase themselves in the view of their present weakness?

Unable to see the whole truth, they have never attained to perfect

virtue. One class considering nature as incorrupt, another as

irreparable, they have been alternately the victims of pride or

sensuality—the two sources of all vice. . . . If, in one case, they

recognised man’s excellence, they ignored his corruption; and so, in

escaping indulgence, they lost themselves in pride. In the other

case, in acknowledging his weakness they ignored his dignity, and,

while escaping vanity, plunged into despair. Hence the diverse sects

of Stoics and Epicureans, of Dogmatists and Academicians, etc. The

Christian religion alone can reconcile these discrepancies and cure

both evils, not by expelling the one by the other, according to the

wisdom of this world, but by expelling both the one and the other by

the simplicity of the Gospel. For it teaches the just that while it

elevates them even to be partakers of the divine nature, they still

carry with them in this lofty state the source of all their

corruption, making them during life subjects of error, misery, death,

and sin. At the same time, it proclaims to the most impious that

they are capable of becoming partakers of a Redeemer’s grace. By

thus warning those whom it justifies, and consoling those whom it

condemns, it tempers with just measure fear and hope, through the

twofold capacity in all of grace and sin; so that it abases

infinitely more than reason, yet without producing despair, and

exalts infinitely more than natural pride, yet without puffing

up,—plainly showing that it alone is exempt from all error and wrong,

and possesses the power at once of instructing and correcting men.

Who, then, can withhold his belief in this revelation, or refuse to

adore its celestial light? For is it not more clear than day that we

feel in ourselves the ineffaceable traces of divine excellence? And

it is equally clear that we experience every hour the effects of our

fall and ruin. What, then, comes to us from all this chaos and wild

confusion, in a voice of irresistible conviction, but the

irrefragable truth of both those sides of humanity?” {199}

This passage conveys very clearly at once the gist of Pascal’s philosophy

and the chief merit of his line of Christian apology. The two cannot be

separated. They run constantly into one another. He was a Christian

apologist in so far as he was a Christian philosopher; and those who

reject his line of Christian defence, will also reject his whole mode of

thought. To him the only solution of human perplexity in thought and

life is Christ. He is the “object and centre of all things, in whom

alone all contradictions are reconciled.” This is the conclusion of his

intelligence, and not of his despair. Whatever may be the traces of

scepticism in his intellectual nature, it is doing him great injustice to

represent his acceptance of Christianity as a mere refuge from

uncertainty. He is a totally different man from Huet, with whom Cousin

has ventured to compare him in this respect. He never dallies on the

surface; mere traditionalism has but a slight hold of him. He is a

Christian not because he has been taught Christianity, or because the

Church as a divine institution claims his allegiance. All these

influences may have affected him, and given a turn to his mind; but they

do not touch the essence of his thoughts. Anything he does say of the

external claims of Christianity has but little weight. It is out of the

depths of his own spiritual experience that his faith is born. It is a

voice within him, a conflicting cry of weakness and aspiration going up

everywhere from humanity, that find their answer in Christ. There is the

enigma of man on the one side, to him otherwise hopeless, and Christ on

the other, holding the keys of the enigma in His hand. The solution

appeared to him perfect, according to his study and analysis of the

problem—the twofoldness that he found in man, of divine dignity on the

one hand, and frivolous, sensual degradation on the other. Both facts,

he says, are equally clear and certain. Man’s fall from a state of

divine innocence alone explains them; and the Gospel alone recognises the

one side as well as the other of human nature, and provides a Power

capable of restoring its true balance and rectifying all its disorder.

He felt in himself the might of this power healing all the wounds of his

own heart, and binding up the shreds of his Christian efforts “to do

justly, and love mercy, and walk humbly with God.” Whether we agree with

all his analyses, or recognise all the adaptations which he describes, it

is impossible not to feel that they were living to him, and that he saw

in Christianity not merely a refuge for the disappointed heart, but a

true philosophy of life—the only “sure and sound philosophy,” as Justin

Martyr had found long before him.

It is in the same spirit that he writes in many of his later ‘Pensées.’

Some of the passages already quoted are in fact taken from the chapter

“On the Christian Religion,” which appears to have been intended to form

one of the concluding chapters of his Apology. But he repeats over and

over again the same strain—that the present condition of man is only

intelligible in the light of the Christian revelation, and that this

revelation alone answers to all man’s necessities. Christ has not only

proclaimed a higher truth to man, which man is bound to accept under

penalties of default. This tone is also found sometimes, but

comparatively seldom. The prevailing note is, that there is an admirable

fitness between the two—the mysteries of human nature witnessing to the

divine veracity of the Gospel, and the Gospel again holding the only key

to these mysteries, and the only power of unravelling them and restoring

them to their divine original. “Jesus Christ,” he says, “is for all men;

Moses for one people.” “The knowledge of God without a knowledge of our

misery produces pride; that of our misery without God leads to despair.

The knowledge of Jesus is the means by which we at once find God and our

misery.” “Without Jesus Christ man is sunk in vice and misery. . . . In

Him is all our virtue and felicity.”

Of the more directly apologetic ‘Pensées’ of Pascal there are many of

great significance and interest, slight as may be the value of his

general historical argument, so far as this can be traced. Wherever he

trusts to his own clear judgment and profound penetration, he throws out

sentences weighty with meaning, and capable of being expanded into trains

of argument. Our shortening space warns us that our quotations must come

to an end; but the reader may thank us for drawing his attention to the

following:—

“Even when Epictetus had discovered the right way, he could only say

to man, ‘You follow a wrong one.’ He shows that there is another,

but he does not lead to it. . . . Jesus Christ alone leads to

it—_via_, _veritas_.

“Jesus Christ has spoken great things so simply that they seem to

have cost Him little thought—and yet so fitly that we see well what

His thought was.” [This combination of clearness and _naïveté_ is

admirable.]

“The apostles were either deceived or deceivers; either supposition

is full of difficulty.

“What right have they to say, ‘It is impossible that we should rise

again’? Which is the more difficult to be—to be born, or to be

raised from the dead? Is it less difficult to come into being than

to return to being? Custom (experience) renders the one easy to us;

the want of custom makes the other seem impossible. But _this is a

popular way of judging_.

“Who taught the evangelists the qualities of a truly heroic soul,

that they should paint it to such perfection in Jesus Christ? Why

have they made Him weak in His agony? Did they not know how to

describe a death of fortitude? Assuredly; for it is the same St Luke

paints St Stephen’s death as so much braver than that of Jesus

Christ. They have made Him capable of fear before the necessity of

death had come, then entirely calm and brave. But when they show Him

in trouble, the trouble comes from Himself; in the face of men He

remains unmoved.

“The highest achievement of reason is to recognise that there is an

infinity of things which surpass its powers.

“If we submit everything to reason, our religion would have nothing

mysterious or supernatural. If we violate the principles of reason,

our religion will be absurd and ridiculous.

“There are two extremes—to exclude reason, and to admit only reason.

“It is your own consent, and the steady voice of your own reason, and

not that of others, which must make you believe.

“If antiquity was the rule of faith, the ancients were without a

rule.

“Let them say what they will, it must be confessed that the Christian

religion is something astonishing. ‘That is because you were born in

it,’ they say. So far from this, I am on my guard against it on this

very account, lest this incline me unduly to it. But though I was

born in it, the facts are not the less as I find them.”

True to his whole conception of religion as the free choice of the heart

and will, Pascal does not find any special difficulty in the fact of so

many rejecting Christianity. It is of its very nature that it cannot be

forced on any mind. The God of the Gospel can only be reached by faith.

To all without faith, or the inner eye to see Him, He is a _Deus

absconditus_, “a God who hides himself.” In one of his letters to

Mademoiselle de Roannez, he dwells upon this idea, which also continually

recurs in his Thoughts:—

“If God continually revealed Himself to man, faith would have no

value; we could not help believing. If He did not reveal Himself,

there could be no such thing as faith. While hiding Himself, He yet

reveals Himself to those who are willing to be His servants. . . .

All things hide a mystery. All are a veil which conceal God. The

Christian must recognise Him in all. . . . There is light enough for

those who wish to see, but darkness enough for those who are of an

opposite disposition. . . . For God would rather move the will than

the intellect. Perfect clearness would cure the one, but injure the

other.”

And so this great mind comes round once more to its central thought, that

religion is born not of science, but of love and faith. Christianity

appeared to Pascal divine—as the only true interpreter of human

experience; and where this experience bore no witness to it, and found no

blessing in it, the fault and the misery were its own. The divine light

was not gone because men did not see it, when they were not willing to

see it. This may seem a hard saying,—a paradox of faith rejoicing in its

own illumination, rather than an utterance of reason challenging the

world. But can a divine appeal ever go further? Christian apology has

its own sphere, no less than science; and the evidence which the one

desiderates is not the supreme life and power of the other. It may not

on this account be the less satisfactory or the less rational when the

whole life of humanity is looked at.

If we ask ourselves, in conclusion, what is the chief charm of the

‘Pensées,’ we feel inclined to answer,—their touching reality. They are

the utterances of one who thought not only deeply but passionately. A

strange thrill of personal emotion runs through them all, animating them

with vitality, even when one-sided or extravagant. One of his own

countrymen {204} has said of Pascal that it was his mission to do for

theology what Socrates did for philosophy—to bring it down from heaven to

earth. And certainly there is the breathing movement as of a human heart

through his whole writings. More than anything else, it is this vitality

combined with his exquisite literary art which sets him above all his

friends and contemporaries—Arnauld, De Saci, Le Maitre, Nicole, or

Fontaine. Still, when we read the ‘Provincial Letters’ or the ‘Pensées,’

we feel ourselves in communion with a living writer who knew how to light

up with an immortal touch both the follies of ecclesiasticism and the

struggles of a solitary spirit after truth. The tenderness of a genuine

insight mingles with all the sublimity and severe reserve of the thought,

and so we get close to a true soul, distant as Pascal himself in some

respects remains to us. The play of human feeling which we miss in the

man moves in his writings, and touches our hearts with an ineffable

sympathy, even when we remain unconvinced or unenlightened.

END OF PASCAL.

NOTES.

{3} Lettres, Opuscules, et Mémoires de Madame Périer et de Jacqueline,

Sœurs de Pascal, et de Marguerite Périer, sa nièce; publiés sur les

Manuscrits originaux, par M. P. Faugère. Paris, 1845.

{4a} Jacqueline Pascal, par M. Victor Cousin. Troisième éd. 1856.

Lélut, L’Amulette de Pascal. Paris, 1846.

{4b} Sainte-Beuve. Port Royal. Tom. ii. iii. Mr Beard, in his two

volumes on Port Royal, gives an excellent sketch of Blaise and Jacqueline

Pascal, in which he has made a diligent use of all the recent French

authorities on the subject.

{4c} British Quarterly Review, August 1850.

{5} The Provincial Parliaments in France before the Revolution

discharged within a definite area the same judicial and administrative

functions as the Parliament of Paris; but they were always regarded as

offshoots of the latter, and subordinate to its supreme direction. They

possessed no lawful political powers. Lalanne, Dictionnaire Historique,

Art. “Parl.,” p. 1421. The “Court of Aides,” according to the same

authority, p. 32, decided in the last resort civil and criminal processes

relating to subsidies, assessments, and taxes in general, and

superintended the collection of the royal revenues.

{6a} Gilberte Pascal—Madame Périer—says, in her life of her brother,

1626. Marguerite Périer, her daughter, Pascal’s niece, says 1628.

Cousin (B. Pascal), App. I. 315. Faugère, Lettres, Opuscules, etc., p.

419.

{6b} Cousin, Jacqueline Pascal, p. 23.

{7} Memoir by Marguerite Périer, her daughter, quoted by Cousin, ibid.,

p. 24. “Do not think,” adds Cousin, “that this portrait is embellished:

the austere Marguerite flatters no one; and if she, a Jansenist, says

that her mother was beautiful, we may be sure that she was very much so.”

{10} “The exterior angle of a triangle is equal to the two interior and

opposite angles; and the three interior angles are together equal to two

right angles.”

{11} Baillet, Vie de Descartes, liv. V. c. v. p. 39.

{12}

“Ne vous étonnez pas, incomparable Armand,

Si j’ai mal contenté vos yeux et vos oreilles;

Mon esprit agité de frayeurs sans pareilles

Interdit à mon corps et voix et mouvement.

Mais pour me rendre ici capable de vous plaire,

Rappelez de l’exil mon misérable père.”

{13} Cousin, Jacqueline Pascal, pp. 72–75.

{15} The Intendant was a special Royal Commissioner, sent into the

provinces to watch over the administration of justice and the finances.

{16} See Cousin, Jacqueline Pascal, pp. 78–80.

{17} M. Lélut’s volume (already referred to) deserves special attention

in its bearing on Pascal’s health, and the character of his sufferings.

He lays great stress on Pascal’s highly-strung nervous constitution, in

connection both with the precocity of his genius, his physical

sufferings, his religious susceptibility, and the profound melancholy

which affected his later years. The study is very interesting in some

respects, but is overstrained in its physiological details and imaginary

analysis.

{18} Madame Périer, Vie de Pascal.

{20} A disciple and friend of François de Sales, who had been bishop of

Bellay or Belley, but had at this time demitted his bishopric for the

Abbey of Aulney-Havet.

{21} The documents containing these details are found among the Pascal

MSS. in the National Library at Paris, having been given by Marguerite

Périer to one of the Guerrier family, by whose care so many interesting

memorials of Pascal have been preserved. See Faugère, Int. to Ed. of

Pensées, xlvi.-ix.

{23a} Cousin, app. 392.

{23b} Faugère, Lettres, Opuscules, etc., p. 452. It is difficult to

make out the exact chronological sequence of some of the facts mentioned

by Pascal’s sister and niece. But a special accession of ill-health,

according to both, seems to have followed his conversion at Rouen, and to

have been amongst the causes of his removal to Paris in 1647.

{23c} Pp. 134–137.

{26a} Jacqueline Pascal, p. 73.

{26b} Œuvres de Blaise Pascal, t. 4. Paris, 1819.

{28a} North British Review, August 1844, p. 296.

{28b} I owe this information to the kindness of my friend, Professor

Tait of Edinburgh. He further informs me that “of late years the

calculating machine of M. Scheutz has been employed in the production of

many valuable tables almost hopelessly beyond the power of mere mental

calculation;” and that a very simple and ingenious machine, known as the

Arithmomètre of M. Thomas, is to be found in the office of almost every

engineer and actuary.

{29a} Letter to M. Ribeyre, Œuvres, t. iv.

{29b} The illustrious Italian was then advanced in years. He died in

January 1642.

{31} Œuvres, t. iv. pp. 160,161.

{33} Sir D. Brewster, in an article on Pascal’s Writings and Discoveries

in North Brit. Rev., Aug. 1844. Sir David’s account is almost literally

translated from M. Périer’s letter to Pascal, of date September 22, 1648,

and embodied in Pascal’s “Récit de la grande Expérience de l’Équilibre

des Liqueurs,” first published in 1648.

{39a} Cousin, Jacqueline Pascal, p. 94.

{39b} “Evidently,” says Cousin, “M. Habert de Montmor, the Mæcenas of

the _savants_ of the time.”

{41} Blaise Pascal. Préface de la nouvelle éd., P. 46. Œuvres, t. i.

1849.

{42a} Jus mihi esset hoc ipsum ab ipso potius quam a te expectare, ideo

quod ego ipsi, jam biennium effluxit, auctor fuerim ejus experimenti

faciendi, eumque certum reddiderim, nec de successu non dubitare,

quamquam id experimentum nunquam fecerim. Verum quoniam D. R. amicitia

junctus est qui mihi ultro adversatus . . . non sine ratione credendum

est eum sequi passiones amici sui.—Descartes, Epist. Amstelodami, 1683.

{42b} Discours sur la Vie et les Ouvrages de Pascal, p. xviii.

{43a} Any reader curious as to how far Descartes had advanced in this

matter may consult Montucla, Histoire des Mathématiques, vol. vi. p. 205.

Montucla, no less than Baillet, writes with a clear bias in Descartes’s

favour.

{43b} Récit de la grande Expérience de l’Équilibre des Liqueurs.

Œuvres, t. iv. p. 301—“Je méditai des lors l’expérience dont je fais voir

ici le Récit.”

{44} Intererat mea id rescire, ipse enim petii ab illo, jam exacto

biennio, ut id faceret, eumque pulchri successus certum reddidi, quod

esset omnino conforme meis Principiis, absque quo nunquam de eo

cogitasset, eo quod contrariâ tenebatur sententiâ.—Ep. lxix., ibid.

{45a} Professor Tait, article “Vacuum,” Chambers’s Encyclopedia.

{45b} These further researches are expounded in two treatises, ‘De

l’Équilibre des Liqueurs,’ and ‘De la Pesanteur de l’Air,’ supposed to

have been written in 1653, but not published till 1663, after the

author’s death.

{46a} North British Review, August 1844. Sir David in the main

translates from M. Bossut’s “Discours.”

{46b} Œuvres, t. iv. p. 187.

{50} Faugère, Lettres, etc., p. 80.

{51} Vie de Pascal.

{54a} Cousin, Vie de Jacqueline, p. 43.

{54b} Ibid., p. 101.

{55} B. Pascal, app. vii. p. 491.

{58} Vie de Jacqueline.

{59} Cousin’s Jacqueline, p. 189.

{60} Cousin’s Jacqueline, p. 161.

{61} Relation de la Sœur Jacqueline de Sainte-Euphémie Pascal à Port

Royal, 10 Juin 1653—a long narrative, extending to about 50 pages of

Cousin’s volume. See also Lettres, Opuscules, etc., ed. by Faugère, pp.

177–222.

{63a} Relation de la Sœur Jacqueline, etc., p. 182.

{63b} Ibid., p. 187.

{63c} Ibid., p. 194.

{63d} Mémoire, Faugère, p. 453.

{64} Jacqueline Pascal, pp. 237, 244.

{65a} Marguerite Périer says that Pascal had always a room at the Duc de

Roannez’s, and that he stayed there frequently, although he had a house

of his own in Paris.

{65b} Lélut, p. 234. Women throughout this time took the lead, and were

never so active, even in French politics. “Beautiful, witty, and

dissolute, they brought into public affairs their frivolous ideas, and

sacrificed to their vanity their honour and that of their houses.”—La

Vallée, Hist. des Français, t. iii. p. 195, quoted in Kitchin’s Hist. of

France, vol. iii. p. 114.

{66} Lélut, p. 238.

{67a} Pensées, éd. de M. Faugère, t. i p. 197.

{67b} Ibid., t. ii p. 91.

{67c} Faugère, Introduction.

{67d} Blaise Pascal, App. No. 7.

{68a} Blaise Pascal, App. No. 7.

{68b} Introd. to Ed. of Pensées.

{71} Il prit la résolution de suivre le train commun du monde,

c’est-à-dire de prendre une charge et se marier.—Faugère, p. 453.

{76} “D’horribles attaches”—an expression already alluded to, which has

given rise to a good deal of speculation.—Jacqueline Pascal, Cousin, p.

237.

{77} Cousin, Jacqueline Pascal, pp. 236–241.

{87} Fontaine, vol. i. p. 354.

{89} See Beard’s Port Royal, vol. i. pp. 207, 208.

{90} Recueil d’Utrecht, quoted by Maynard, vol. i. p. 78.

{91}

L’an de grâce 1654.

Lundi 23 novémbre, jour de St Clément, pape et martyr, et autres au

martyrologe.

Veille de St Chrysogone, martyr et autres.

Depuis environ dix heures et demie du soir jusques environ minuit et

demi.

Feu.

Dieu d’Abraham, Dieu d’Isaac, Dieu de Jacob,

Non des philosophes et de savants.

Certitude. Certitude. Sentiment. Joie. Paix. {92}

Dieu de Jésus-Christ

Deum meum et Deum vestrum.

Ton Dieu sera mon Dieu—

Oubli du monde et de tout hormis Dieu.

Il ne se trouve que par les voies enseignées dans l’Evangile.

Grandeur de l’âme humaine.

Père juste, le monde ne t’a point connu, mais je t’ai connu.

Joie, joie, joie, pleurs de joie.

Je m’en suis séparé—

Dereliquerunt me fontem aquæ vivæ.

Mon Dieu me quitterez-vous?—

Que je n’en sois pas séparé éternellement!

Cette est la vie éternelle qu’ils te connaissent seul

vrai Dieu et celui que tu as envoyé, J.-C.

Jésus Christ—

Jésus Christ—

Je m’en suis séparé; je l’ai fui, renoncé, crucifié.

Que je n’en sois jamais séparé!

Il ne se conserve que par les voies enseignées dans l’Evangile.

Renonciation totale et douce,

etc.

{92} In the parchment copy, “Certitude, joie, certitude, sentiment, vue,

joie.”

{94} The evidence of an anonymous MS. in the collection of P. Guerrier,

grandnephew of Pascal, in which the story is told on the authority of two

friends of the Pascal family, M. Arnoul de St Victor and M. le Pierre de

Barillon. The evidence for the story of the abyss is not even

contemporaneous. It comes from an Abbé Boileau, unconnected with the

poet of that name, who first told it in a volume of letters published in

1737.

{95} Leibnitziana, quoted by Sainte-Beuve, t. iii. p. 286.

{97} Pensées, t. ii. p 76, 2d ed., Havet.

{101} Recueil d’Utrecht, Maynard, vol. i. p. 555.

{102} The most authentic portrait of Pascal is probably that prefixed by

M. Faugère to his edition of the ‘Pensées.’ The sketch, in red chalk,

was found amongst the papers of M. Domat, an eminent advocate, and one of

Pascal’s well-known friends. It bears below an inscription by Domat’s

son—“Portrait de M. Pascal fait par mon père”—and is supposed to

represent him in his earlier years, when he studied natural philosophy

along with his friend.

{105} The following genealogy, from a Jesuit source, represents not

unfairly the origin of Jansenism and Port Royalism as a theological

system: “Paulus genuit Augustinum; Augustinus Calvinum; Calvinus

Jansenium; Jansenius Sancyranum; Sancyranus Arnaldum et fratres ejus.”

The sequel will show how earnestly Pascal disclaims Calvinism.

{106} “Attrition” is a scholastic term for the first acute emotions of

the grace of repentance. “Contrition” denotes the grace in a more

advanced stage of development.

{107} The full title is, “Cornelii Jansenii Episcopi Iprensis

Augustinus: seu doctrina S. Augustini de humanæ naturæ sanitate,

ægritudine, medicinâ, adversus Pelagianos et Massilienses.”

{108} Beard’s Port Royal, vol. i. p. 243.

{116a} Recueil d’Utrecht, p. 271. See also Sainte-Beuve, vol. iii. p.

536.

{116b} _Curieux_ in the sense, says Sainte-Beuve, of _bel-esprit_,

_amateur_.

{120} A name applied to the Jesuits after Louis Molina, a Spanish Jesuit

(1535–1600), whose “Scientia Media,” akin to the Arminian doctrine of

Divine foreknowledge, was very famous in its day.

{132} Beard’s Port Royal, vol. i. p. 271. Founded on Recueil d’Utrecht,

p. 278, and Sainte-Beuve, t. ii. p. 555.

{133} M. Sainte-Beuve connects only the two concluding Letters with the

first two, but the sixteenth Letter also, upon the whole, as a direct

defence of Jansen and Port Royal, may be said to connect itself with

these rather than with the intervening series assailing the Jesuits.

There were eighteen Letters in all published by Pascal, but there is a

brief fragment of a nineteenth Letter supposed to be also from his pen,

and a farther Letter from the pen of M. le Maitre on the Inquisition,

commonly printed along with the others.

{138} After the Edict of Nantes (1598), the Protestants were permitted

to assemble for worship at Charenton, a small town about four miles from

Paris.

{144a} Letter V.

{144b} “The grand project of our Society,” Pascal makes his Jesuit

informant say (Letter VI.), “is for the good of religion, never to

repulse any one, let him be what he may, and so avoid driving people to

despair.”

{147} Letter IV.

{148} Letter IV.

{150a} Letter X.

{150b} “Who is Escobar?” Pascal represents himself as inquiring in the

fifth Letter. “Not know Escobar?” cries the monk; “the member of the

Society who compiled a Moral Theology from twenty-four of our fathers.”

This book, which Pascal says he “read twice through,” was the great

repository from which he gathered the details of Jesuit doctrine which he

exposes with such minuteness. Escobar, like so many of the chief Jesuit

writers, was a Spaniard, born at Valladolid in 1589. His name became a

sort of proverb in connection with their casuistical system, and

“escobarder” came to signify “to palter in a double sense.”

{151a} Letter XI.

{151b} Ibid.

{152} Letter XV.

{153} This is Sainte-Beuve’s statement (t. iii. p. 138), repeated by Mr

Beard, and founded apparently on Nicole.

{156} Nicole’s translation into Latin of the ‘Provincial Letters,’ in

preparation for which he is said to have read repeatedly over all the

plays of Terence, appeared at Cologne in 1658, about a year after their

completion.

{164} These lectures will be found, translated by the writer of the

present volume, in Kitto’s Journal of Sacred Literature, April-October,

1849.

{165} In his Mémoires de Littérature et d’Histoire.

{166} Faugère, i. pp. 123–129.

{168} Faugère, i. pp. 149–152.

{171} See p. 66.

{174} Chiefly from Pensées Diverses.—Faugère’s ed., vol. i. pp. 177–242.

{176} The following passage from Fontaine’s Memoirs, quoted by Cousin

(B. Pascal, p. 132), gives an interesting and lively glimpse of the

philosophical discourses at Port Royal. It may not be without some

application to the modern no less than the original Cartesian doctrine.

“How many little agitations raised themselves in this desert touching the

human science of philosophy and the new opinions of M. Descartes! As M.

Arnauld in his hours of relaxation conversed on these subjects with his

more intimate friends, the excitement spread on every side, and the

solitude, in the hours of social intercourse, resounded with these

discussions. There was hardly a solitary who did not talk of ‘automata.’

To beat a dog was no longer a matter of any moment. The stick was laid

on with the utmost indifference, and a great fool was made of those who

pitied the animals, _as if they had any feeling_. They said they were

only clockwork, and that the cries they uttered when they were beaten

were no more than the noise of some little spring that had been moved,

and that all this involved no sensation. They nailed the poor animals

upon boards by the fore-paws, in order to dissect them while still alive,

and to see the circulation of the blood, which was a great subject of

discussion. The chateau of the Duc de Luynes was the source of all these

curious inquiries, and a source that was inexhaustible. There they

talked incessantly, and with admiration, of the new system of the world

according to M. Descartes.”

{177} Fragment sur la Philosophie de Descartes.

{185} Havet, i. pp. cxxiv-cxxxiii

{186} Faugère, ii. pp. 81, 82.

{187} Faugère, ii. pp. 91, 92, 99, 104.

{189} Faugère, p. 108.

{190} Faugère, p. 84.

{199} Faugère, ii. pp. 136, 137.

{204} The lamented Prévost Paradol, Études sur les Moralistes Français.