SOURCE: A conclusion to Pascal: His Life and Works, translated by G. S. Fraser, Harvill Press, 1952, pp. 179-201.

I. The Man

"Pascal, not the writer, but the man": with this phrase the Swiss moral philosopher, Vinet, drawing his inspiration from one of the most famous of the Pensées, headed one of the chapters of his Etudes sur Pascal. It is, indeed, one of the most notable facts about Pascal's astonishing personality that, however great his genius as a mere writer may appear to us to be, it is Pascal the man, in the end, whom we really wish to grasp; even more than Pascal's thought, it is the soul of Pascal that criticism seeks to revive for us. Let us, in our turn, seek to lay bare his secret.

Though there have been numerous reactions against the romantic critics, modern criticism is on the whole still obsessed with their picture of Pascal as himself a romantic, first brilliantly sketched by Chateaubriand, more methodically worked out by Victor Cousin, and finished off in several different styles by the various Pascal enthusiasts of the last century. This romantic picture is that of a man tending in all directions towards excess; using up his strength in the pursuit of science, flinging himself madly into the fashionable world, and then suddenly won over by a kind of fanaticism and wasting himself away in austerities. Full of anguish when confronted with the silence of the world and the mystery of God's grace, this romantic Pascal is thought of as having been assailed by doubt and having rescued himself from misery by rushing headlong into belief. Finally, this romantic Pascal is thought of as above all a sick man, a "sublime madman", in the phrase of Voltaire which Chateaubriand repeated; as a man owing his genius to his excessively neurotic temperament, to the hallucinatory vividness of his imagination; as a man writing in pain and fever.

Such a picture of Pascal bears too obviously the marks of the age which conceived it to remain a really authoritative one. A biographical study, like our own, which aims at precision is obliged to tone down these glaring colourings and to depict the inner life of Pascal and its development with a more delicate balance of light and shade. What critics have taken as Pascal's personal anguish is, after all, only the anguish of humanity deprived of God, as it is described at the outset of the Apology. The famous cry, "The everlasting silence of these infinite spaces frightens me," ought to be placed, as Tourneur has shown, in the mouth of the unbeliever whose plight Pascal is considering; or even if it was a cry from Pascal's own heart, it could only be considered as expressing a transitional moment in a process of thought soon to conclude in triumphant certainty. In a word, it is futile to seek to explain Pascal by his illness. Nobody, in fact, has been able to say exactly what the nature of this illness was. In a recent work, Dr. Onfray diagnoses it as ophthalmic migraine; an attractive hypothesis, and valid up to a point, but one which does not appear to us to take account of the whole range of documented facts about the illness. While we are still waiting for really decisive medical researches on Pascal, let us confine ourselves to asking a single question: what is it, in Pascal's life and his work, that betrays the sick man? It must be admitted that, in their answers to this question, critics have been rather lax in their notions of what constitutes evidence and also rather simple-minded. How many facts have been attributed to Pascal's illness for which there is a much simpler explanation if one consults the relevant documents or even places oneself in the climate of Pascal's age! Here is an example: Pascal's handwriting, which is, we are told, "shaken by fever". Let us compare it, however, with other typical handwritings of the time. It is a thin, regular handwriting, very similar to other seventeenth-century cursive scripts, much more legible than that of many Parliamentary records and many legal documents. Is it generally known that Pascal's will, written by the hand of his attorney, Guineau, is much harder to decipher than the manuscript of the Pensées? Finally, we ought once more to make a close study of contemporary descriptions of Pascal's illness, notably those of Boulliau. It is obvious from these that physical suffering, far from producing a sort of nervous exaltation in Pascal, crushed and overwhelmed him and made him incapable of any sort of work—and less capable, if possible, of intellectual work than of any other kind. Such descriptions appear to us to have a symbolic value: Pascal's life and work were, in fact, the fruit of a constant victorious struggle against his illness. Pascal's genius is not to be explained by his illness; on the contrary it was able to expand and achieve itself in spite of his illness.

It is starting, therefore, from other premises that we shall sketch out the broad lines of our portrait of this extraordinarily striking figure.

Incontestably, Pascal was in the first place a violent man. This violence, however, was not that of a neurotic, but the violence proper to that tough and vigorous generation of the first half of the seventeenth century in France; his was the violence which one also discovers in his father and in Jacqueline—in this, truly the female counterpart of her brother—in the Arnaulds, and in the men of the Fronde. Basically, this violence is an ardent zest for life. We are wrong to think of Pascal as always shut up within the four walls of a study, a literary drawing-room, a cell. He was a traveller; he travelled from Clermont to Paris and from Paris to Rouen more often than has been generally noticed; we find him at Poitiers and at Fontenay-le-Comte, taking the waters at Bourbon, certainly also at Dieppe and possibly at Lyons, visiting his friend Desargues. He had the temperament of a man of action, a love for grandiose undertakings; he carried out spectacular experiments, tried to exploit his calculating machine commercially, had a share in the project for draining the Poitou marshes, formed a project of his own for the education of a prince, established in Paris a carriage service at a fare of five sols. This ardent zest for life, moreover, was often transformed in Pascal into a dominating pride. Conscious of his own supreme genius, Pascal as a scientist could brook no contradiction and showed himself merciless to such adversaries as Father Noël or Father Lalouère. Pascal the convert was never able, moreover, wholly to root out and destroy this natural arrogance; in a moment of anger he could terrify Singlin, whose inadequacies on the intellectual plane could not escape him; he humiliated Arnauld and Nicole when he made it clear that he thought their conduct pusillanimous. This need to dominate over other souls, though much purified by Pascal's conversion, explains, no doubt, his violence and impetuosity as a religious apologist. But this violence and impetuosity can also be considered as a kind of passion. There is, in Pascal, a passion for truth in all its shapes; this is seen as clearly, in spite of the reservations we have occasionally thought fit to make, in Pascal's investigations into the nature of a vacuum as in his controversies about the formula. Even more, there is in Pascal a passion for the infinite; thanks to that, transcending the rather elementary common sense with which average minds content themselves, he was able to pave the way for the discovery of the infinitesimal calculus, to denounce the vanity of every kind of merely human social organization, and to define one of the highest forms of the religious ideal.

This fundamental violence was linked, however, in Pascal's nature to a profound sensibility. This sensibility, however, found hardly any satisfaction in the outer natural world. Intellectually, Pascal was able to appreciate the picturesque aspects of nature, but he got no profound enjoyment out of them. The social sentiments were far more deeply rooted in him. We know the tenderness of his feelings for his family, a tenderness sometimes a little exclusive and self-centred, which led to his at first opposing Jacqueline's entry into Port-Royal; but a tenderness all the more moving because the seventeenth century offers us hardly any other famous examples of such united families. Pascal's tender feelings towards friends were hardly less strong. Gilberte Périer bears witness to this, and it is proved also by the attachment which Pascal always showed towards the Duc de Roannez and his sister; we should be in a better position to appreciate this tenderness if the greater part of Pascal's correspondence were not lost.

But a sensibility so profound could only, in the end, be satisfied by an infinite object: it could reach its real flowering only in the attitude of the mystic. Nature, which in itself did not touch Pascal's feelings, nevertheless nourished this mysticism of his to the degree in which it is itself only a "forest of symbols", a figurative representation of the Infinite that has created it. "Invisible things" are represented in "the visible". God hides himself under the veil of sensible appearances. But the chief source of Pascal's profounder emotions lay in the sense of communication with God, with the living God of the Bible. The Mémorial is an impulse of love reaching out towards the God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob; in The Mystery of Jesus the note of exaltation becomes so deep that the crucified Christ is caught up in a dialogue with the penitent human soul.

It is from this unique and individual sensibility that all the sublimity of the Pascalian sense of disquiet arises. It is the expression, by a man of genius, of a more general Christian disquiet. There is a sense of disquiet about one's own salvation: who can be certain of persevering in the ways of grace, and who does not feel in himself the fountainhead of these evil desires that cause divine grace to be lost? Ought Pascal not to be all the more fearful, in that he had already fallen? However, on this point, he remained strongly confident. What troubled him much more was disquiet about the salvation of others; when he put himself, in fancy, in the place of the unbeliever, Pascal felt a kind of shudder; the moment when he appreciated the position of the unbeliever from his own believer's point of view was also the moment in which a sense of the tragedy of human fate gripped him with a kind of anguish. Here and there this disquiet already lends feeling to The Provincial Letters; and it is what gives the Pensées their gripping note.

But Pascal would not be a true contemporary of Corneille, of the author of Cinna and Polyeucte, if this inner violence and this profound sensibility of his were not linked to a great self-mastery. This violent man is not a man who acts on his instincts; this "man of feeling" reflects on his emotions. Pascal's natural impetuosity very rarely carries him beyond the boundaries which it has fixed for itself; at the moment of the most intense ecstasy, the lucidity of reason does not lose its rights. Pascal dominates both his own life and his own work through the strength of his will and the clarity of his intelligence.

It would not be surprising if such a man, in his youth, had been strongly influenced by Stoicism: when Jacqueline in her Stances contre l'Amour exalts the power of reason over the passions, it is very probable that she is expressing an ideal she shared with her brother. In the salons, those who preached the ideal of the honnête homme tended to intellectualize the emotions and demanded from their disciples first submission to others, and then self-control and self-transcendence. After his second conversion, Pascal sought to check and tame a sensibility which he knew to be sometimes excessive and an inner violence which kept him at a distance from Christian humility. If he did succeed in the end in becoming "as simple as a child", it was at the price of patient effort and not without numerous fallings by the way. It was the strength of his will that enabled him to attain the state in which he had, as it were, stripped himself of worldliness.

This self-mastery is to be found also in Pascal's literary work, which is wholly and in every part governed by his intelligence. In this connection, the unfinished state of the Pensées ought not to deceive us. There can be no longer any question of considering these as a "shapeless heap of materials". The Pensées were methodically prepared, and even methodically grouped, by a genius who had a complete mastery of his own gifts and was extremely conscious of the effects he sought to obtain. Pascal was never tempted to equate sincerity with spontaneity or art with self-abandonment to instinct. If he hastens towards truth with a sort of violent passion, he nevertheless conducts his investigations into what may be truth with an extremely acute critical spirit and shows himself as strict as can be in his weighing of evidence. If his thinking aspires towards an infinite God, it remains none the less the thinking of a man who is a scientist as well as a mystic, and it also tends to express itself in an artistically perfect form. The completed Pensées would have had all the finish of The Provincial Letters; the violence of the feeling would have been wedded to a subtle elaboration of form.

From Pascal's whole personality there emanates a kind of imperious attraction. He attracted by imposing himself. We know what an ascendancy he gained over the Duc de Roannez, how this great nobleman made himself Pascal's humble disciple and retained all his life a touching fidelity to his master. We know also, through many witnesses, how Pascal's spoken words remained, as it were, engraved in the memories of those who heard him. Having moved his contemporaries so strongly, he could not fail to exercise a strong fascination over posterity.

II. The Thinker

But Pascal does not attract us only by the vigour of his personality; he possesses in addition the prestige which properly belongs to every powerful and original thinker. Not that he was, strictly speaking, a philosopher; he did not organize his notions into a complete and coherent system. But his work carries a "message", if one understands by that certain great ideas which Pascal grasped profoundly and to which he gave a lasting life; exciting enthusiasm on the one hand, and arousing violent opposition on the other.

One primary aspect of this message can be defined as the primacy of experience and the experimental method. This is already, in his purely scientific work, one of the chief lessons he has to teach us. "Experiments are the only basis of physical science." In opposition to Descartes, for whom physical science rests on mathematical deductions from purely rational principles, and for whom experiments merely confirm these deductions, Pascal claims that the explanation of phenomena must rest on experiments only, and not on any system of thought that may claim priority to experience; we must not assert anything more than our experiments allow us to. In all this, Pascal made a much more important contribution than Descartes to the separation of physics from metaphysics and towards laying the foundations of modern science.

The habit of mind of Pascal, the man of science, can also be discovered in Pascal, the theologian. Just as he disallows purely deductive reasoning in physics, so he disallows it in theology. The theologian confines himself to acquiring knowledge of the facts contained in Revelation and Tradition. Experience is the basis of human science, revelation of divine science; in both cases, reason, as such, has a limited part to play. Revelation and experience thus, taken together, define two classes of facts which are totally independent of each other and between which, therefore, no contradiction is possible. Nothing which is accessible to experience has been revealed: that is the basis of the attitude of Pascal and his friends on "the question of fact". But the theologian may have to take simultaneous cognizance of these two classes of facts, experiential and revealed. Thus no theologian's theory of the nature of the moral act may contradict psychological realities; every system of casuistry must be based at once on a scrupulous fidelity to Tradition and on an exact knowledge of human nature. Pascal reproaches the Jesuits not only with forgetting the lessons of the Christian Fathers, but also with being ignorant of man's real nature.

In a word, Pascal's religious apologetic is based on the principle: God is accessible to us through facts and not through reasonings. This does not mean that Pascal denies any value at all to human reason; he merely takes note of the fact that, in the world as we find it, it is not reasonings that convince men; if the reign of true justice should commence on earth, men would still oppose that justice; and though the argument from the orderliness of the universe may really prove the existence of a God, it does so in vain, since men do not believe any more firmly in God because of that proof. The facts of the case, on the other hand, are of a nature to constrain any mind that is not made blind by concupiscence. Thus the whole dialectic of the Apology rests on two facts: the fact of man and the fact of history. What is it that experience reveals to us about man? It is essentially his dual nature, his wretchedness and his greatness. Only one system can explain this fact of man's dual nature, and that system is Christianity. What does the examination of history reveal to us? The fulfilment of Biblical prophecies, the perpetuity of a religion opposed to the passions of man, and therefore the presence of a miracle, of the divine, in the world. And this note of the divine is attached to the Christian religion alone, under its two forms, which an analysis of the documents shows to be identical with each other: the Jewish form, and the strictly Christian form. In all this argument of Pascal's there has been no place any-where for abstract deduction.

But if we pass from the methodological realm of discourse to that of philosophy, the primacy of experience can be equated with the primacy of existence. As has often been noticed, Pascal is in effect a precursor of contemporary existentialism. Like the existentialists, he takes his stance in concrete living, he strives to consider the situation of man with fresh eyes, to get back to the primitive feeling of existence: and in fact he manages to make us feel astonished that we do exist. We discover in the Pensées one of the most cherished topics of existentialism: the absurdity of the human condition, expressed by Pascal in terms like "contrariness" or "disproportion"; the anguish that results from this absurdity; even M. Sartre's "nausea" to which Pascal's "weariness" (ennui), taken in the strong, seventeenth-century sense, corresponds; we discover also the necessity of choice, of commitment, of "the wager". Pascal's Christianity can also be called an existential Christianity. It is through reflecting on his own existence that man discovers the necessity of God, who is alone capable of filling the emptiness which man feels in himself: a living, incarnate God, who lives in each of us, members of His Mystical Body. Nevertheless, Pascal's existentialism is a very original existentialism. It widely transcends the limits of modern types of existentialism, even if only through its concern for the universal. The existentialist attitude is nearly always combined with a profound pessimism, as the themes touched on above have already made clear. In fact, a second aspect of Pascal's message may be expressed in the words: the wretchedness of man without God. Among all his writings, it may be that the pages devoted to the description of this wretchedness have awakened the profoundest echo.

But in the Pensées this idea is brought forward in a very original and precise shape. The essence of man's wretchedness lies in his powerlessness. And man's wretchedness, also is caused by his greatness. Man resembles the animals, and these are not wretched; but he finds himself in a far loftier station than they and the vague memory which he retains of his first state makes his present condition unbearable to him. The wretchedness of man comes from the contradiction between the reality of what he is and the ideal to which he aspires. He aspires to truth and finds only error; he aspires towards real justice and finds only false justice; he aspires towards the infinite and finds only the finite. Man is therefore a divided being; his life is a perpetual drama.

Pascal is, however, at the opposite pole to Kierkegaard in that he never gives the impression that man is necessarily crushed under the weight of his destiny, necessarily condemned to a perpetual painful anxiety. His description of man's wretchedness is an invitation to man to transcend himself, to discover that infinite towards which he aspires. Thus even the most pessimistic pages at the outset of the Apology contain an appeal to the heroic element in human nature, an appeal to man to turn towards God. Man's wretchedness is merely the wretchedness of man "without God". Everything evil comes from man, every-thing good from God; to be delivered from his wretchedness, man must renounce himself.

Pascal's dramatic vision of humanity awakens a deep echo in all unsatisfied souls, particularly in "times of troubles", when man becomes tragically aware of his own destiny. But it is also this part of his argument that arouses the most lively opposition. There are two groups of thinkers who react against the harshness, the naked heroism, of his portrait of human nature; on the one hand, those who uphold a kind of optimistic rationalism; and on the other, the partisans of "the pursuit of happiness", and, in general, those who assign to man no other end, or aim, than himself.

The best representative of the first group, the upholders of an optimistic rationalism, is obviously Voltaire. His famous "observations" on Pascal, contained in the twenty-fifth of his Letters Philosophiques, are familiar to most readers, at least in France. To Pascal's assertion that man is wretched, Voltaire opposes the assertion that human happiness is a reality; and he appears to himself to be stating a plain fact. Our impulses, according to Voltaire, are in themselves good; nothing, for instance, is healthier than that human self-esteem, or self-love, which Pascal hated. Rational self-love is the foundation of social life, of, indeed, every form of human activity; it alone really makes us exist. There is nothing, again, for Voltaire, disquieting about human destiny; our destiny is marked out for us by our place in the great chain of being, a little above the animals, a little below pure spirits like the angels. There is nothing that we need worry and torment ourselves about in the riddle of the universe; why not simply trust ourselves to a benevolent Providence? Voltaire's optimistic rationalism issues, therefore, in a kind of exaggerated Molinism. These criticisms have been repeated, since Voltaire's time, in a hundred different styles; some of them have been brilliantly restated in our own day by the early Aldous Huxley.

In our second group, that of the humanist opponents of Pascal, we include those thinkers who are less concerned to attack Pascal's picture of the wretchedness of man than to refute the moral he draws from it. They substitute for Pascal's ideal of human self-transcendence a new ideal of human completeness or fulfilment. Life for them is like the elaboration of a work of art, which must draw as near as it can to perfection, but to a perfection that will always remain finite. This is the common note of Nietzsche who, putting forward the ideal of the superman, comes sharply up against Pascal, whose sheer power nevertheless overawes him, and of Gide, who refuses to "work out his salvation with fear and trembling", and who, without failing to recognize the element of illusion in it, nevertheless rehabilitates the notion of "diversion", of amusement or distraction, in its forms of sport or art. These, in spite of everything, do enable man to fulfil himself.

These are the two principal lines of opposition to Pascal. There is no place here for a discussion of the validity of these criticisms. Let us repeat, merely, an observation that has often been made before; in the end, the thinker who really raises man up to the highest level, who sets before him the highest aim, is the very thinker who insists most strongly on man's "lowly" and "wretched" condition; the thinker who shows the greatest humanity, the greatest understanding of man, in that he refuses to betray, by denying, man's secret suffering, is the very thinker who demands that man should die to himself.

While the adversaries of Pascal have always concentrated on the problem of man's wretchedness, it is Pascal's strictly religious message which has gained him his warmest adherents. If the reading of the Pensées occasionally leads to religious conversions, it is less because it disquiets the soul than because it offers to the religious need and impulse in man the highest conceivable ideal. For the third aspect of Pascal's message is: "There is no religion without love". Without love, which is to say, without charity or love of God. In that are summed up "all the law and the Prophets".

The principle of the love of God plays an essential part in Pascal's apologetic. True religion can consist only of the love of God. "If there is a single principle underlying everything, a single end set for everything, then everything exists through that principle and everything exists for the sake of it. It is therefore necessary that true religion should teach us to adore nothing but this principle, to love only it." Every religion which does not put the love of God in the first place is false, since it is incapable of satisfying that need for the infinite which our intellect and our emotions both experience: love, in fact, is precisely this human gift or capacity for the infinite. That is why, for instance, the religion of Mahomet appears to Pascal "absurd". But, somewhere between the true religions and the false ones, there exists, problematically, the religion of the Jews. Can we halt, in our religious development, at the letter of the Law and of the ceremonies of the Old Testament? One cannot, in fact, say about these that they had charity as their sole aim; and therefore the religion of the Jews would be, according to Pascal's criterion, a false one. But an exact interpretation of the Biblical texts enables Pascal to reach this conclusion: "Everything (in the Bible) that does not make for charity is figurative." All the precepts of the Mosaic Law are only various expressions of the central precept of charity. "The one end at which Holy Scripture aims is charity." In its basis, therefore, the Jewish religion is true; it is identical with the Christian religion.

But let us leave the plane of apologetic for that of the moral life. How can we define in terms of psychology the presence of the love of God in a soul? As we have already said, the love of God for Pascal is primarily and essentially a good direction of the will: a faithfulness in man to the call which he has heard leading him towards something higher than himself, his response to his "vocation".

Thus it is love which conducts the infidel towards faith. It is love which leads us to undertake that quest for the truly Good which is nothing other than the quest for God Himself. Whoever feels his own wretchedness and has a deeply-rooted desire to cure it; whoever feels that he cannot find any real consolation in created things; such a man in the end will find his "Liberator". It is not the evidence for the truth of Christianity that by itself convinces the unbeliever; the love of God must clarify his reasoning faculty before he will be able to perceive the truth of the evidence.

In the same way, with the believer, it is only love that gives religious practice life. That is the real lesson of The Provincial Letters. It was by no means Pascal's intention merely to substitute an austere religious formalism for the lax religious formalism of the Jesuits; he repudiates formalism in all its shapes. Nothing is really at a more opposite pole than Jansenism to that middle-class Puritanism of seventeenth-century Protestant countries with which historians too often tend to confuse it. For Jansenism, the sacraments, if they are really going to be the instruments of grace, must be received with a purified heart; for absolution to be valid, the penitent must manifest a sincere goodwill in relation to his future conduct. In order to act morally, we must be ready to respond to the stirrings of a conscience which we have taken care to orientate towards the quest for truth, and to make more scrupulous by the practice of putting ourselves under spiritual direction. This is the lesson which Pascal repeats at the end of his Apology, in the chapter called "Christian Morals", where he allots their respective shares to external practice and the inner life in the conduct of the Christian. The leading image in this chapter is that of the Mystical Body. The limbs, the members, live only through the body as a whole; man lives only through God. If I wish to attain to the true life of the spirit, "I must love only God and hate only myself."

Though Pascal puts this ideal forward to all men, it is an ideal which is likely to be realized only by an élite. This fact does not diminish the sympathy which many Protestants feel for Pascal, but it does worry some Roman Catholics. It worries them because it tends to lessen the importance of external rites and ceremonies, because it bases religion on a personal link between man and God, and because it demands of the believer that he should seek to be perfect. Thus Pascal has aroused a certain mistrust, which has been formulated now more, and now less, clearly, among those who prefer, to a reflective Christianity, or a Christianity of the inner man, the faith of the simple, a popular piety, even if that has to be mingled with a certain amount of supersitition. It has excited distrust also among those who think of the Church as a kind of sacred army, regulated, like an army, by the law of unquestioning obedience; and finally by those who fear that, by demanding too much, Pascal will discourage the weaker brethren. With these reservations, we have to admit that Roman Catholic opinion in general has always considered Pascal as one of the masters of the spiritual life and has always considered his apologetic as a model.

III. The Artist

However many opponents the thought of Pascal may have encountered, his art as a writer has been universally admired. However, this powerful and subtle art of his does not lend itself easily to analysis; it is extremely spontaneous and yet it has been carefully thought out; it is the art of a man who possessed in the highest degree the two essential gifts of a writer, richness of invention and sureness of taste. These two qualities are united in Pascal, balancing each other in a way that is extremely rare in literary history. He is always the master of his inspiration even when it surges forth most strongly; the innumerable corrections in the manuscript of the Pensées never destroy the freshness of the original vision. Thus, if the literary art of Pascal is based on a few grand and general aesthetic principles, it none the less expresses also the man himself in the very essence of his soul.

Certain theoretical writings help us to grasp some aspects of the ideal which Pascal, as a typical man of good taste of his century, had accepted for himself. We have already shown, in analysing L'Art de Persuader, what is the philosophical foundation of what has been called Pascal's "rhetoric". Some of the Pensées define the practical consequences of these rhetorical theories. Two ideas are outlined with particular sharpness and clarity: that of "order", as an element of good style, and that of "naturalness".

In arranging his papers with his Apology in mind, Pascal had formed a first chapter called "Order", in which he grouped together all his reflections about the disposition of the material in his intended work. But, in repeating the word "order" so often, Pascal had not in any sense in mind the trite idea that a work of literature ought to be clearly and solidly composed. On the contrary, he thought the rigorous divisions of topics which he discovered in scholastic treatises artificial and therefore to be condemned. Order for him was not an abstraction, not something independent of the idea to be expressed. A thought, for Pascal, could not receive a faithful expression, nor attain the purpose which the writer had in mind in expressing it, unless a certain "order" had been imposed on it. "The same words differently arranged convey different meanings, and the same meanings differently arranged have different effects on the reader." In the same way, a chapter, or a work taken as a whole, ought to develop itself in an orderly fashion, in harmony with the subject treated, or the leading idea to be emphasized. Thus, wishing to speak of Pyrrhonism, Pascal warns his reader: "I shall put down my thoughts here without any order, and yet perhaps not in mere purposeless confusion; this is the proper order, which, by its very disorder, indicates my theme." Apparent disorder is also a kind of order; in this sense disorder can be not only a source of beauty, as Boileau had already seen, but also of truth. It is therefore in the search for a proper order that a thinker's labours achieve their purpose; it is in its order that the real originality of a work of literature lies. "Let nobody say that I have said nothing new. The arrangement of the material is new."

Thus "order" in writing, though primarily intended to convey the author's idea faithfully, in the end also expresses his personality. And to find the right order for what one has to say is to achieve "naturalness". Here we have the formulation of Pascal's grand aesthetic principle. All useless ornaments ought to be lopped away; the writer must eschew "false beauties", "mock windows put in for the sake of symmetry". He must also eschew everything that smacks of specialization. "We must be able to say of a writer neither that he is a mathematician, nor a preacher, nor an able orator, but that he is an honest man. Only that universal quality pleases me." Finally "the author" must give way to "the man". No doubt he must seek to please, but it is only naturalness that really pleases. "We need both what is pleasant and what is solid, but what is pleasant must be itself based on truth." Pointed sentences and brilliant antitheses excite only an artificial and transitory pleasure. On the contrary, the writer who paints the passions in their natural colours makes his readers recognize, in their own inner selves, the truth of his observations; he pleases in the real sense of the phrase, he makes himself loved. All these ideas, partly inspired perhaps by the Chevalier de Méré, show that Pascal belonged completely to the seventeenth-century French classical tradition.

In his actual writing, moreover, Pascal was able to put his theories of composition magnificently into practice. If there is order and naturalness in everything he writes, the reason is that in his writing he is always profoundly himself. In Pascal's literary art, we find Pascal the man completely expressed; the temperament of a scientist blended with that of a poet.

The scientific habit of Pascal's mind can be traced in his eagerness to define his terms strictly, an eagerness which we see demonstrated at the beginning of the fourth "Provincial Letter", or in the mathematical precision of some of his formulas. We shall attempt to draw attention, especially, to the influence of this scientific habit of mind on Pascal's methods of composition. The method of the physicist explains the development of a fragment, like that in the Pensées on the subject of "diversion", of amusement or distraction. Pascal begins by noting facts, which, taken together, permit him to assert that men suffer from a kind of restlessness which is not linked to any coherent sense of need or purpose. Then he postulates a hypothesis to explain this restlessness; man is seeking to forget his wretched condition. The hypothesis is then demonstrated in an extreme and crucial case; that of a king, who, though the most favoured of mortals, must nevertheless seek distraction like other men to avoid unhappiness. Finally, the demonstration of this hypothesis is followed by a return to the facts which Pascal started with. But a new light has been shed on these; every kind of human activity can be explained by the great principle of man's need for distraction. A similar movement of thought can often be discovered in Montaigne, but it lacks in him this scientific character. The same method appears in other fragments of the Pensées, like that on imagination. Other passages make us think less of the experimental method of natural science than of that of pure mathematics. In the fragment on the two kinds of infinity, we see the universe working outwards or inwards in concentric circles; it is the geometrical method which is our model. Elsewhere, we have indicated the sources in geometry of Pascal's idea of the three orders of greatness. The presentation of the idea, however, has its model in an arithmethical symbolism, the sum in proportion: as flesh is to spirit, so is spirit to charity. The whole development of the thought consists in the postulation of the equality of these relations in eight different fashions. (The problem is made more complex, of course, by the fact that these relations, unlike those in a sum in proportion, are relationships between infinite values.) We can see that Pascal's thought has a natural tendency to shape itself in a scientific mould.

It might be feared that methods of exposition borrowed from the sciences would entail a certain dryness. But as the fragment on the three orders wonderfully proves, the method has an opposite result. Pascal's prose acquires through his scientific approach a purity and nakedness of line which brings out the whole substance of his thought and feeling. The strictness of the approach assists, rather than hinders, the lyrical impetus.

In fact Pascal was primarily a poet, He was a poet above all through his gift for creating images. But these images, in his case, are never used merely to adorn an abstract idea, or even to make it clearer by a concrete example; the image in Pascal, is of one flesh with the idea, it is summoned by the idea. It is the warmth of the argument that gives birth to the vision; it is the emotion excited by the idea that begets the image. In his genius for the powerful and original metaphor, Pascal is closely related to the great French romantics.

What is the nature of these images? Some of them reveal a gift of penetrating observation, an observation turned on outward nature, on the pictorial aspects of the world, as much as on the moral attitudes of men. In his descriptions of the "human comedy", Pascal's minute realism sometimes even verges on triviality—though not to the extent which certain blundering editors of the romantic period might make us believe, who read "trognes d'armées" (high-coloured faces of armies, flushed as if with drink) where Pascal had merely written "troupes d'armées" and "foisons de religions" (heaps of religions) where he had merely written "faiseurs de religions". But there are descriptions like those of the magistrates with "their red robes, their ermines, in which they swaddle themselves like cats in their fur"; or there is the spectacle of the dance, one of the best means man has of forgetting his condition: "You have to think carefully where you put your feet." More often, however, external reality is transcended. Pascal's imagination is superior even to his gift of observation, and starting with some concrete detail we reach up towards an infinity which is, as it were, made palpable to us: the "atomic tininess" which we reach in dissecting as thoroughly as we can the body of an alimentary parasite suddenly expands into an "infinity of universes".

How are these images fitted into the general pattern of the development of Pascal's thought? Usually, the metaphor is rapidly sketched in. Pascal asks himself whether our reason is abused by our imagination. "Ridiculous reason that the wind shifts, and shifts in every direction!" The spectacle of the search for distraction extorts from him the cry: "How hollow the heart of man is, and how full of filth!" Sometimes the metaphor is expressed through a violent foreshortening and thus becomes all the more striking. Compared to the infinity of celestial space this familiar universe of ours is only "a prison cell". Finally, in certain images which he has allowed himself to develop with more elaboration, Pascal touches the height of his powers: "We drift on a vast scene, always uncertain and floating, thrust from one goal towards another. If there is some boundary to which we think we can hold on and there assert ourselves, it shakes us off and leaves us and, if we follow it, it escapes our grasp, glides away from us and flees with an eternal flight."

Pascal is a poet, also, through his acute sense of rhythm. If we read the sentence just quoted, in French, we find ourselves in the presence of what is really a strophe, beginning with two octosyllables, "Nous voguons sur un milieu vaste, toujours incertains et flottants", and the various climaxes of this fantastic voyage, as Tourneur has remarked, are evoked by "the balance of the sentence, its jolts, its prolonged development, its cadences and the sounds of the individual words". There are very many passages of the Pensées and also of The Provincial Letters which, if arranged on the page in "free verse" form, would at once reveal their cunning management of sound and rhythm. The French alexandrine itself is often "in ambush" in this poetic prose. Here is an example, a line of piercing harmony, which concludes a discussion of reality and dreams: Car la vie est un songe un peu moins inconstant. (This also comes naturally over into an English heroic line: Life is a slightly less inconstant dream.) Pascal, therefore, is a poet not only through his visionary power but because he makes use of the poet's actual techniques.

But Pascal is a poet, above all, through the emotional power which animates his sentences. The Pensées are one huge poem in the lyrical mode. We can distinguish in them two different kinds of lyricism, differing according to the nature of the underlying emotion. In the first part of the Apology, we have the lyricism of man's wretchedness. By a kind of act of poetic substitution, Pascal identifies himself with that humanity deprived of God, whose distress he lives through. Elsewhere, there is a mystical lyricism, nourished by an ardent love for the person of Christ, humble and poor throughout His life, in the end pouring out His Blood on the Cross for the salvation of sinners. Pascal reaches his emotional heights when he most completely strips himself.

Thus Pascal is very profoundly a literary artist in the classical tradition: classical in the theoretical principles of his art, classical in his concern for perfection of form, classical in that he considers reflection inseparable from the creative task. But through the sheer power of his genius he so infinitely transcends all the groups and schools of his time that the romantics, later, were able to claim him as one of themselves.

One lesson, we believe, emerges from this study: that there is a profound unity between Pascal's life and his work. All critical efforts to divide Pascal from himself have ended in failure. We cannot radically oppose the scientist to the man of the world, or the scientist or the man of the world to the Christian; Pascal, was always, in various fashions, a scientist, a man of the world, and a Christian. It is futile to try to set the doctrine of The Provincial Letters against that of the Pensées, or to try to set the dying Pascal against the living Pascal. The foregoing examination of Pascal's life and writings has shown, on the contrary, that the same doctrines, the same topics, the same habits of mind are found throughout his works and link them together. Pascal's art cannot be explained without considering his science, nor his efforts as a Christian apologist without considering his polemics and his theology. In the unity of his personality and his work, Pascal, like Corneille, expresses in a very original fashion the trends and the aspirations of the age, in France, of Louis XIII and the minority of Louis XIV. He expresses the spirit of that ardent and sturdy generation, proud and independent, setting out like explorers towards the discovery of the physical and moral worlds; a generation with a passion for concrete reality and yet an idealistic generation, men who disciplined their natural impetuosity by accepting the authority of reason, who were eager for distinction and in love with fine manners, but eager also for, and in love with, heroism and sanctity.