the same time, to bring the former into the closest possible conjunction
with the latter, to make it dwell therein--a break between the transcendent
and immanent conceptions of the idea of God. No light is vouchsafed on the
relation between primary and secondary causes, between the immediate divine
causality and the divine causality mediated through finite causes. The
infinity of God is in conflict with his complete cognizability on the
part of man; for how is a finite, transitory spirit able to conceive
the Infinite and Eternal? How does the human intellect rise above modal
limitations to become capable and worthy of the mystical union with God?
Reference has been already made to the twofold nature of the attributes (as
forms of intellectual apprehension and as real properties of substance)
which invites contradictory interpretations.

3. %Pascal, Malebranche, Bayle.%

Returning from Holland to France, we find a combination of Cartesianism
and mysticism similar to that which we have noticed in the former country.
Under Geulincx these two forces had lived peacefully together; in Spinoza
they had entered into the closest alliance; with Blaise Pascal (1623-62),
the first to adopt a religious tendency, they came into a certain
antithesis. Spinoza had taught: through the knowledge of God to the love
of God; in Pascal the watchword becomes, God is not conceived through
the reason, but felt with the heart. After attacking the Jesuits in his
_Provincial Letters_, and unveiling the worthlessness of their casuistical
morality, Pascal, constrained by a genuine piety, undertook to construct a
philosophy of Christianity; but the attempt was ended by the early death of
the author, who had always suffered under a weak constitution. Fragments of
this work were published by his friends, the Jansenists, under the title,
_Thoughts on Religion_, 1669, though not without mediating alterations.
The Port-Royal _Logic (The Art of Thinking_, 1662), edited by Arnauld and
Nicole, was based on a treatise of Pascal. His thought, which was not
distinguished by clearness, but by depth and movement, and which, after
the French fashion, delighted in antitheses, was influenced by Descartes,
Montaigne, and Epictetus. He, too, finds in mathematics the example for
all science, and holds that whatever transcends mathematics transcends the
reason. By the application of mathematics to the study of nature we attain
a mundane science, which is certain, no dou