out for
one in Montaigne's "Essays," becomes for Pascal a scene of harsh
precipices, of threatening heights and depths--the depths of his own
nothingness. Vanity: nothingness: these [87] are his catchwords: Nous
sommes incapables et du vrai et du bien; nous sommes tous condamnes.
Ce qui y parait (i.e., what we see in the world) ne marque ni une
exclusion totale ni une presence manifeste de divinite, mais la
presence d'un Dieu qui se cache: (Deus absconditus, that is a recurrent
favourite thought of his) tout porte ce caractere. In this world of
abysmal dilemmas, he is ready to push all things to their extremes.
All or nothing; for him real morality will be nothing short of
sanctity. En Jesus Christ toutes les contradictions sont accordees.
Yet what difficulties again in the religion of Christ! Nulle autre
religion n'a propose de se hair. La seule religion contraire a la
nature, contraire au sens commun, est la seule qui ait toujours ete.

Multitudes in every generation have felt at least the aesthetic charm
of the rites of the Catholic Church. For Pascal, on the other hand, a
certain weariness, a certain puerility, a certain unprofitableness in
them is but an extra trial of faith. He seems to have little sense of
the beauty of holiness. And for his sombre, trenchant, precipitous
philosophy there could be no middle terms; irresistible election,
irresistible reprobation; only sometimes extremes meet, and again it
may be the trial of faith that the justified seem as loveless and
unlovely as the reprobate. Abetissez-vous! A nature, you may think,
that would magnify things to the utmost, nurse, expand them beyond
their natural bounds by his [88] reflex action upon them. Thus
revelation is to be received on evidence, indeed, but an evidence
conclusive only on a presupposition or series of presuppositions,
evidence that is supplemented by an act of imagination, or by the grace
of faith, shall we say? At any rate, the fact is, that the genius of
the great reasoner, of this great master of the abstract and deductive
sciences, turned theologian, carrying the methods of thought there
formed into the things of faith, was after all of the imaginative
order. Now hear what he says of imagination: Cette faculte trompeuse,
qui semble nous etre donnee expres pour nous induire a une erreur
necessaire. That has a sort of necessity in it. What he says has
again the air of Montaigne, and he says much of the same kind: Cette
sup