s saw in the rhetoric of Corneille a
parody of his own sentiments, carried to the verge of rodomontade.

The publications of Vauvenargues during his lifetime come under two
categories. His "Introduction a la Connaissance de l'Esprit Humain" is
a short book, and it is also a fragment. The author had begun to
collect notes for it during his Bohemian campaign, in 1741; but "those
passions which are inseparable from youth, and ceaseless physical
infirmity, brought on by the war, interrupted my studies," he says.
Voltaire has expressed his amazement that under such piteous
conditions, Vauvenargues had the fortitude to pursue them at all.
There seems to be a change apparent in the object he put before him;
he set out, like Locke, to write an essay on the Human Understanding,
but he ended by putting together a chain of maxims. He quoted Pascal,
who had said, "All good maxims are in the world; we have only got to
apply them," but though Vauvenargues takes this dictum as his text he
refutes it. He says that maxims originally "good," in Pascal's sense,
may have grown sleepy in popular use, and may have ceased to act, so
that we ought to rid ourselves of conventional prejudice and go to the
fountain-head, to try all spirits, in fact, and find out what spirits
really are of God. When Vauvenargues began to reflect, he was
astonished at the inexactitude and even self-contradiction of the
philosophical language of his day. He was not, and probably never
would have become, what we understand now as a philosopher. He was a
moralist, pure and simple, and had no more relation with men like
Descartes or Berkeley than a rousing revivalist preacher has with a
regius professor of Theology.

The only thing which really interested Vauvenargues was the social
duty of man, and to discover what that is he attempted to define
morals, politics and religion. He had an intense desire for clear
guidance, and he waited for the heavenly spark to fall. He said to
himself, before he made it plain to others, that if we are not guided
by _truth_, we fall into the pit. There was a certain childishness in
his attitude in this matter, for he was inclined to regard abstract
truth as the only one worthy of pursuit. That he was advancing in
breadth of view is shown by the fact that he cancelled in the second
edition of his book a whimsical passage in which he urged people who
were studying conchology, to throw away their shells, asking them to
consider "whether