rn of the human race into this planetary system.

They take for granted so many things, these others. They have no
power in them to lift eagle wings and fly over the cold grey
boundless expanse of the shadowy waters.

They take for granted--materialists and mystics alike--so much; so
much, that there is no longer any tragic dilemma left, any sublime
"parting of the ways," any splendid or terrible decision.

Pascal's essential grandeur consists in the fact hat he tore himself
clear of all those peddling and pitiful compromises, those half
humorous concessions, those lazy conventionalisms, with which
most people cover their brains as if with wool, and ballast their
imagination as if with heavy sand.

He tore himself clear of everything; of his own temperamental
proclivities, of his pride, of his scientific vanity, of his human
affections, of his lusts, of his innocent enjoyments. He tore himself
clear of everything; so as to envisage the universe in its unmitigated
horror, so as to look the emptiness of space straight between its
ghastly lidless eyes.

One sees him there, at the edge of the world, silhouetted against the
white terror of infinity, wrestling desperately in the dawn with the
angel of the withheld secret.

His pride--his pride of sheer intellect--ah! that, as Nietzsche well
knew, was the offering that had the most blood in it, the sacrifice
that cried the loudest, as he bound it to the horns of the altar. The
almost insane howl of suppressed misery which lurks in the
scoriating irony of that terrible passage about sprinkling oneself with
"holy water" and rendering oneself "stupid," is an indication of what
I mean. Truly, as his modern representative does not hesitate to hint,
the hand of Pascal held Christianity by the hair.

To certain placid cattle-like minds, the life we have been born into is
a thing simple and natural enough. To Pascal it was monstrously and
insolently unnatural. He had that species of grand and terrible
imagination which is capable of piercing the world through and
through; of rising high up above it, and of pulverising it with
impassioned logic.

The basic incongruities of life yawned for him like bleeding
eye-sockets, and never for one moment could he get out of his mind
the appalling nothingness of the stellar spaces.

Once, after thinking about Pascal, I dreamed I saw him standing, a
tall dark figure, above a chaotic sea. In his hand he held a gigantic
whip, whose long q