ematic
philosopher. He was a man with an immense genius for science, and at the
same time a natural psychologist and moralist. As he was a great
literary artist, his book would have been also his own spiritual
autobiography; his style, free from all diminishing idiosyncrasies, was
yet very personal. Above all, he was a man of strong passions; and his
intellectual passion for truth was reinforced by his passionate
dissatisfaction with human life unless a spiritual explanation could be
found.

We must regard the _Pensees_ as merely the first notes for a work which
he left far from completion; we have, in Sainte-Beuve's words, a tower
of which the stones have been laid on each other, but not cemented, and
the structure unfinished. In early years his memory had been amazingly
retentive of anything that he wished to remember; and had it not been
impaired by increasing illness and pain, he probably would not have been
obliged to set down these notes at all. But taking the book as it is
left to us, we still find that it occupies a unique place in the history
of French literature and in the history of religious meditation.

To understand the method which Pascal employs, the reader must be
prepared to follow the process of the mind of the intelligent believer.
The Christian thinker--and I mean the man who is trying consciously and
conscientiously to explain to himself the sequence which culminated in
faith, rather than the public apologist--proceeds by rejection and
elimination. He finds the world to be so and so; he finds its character
inexplicable by any non-religious theory; among religions he finds
Christianity, and Catholic Christianity, to account most satisfactorily
for the world and especially for the moral world within; and thus, by
what Newman calls "powerful and concurrent" reasons, he finds himself
inexorably committed to the dogma of the Incarnation. To the unbeliever,
this method seems disingenuous and perverse; for the unbeliever is, as a
rule, not so greatly troubled to explain the world to himself, nor so
greatly distressed by its disorder; nor is he generally concerned (in
modern terms) to "preserve values." He does not consider that if certain
emotional states, certain developments of character, and what in the
highest sense can be called "saintliness" are inherently and by
inspection known to be good, then the satisfactory explanation of the
world must be an explanation which will admit the "reality" of thes