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Pascal’s “Thoughts,” then, we shall not rightly measure but as the outcome, the utterance, of a soul diseased, a soul permanently ill at ease. We find in their constant tension something of insomnia, of that sleeplessness which can never be a quite healthful condition of mind in a human body. Sometimes they are cries, cries of obscure pain rather than thoughts–those great fine sayings which seem to betray by their depth of sound the vast unseen hollow places of nature, of humanity, just beneath one’s feet or at one’s side. Reading them, so modern still are those thoughts, so rich and various in suggestion, that one seems to witness the mental seed-sowing of the next two centuries, and perhaps more, as to those matters with which he concerns himself. Intuitions of a religious genius, they may well be taken also as the final considerations of the natural man, as a religious inquirer on doubt and faith, and their place in things. Listen now to some of these “Thoughts” taken at random: taken at first for their brevity. Peu de chose nous console, parce que peu de chose nous afflige. Par l’espace l’univers me comprend et m’engloutit comme un point: par la pensee je le comprends. Things like these put us en route with Pascal. Toutes les bonnes maximes sont dans le monde: on ne manque que de les appliquer. The great ascetic was always hard on amusements, on mere pastimes: Le divertissement nous amuse, one and all of us, et nous fait arriver insensiblement a la mort. Nous perdons encore la vie avec joie, pourvu qu’on en parle. On ne peut faire une bonne physionomie (in a portrait) qu’en accordant toutes nos contrarietes. L’homme n’est qu’un roseau, le plus foible de la nature, mais c’est un roseau pensant. Il ne faut pas que l’univers entier s’arme pour l’ecraser. Une vapeur, une goutte d’eau, suffit pour le tuer. Mais quand l’univers l’ecraseroit, l’homme seroit encore plus noble que se qui le tue, parce qu’il sait qu’il meurt, et l’avantage que l’univers a sur lui, l’univers n’en sait rien. It is not thought by which that excels, but the convincing force of imagination which sublimates its very triteness. Toute notre dignite consiste donc en la pensee.

There, then, you have at random the sort of stuff of which the “Pensees” are made. Let me now briefly indicate, also by quotation again, some of the main leading tendencies in them. La chose la plus importante a toute la vie c’est la choix du metier: le hasard en dispose. There we recognise the manner of thought of Montaigne. Now one of the leading interests in the study of Pascal is to trace the influence upon him of the typical sceptic of the preceding century. Pascal’s “Thoughts” we shall never understand unless we realise the under-texture in them of Montaigne’s very phrases, the fascination the “Essays” had for Pascal in his capacity of one of the children of light, as giving a veritable compte rendu of the Satanic course of this world since the Fall, set forth with all the persuasiveness, the power and charm, all the gifts of Satan, the veritable light on things he has at his disposal.

Pascal re-echoes Montaigne then in asserting the paradoxical character of man and his experience. The old headings under which the Port-Royalist editors grouped the “Thoughts” recall the titles of Montaigne’s “Essays”–“Of the Disproportion of Man,” and the like. As strongly as Montaigne he delights in asserting the relative, local, ephemeral and merely provisional character of our ideas of law, vice, virtue, happiness, and so forth. Comme la mode fait l’agrement aussi fait-elle la justice. La justice et la verite sont deux pointes si subtiles, que nos instruments sont trop mousses pour y toucher exactement. Bien suivant la seule raison n’est juste de soi: tout branle avec le temps. Sometimes he strikes the express accent of Montaigne: Ceux qui sont dans un vaisseau croient que ceux qui sont au bord fuient. Le langage est pareil de tous cotes. Il faut avoir un point fixe pour en juger. Le port juge ceux qui sont dans un vaisseau, mais ou prendrons-nous un port dans la morale? At times he seems to forget that he himself and Montaigne are after all not of the same flock, as his mind grazes in those pleasant places. Qu’il (man) se regarde comme egare dans ce canton detourne de la nature, et de ce petit cachot ou il se trouve loge, qu’il apprenne the earth, et soi-meme a son juste prix. Il ffre, mais elle est ployable a tous sens; et ainsi il n’y en a point. Un meme sens change selon les paroles qui l’expriment. He has touches even of what he calls the malignity, the malign irony of Montaigne. Rien que la mediocrite n’est bon, he says,–epris des hauteurs, as he so conspicuously was–C’est sortir de l’humanite que de sortir du milieu; la grandeur de l’ame humaine consiste a savoir s’y tenir. Rien ne fortifie plus le pyrrhonisme–that is ever his word for scepticism–que ce qu’il y en a qui ne sont pas pyrrhoniens: si tous etaient ils auraient tort. You may even credit him, like Montaigne, with a somewhat Satanic intimacy with the ways, the cruel ways, the weakness, lachete, of the human heart, so that, as he says of Montaigne, himself too might be a pernicious study for those who have a native tendency to corruption.