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The paradoxical condition of the world, the natural inconsistency of man, his strange blending of meanness with ancient greatness, the caprices of his status here, of his power and attainments, in the issue of his existence–that is what the study of Montaigne had enforced on Pascal as the sincere compte rendu of experience. But then he passes at a tangent from the circle of the great sceptic’s apprehension. That prospect of man and the world, undulant, capricious, inconsistent, contemptible, lache, full of contradiction, with a soul of evil in things good, irreducible to law, upon which, after all, Montaigne looks out with a complacency so entire, fills Pascal with terror. It is the world on the morrow of a great catastrophe, the casual forces of which have by no means spent themselves. Yes! this world we see, of which we are a part, with its thousand dislocations, is precisely what we might expect as resultant from the Fall of Man, with consequences in full working still. It presents the appropriate aspect of a lost world, though with beams of redeeming grace about it, those, too, distributed somewhat capriciously to chosen people and elect souls, who, after all, can have but an ill time of it here. Under the tragic eclairs of divine wrath essentially implacable, the gentle, pleasantly undulating, sunny, earthly prospect of poor loveable humanity which opens 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 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 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 superbe puissance ennemie de la raison, combien toutes les richesses de la terre sont insuffisantes sans son consentement. The imagination has the disposition of all things: Elle fait la beaute, la justice, et le bonheur, qui est le tout du monde. L’imagination dispose de tout. And what we have here to note is its extraordinary power in himself. Strong in him as the reasoning faculty, so to speak, it administered the reasoning faculty in him a son grbut he was unaware of it, that power d’autant plus fourbe qu’elle ne l’est pas toujours. Hidden under the apparent rigidity of his favourite studies, imagination, even in them, played a large part. Physics, mathematics were with him largely matters of intuition, anticipation, precocious discovery, short cuts, superb guessing. It was the inventive element in his work and his way of putting things that surprised those best able to judge. He might have discovered the mathematical sciences for himself, it is alleged, had his father, as he once had a mind to do, withheld him from instruction in them.

About the time when he was bidding adieu to the world, Pascal had an accident. As he drove round a corner on the Seine side to cross the bridge at Neuilly, the horses were precipitated down the bank into the water. Pascal escaped, but with a nervous shock, a certain hallucination, from which he never recovered. As he walked or sat he was apt to perceive a yawning depth beside him; would set stick or chair there to reassure himself. We are now told, indeed, that that circumstance has been greatly exaggerated. But how true to Pascal’s temper, as revealed in his work, that alarmed precipitous character in it! Intellectually the abyss was evermore at his side. Nous avons, he observes, un autre principe d’erreur, les maladies. Now in him the imagination itself was like a physical malady, troubling, disturbing, or in active collusion with it….

NOTES

1. +Transliteration: pathos.

2. *The words here cited are, however, from Psalm cxviii., the cxvii. of the Vulgate, and not from Pascal’s favourite Psalm. (C.L.S.) +C.L.S. stands for Charles Shadwell, editor of the original volume.