PASCAL

PASCAL, BLAISE,¹ one of the brightest names in the annals, not only of France, but of the human race, was born at Clermont in Auvergne, in the year 1623. He was not forty when he died. But the achievements which he crowded into his brief span of life, and which have made his name famous to all generations, may well make the world say with Corneille, "A peine a-t-il vécu; quel nom il a laissé?" From the earliest childhood Pascal exhibited most prococious proofs of inventive genius, especially in the

Why is a privilege to be conceded to ten or twelve persons, and denied to six, to four, or to one? Where, may we ask, is the justice of such a proceeding? Why should not Mr A. be permitted to limit his liability; to declare, a priori, that whatever debts he may contract, he shall be liable only to the extent of some L.500 or L.1000; and that it is to this "fund," and not to his estates, his factories, or his consols, that his creditors have exclusively to look? But everybody knows, or ought to know, that there is something more than mere logical etiquette to be attended to in public affairs. When a law has been enacted which affects certain businesses or certain individuals, the question, whether it should be extended to others, depends in no degree on hypothetical notions about the symmetry of legislation, but on the fact whether it is a beneficial law, and on its being fitted to promote the interests of those to whom it is proposed to extend its operation. When the cook has ascertained that a particular sauce is good for the goose, she may then, but not till then, think of applying it to the gander. But limited liability is not a sauce which is suitable for anything. It has not a single good quality to recommend it; and instead of being extended, the sphere of its operation should be contracted as much as possible. In so far, however, as banks are concerned, we incline to think that its extension to them will not have much influence either one way or other; for we cannot believe it possible, were an ordinary bank to limit its liability, that half-a-dozen individuals would be found to entrust their money to its keeping. If they did, they would well deserve to meet the fate which would be all but certain to await them—that is, to lose their entire deposits. If it attempted, as it would probably do, to allure loans by the offer of a comparatively high rate of interest, that would make its ruin more certain and immediate; and is a bait that would be swallowed by those only whose ignorance was even greater than their voracity. We therefore have little doubt that the device of limited liability will be rejected by all banking companies that have any pretensions to character, or that have any wish to possess any portion of the public confidence. It is not by vicious and inapplicable measures of this sort that joint-stock banking will be improved. What is wanted in it is a return to the old law, which enabled the creditors of insolvent banks to seek redress by execution against such stockholders as they pleased to prosecute; to evince a determination to make all directors who act either dishonestly or with gross carelessness liable for the consequences; and to facilitate the proceedings in bankruptcy. This is all that is required to be done in respect of these matters in as far as banks are concerned. And a return to the old system of unlimited liability, except in special routine cases, which may be left to the decision of the Board of Trade, with the like leave to proceed against individuals, and the publication of their names, would obviate the principal objections to the present law in as far as it affects joint-stock companies. (J. R. M.)

department of mathematics. If we may believe a universally-received tradition, he had been purposely kept in ignorance of geometry, lest his propensity in that direction should interfere with the prosecution of other branches of knowledge. But in vain: his self-prompted genius, so it is said, discovered for itself the elementary truths of the forbidden science; and at twelve years of age he was surprised by his father in the act of demonstrating on the pavement of an old hall where he used to play, and with the

help of a rude diagram, traced by a piece of charcoal, a proposition which corresponded to the thirty-second of the first book of Euclid. At the age of sixteen he composed a little tractate on the conic sections, which provoked the incredulity and admiration of Descartes. At nineteen, he invented his celebrated arithmetical machine; at the age of six-and-twenty, he had composed the greater part of his mathematical works, and made those brilliant experiments in hydrostatics and pneumatics which have associated his name with those of Torricelli and Boyle, and stamped him as one of the first philosophers of his age.

Strange to say, he then suddenly renounced the splendid career to which his genius so unequivocally invited him, and abandoned himself to totally different studies. In part this was attributable to the strong religious impulse given to his character at this period,—rendered deeper no doubt by early experience in the school of affliction; for from the age of eighteen he was a perpetual sufferer, and in 1647, when only in his twenty-fourth year, was visited by a slight attack of paralysis. His ill health seems mainly to have been occasioned by his devotion to study; his mind, in fact, consumed his body. The impulse, however, which finally drove him from the world, and turned him into a religious recluse, seems to have been aided by incidents which occurred a few years later. It is said that a hopeless attachment (so M. Faugère plausibly conjectures) to the sister of his accomplished friend and patron the Duc de Roannes, but which Pascal, from timidity, never avowed to the object of it, increased his constitutional melancholy; but however this may be, a far deeper effect was produced by an escape from a frightful death in the year 1654. He was in a coach and four with some friends, and, in crossing the Seine over a bridge, part of the parapet of which was thrown down, the leaders took fright and leaped into the water; their weight as they fell happily broke the traces, and left the carriage free. But Pascal's nervous system received a shock which it seems never to have recovered; and he was often haunted with the thought that on the left side of him—that on which the danger threatened on this occasion—there yawned a deep chasm; nor could he, it is said, sit at ease unless fortified on that side by the sensation of some solid obstacle, though, strange to say, an empty chair would answer the purpose.

So complete was his abandonment of science that he never returned to it but on one memorable occasion, and then only for a short time,—namely, when he solved the remarkable problems relating to the Cycloid. The accounts which have been transmitted to us by his sister of the manner in which these investigations were suggested and completed—accounts which are authenticated by a letter of his own to Fermat—strongly impress us with the vigour and brilliancy of his genius. We are assured that after long abandonment of the mathematics, his attention was directed to the curve in question by a casual train of thought suggested in one of the many nights which pain made sleepless. His inventive mind rapidly pursued the subject till he reached the brilliant results recorded in his own writings; and in the brief space of eight days these difficult investigations were completed. Partly in compliance with the fashion of the age, and partly from the solicitation of his friend the Duc de Roannes, he concealed for a time the results at which he had arrived, and offered the problems for solution to all the mathematicians of Europe, with a first and second prize to successful candidates. If no solution were offered in three months, Pascal promised to publish his own. Several were forwarded, but as none, in the estimation of the judges, completely fulfilled the conditions of the challenge, Pascal redeemed his pledge, under the name of Amos Dettonville, an anagram of Louis de Montalte, the famous pseudonym under which the Provincial Letters had appeared. This was in 1658-9,

when he was thirty-six years of age. With this brief exception, then, and which occurs quite as a parenthesis in his history, Pascal practically abandoned science from the age of twenty-six; yet he did not at once become a religious recluse. For some years he lived a cheerful, sometimes even a gay, though never a dissipated life, in Paris, in the centre of literary and polite society, loved and admired by a wide circle of friends, and especially by the Duc de Roannes. At length, however, under the influence of the causes before specified, his indifference to the world—perhaps we might say his disgust for it—so far increased that he sighed for solitude. This he sought and found at Port-Royal, already endeared to him as the home of his sister Jacqueline.

Here he produced his immortal Provincial Letters; and, when death cut short his brief career, was meditating an extensive work on the fundamental principles of religion, especially on the existence of God and the evidences of Christianity. For its completion he asked ten years of health and leisure! An outline of the work had been sometimes (and on one occasion somewhat fully) given to his friends in conversation, but no part of it was ever completed. Nothing was found after his death but detached Thoughts (interspersed with some on other subjects) on the principal topics appropriate to such a work. They were the stones of which the building was to have consisted, many of them unhewn, and some few such as the builder, had he lived, would no doubt have laid aside. The form in which the Thoughts were put together comported but too well with their fragmentary character. It appears that Pascal did not even use a common-place book; but when, after profound meditation, any thought struck him as worth recording, he hastily noted it on any scrap of paper that came to hand, often on the backs of old letters; these he strung together on a file, or tied up in bundles, and left them till better health and untroubled leisure should permit him to evoke a new creation out of this chaos. It is a wonder, therefore, that the Pensées of Pascal have come down to us at all. Never, surely, was so precious a freight committed to so crazy a bark. But we shall return to this subject when we come to criticize the writings of Pascal, for the literary history of the Pensées is not a little curious. The latter years of his life were spent in almost incessant suffering, not a little increased by the maceration and ascetic rigour to which he subjected a body but little adapted originally to sustain such severe discipline. After lingering in a long decay, through the clouds of which, however, his genius shone with undiminished radiance, even to its setting, he died at Port-Royal in 1662, at the early age of thirty-nine.

We now proceed to make a few observations on the genius and character of this great man. His was one of the rare minds, apparently adapted almost in equal measure to the successful pursuit of the most diverse departments of philosophy and science, of mathematics and physics, of metaphysics and criticism. Many have transcended him in knowledge; for Pascal followed the predominant law of all very inventive minds,—he was fonder of thought than of books, of meditation than of acquisition. Perhaps, also, the character of Pascal's genius was less excursive than that of some other men. But in inventiveness few have been his equals; few even in mathematics, while in moral science, the science of man, we know of nothing out of Bacon and Shakespeare that will bear comparison in depth, subtlety, and comprehensiveness with some of the Thoughts of Pascal. But, in another characteristic of true genius, and which, for want of another name, we must call felicity, scarcely any one can, in the full import of the term, be compared with him. Endowed with originality the most active and various, all that he did was with grace. Full of depth, subtlety, brilliancy, both his thoughts, and the man-

Pascal. ner in which he expresses them, are also full of beauty. His just image is that of the youthful athlete of Greece, in whom was seen the perfection of physical beauty and physical strength,—in whom every muscle was developed within the just limits calculated to secure a symmetrical development of all, the largest possible amount of power and flexibility in union.

In all the manifestations of Pascal's mind this rare felicity is exuberantly displayed: in the happy methods by which he lighted on truth and pursued scientific discovery; in the selection and arrangement of topics in all his compositions; in the peculiar delicacy of his wit, so strongly contrasted with all the ordinary exhibitions of that quality with which his age was familiar; and, above all, in that indescribable elegance of expression which uniformly characterizes his finished efforts, and often his most negligent utterances, and which even time can do nothing to impair.

In his scientific writings, the traces of this felicity may be discerned almost equally in the matter and the form. In relation to the first, there is probably a little illusion practised upon us. In reading his uniformly elegant and perspicuous exposition of his own scientific discoveries, we are apt to underrate the toil and intellectual struggles by which he achieved them. We know that they were, and must have been, attended with much of both,—nay, that his shattered health was the penalty of the intensity of his studies. Still, it is hardly possible to read his expositions without having the impression that his discoveries resembled a species of inspiration, and that his mind followed out the first germinant thought to its ultimate consequences with more ease and rapidity than is usually the case. One can scarcely imagine it necessary for him to have undergone the frightful toils of Kepler, had he been led into the same track of discoveries; and, in fact, whatever illusion his ease and elegance of manner may produce, we know that, comparatively speaking, his achievements were rapidly completed. It was so with the problems on the cycloid; it was so with his discoveries in pneumatics and hydrostatics. In fact, though his Traité de l'Équilibre des Liquides, and the one De la Pesanteur de l'Air, were not composed till 1653, they seem to have been only another form of the treatise he promised in his Nouvelles Expériences Touchant le Vide, published in 1647, and of which that tract was avowedly an abridgment. Indeed, as already said, Pascal had nearly quitted these investigations before the completion of his twenty-sixth year.

There was no scientific subject which Pascal touched in which the felicity of his genius, the promptitude and brilliancy of his mind, did not shine forth. We see these qualities eminently displayed in his Traité du Triangle Arithmétique, in the invention and construction of his arithmetical machine, in the mode of solving the problems respecting the cycloid,—in which, while employing Cavalieri's Method of Indivisibles, he proposes to remove the principal objection which had been made to it, by conceptions which bring him within a step of the Fluxions of Newton and the Calculus of Leibnitz. The same qualities of mind are eminently displayed in the manner in which he establishes the hydrostatic paradox, and generally in the experiments detailed in the Nouvelles Expériences, and the other connected pieces,—most of all in the celebrated crucial experiment on the Puy-de-Dôme, by which he decided the cause of the suspension of the mercury in the barometrical tube. As there are few things recorded in the history of science more happily ingenious than the conception of this experiment, so never was there anything more pleasantly naïve

than the manner in which he proposes it in his letter to M. Perier. "You doubtless see," says he, "that this experiment is decisive of the question; and that if it happen that the mercury shall stand lower at the top than at the bottom of the mountain (as I have many reasons for thinking, although all those who have meditated on this subject are of a contrary opinion), it will necessarily follow that the weight and pressure of the air are the sole cause of this suspension of the mercury, and not the horror of a vacuum; since it is very certain that there is much more air to press at the base than on the summit of the mountain; while, on the other hand, we surely cannot say that nature abhors a vacuum more at the bottom of a mountain than on the top of it."¹

The usual felicity of his style is seen throughout his philosophical as well as his other works. They possess the highest merit which can belong to scientific composition. It is true that, in his purely mathematical writings, partly from the defective notation of his age, itself a result of the want of that higher calculus, the invention of which was reserved for Newton and Leibnitz, he is often compelled to adopt a more prolix style of demonstration than would have been subsequently necessary; but even here, and still more in all the fragments which relate to natural philosophy, his style is in striking contrast with the clumsy expression of the generality of contemporary writers. His Fragments abound in that perspicuous elegance which the French denominate by the expressive word netteté. The arrangement of thought and turn of expression are alike beautiful. Probably no one ever knew so well when to stay his hand.

But it is, of course, in his writings on moral and critical subjects that this felicity may be chiefly expected to appear; and here we may well say, in the eloquent language of M. Faugère, it is a "style grand sans exagération, partout rempli d'émotion et contenu; vif sans turbulence, personnel sans pédanterie et sans amour propre, superbe et modeste, tout ensemble;" or, as he elsewhere expresses it, "tellement identifié avec l'âme de l'écrivain qu'il n'est que la pensée elle-même, parée de sa chaste nudité comme une statue antique." By the confession of the first French critics, the Lettres Provinciales did more than any other composition to fix the French language. On this point the suffrages of all the most competent judges—of Voltaire and Bossuet, D'Alembert and Condorcet—are unanimous. "Not a single word occurs," says the first, "partaking of that vicissitude to which living languages are so subject. Here, then, we may fix the epoch when our language may be said to have assumed a settled form." "The French language," says D'Alembert, "was very far from being formed, as we may judge by the greater part of the works published at that time, and of which it is impossible to endure the reading. In the Provincial Letters there is not a single word that has become obsolete; and that book, though written above a century ago, seems as if it had been written but yesterday." And as these Letters were the first models of French prose, so they still remain the objects of unqualified admiration. The writings of Pascal have indeed a paradoxical destiny,—flourishing in immortal youth, all that time can do is to superadd to the charms of perpetual beauty the veneration which belongs to age. His style cannot grow old.

When we reflect on the condition of the language when he appeared, this is truly wonderful. It was but partially reclaimed from barbarism; it was still an imperfect instrument of genius. He had no adequate models,—he

Pascal. was to create them for others. Now, to seize a language in its rude state, and compel it, in spite of its hardness and intractability, to become a malleable material of thought, is the exclusive prerogative of the highest species of minds; nothing but the intense fire of genius can fuse these heterogeneous elements, and mould them into forms of beauty. As a proof, we have the fact that none but the highest genius has ever been equal to this task. Genius of less than the first order will often make improvements in the existing state of a language, and give it a perceptible impulse; but only the most creative and plastic power can at once mould a rude language into forms which cannot become obsolete,—forms which remain in perpetuity a part of the current literature, amidst all the changes of time and the caprices of fashion. Thus it required a Luther to mould the harsh German into the language of his still unrivalled translation of the Scriptures, in which, and in his vernacular compositions, he first fairly reclaimed his native language from its wild state, brought it under the yoke, and subjected it to the purposes of literature. Pascal was in a similar manner the creator of the French.

The severely pure and simple taste which reigns in Pascal's style seems, when we reflect on those faults which more or less infected universal letters, little less than a miraculous felicity. One wonders by what privilege it was that he freed himself from the contagion of universal example, and rose so superior to his age. Taste was yet almost unfelt: each writer affected extravagance of some kind or other: strained metaphor, quaint conceits, far-fetched turns of thought, unnatural constructions,—these were the vices of the day; not so much perhaps in France as in England, but to a great extent in both. From all these blemishes Pascal's style is perfectly free; he anticipated all criticism, and became a law to himself. Some of his observations, however, show that his taste was no mere instinct; they indicate how deeply he had revolved the true principles of composition. His thoughts Sur l'Eloquence et le Style are well worth the perusal of every writer and speaker. In one of them he profoundly says, "The very same sense is materially affected by the words that convey it. The sense receives its dignity from the words, rather than imparts it to them." In another he says, "All the false beauties that we condemn in Cicero have their admirers in crowds." And in a third he admirably depicts the prevailing vice of strained antitheses: "Those," says he, "who frame antitheses by forcing the sense are like men who make false windows for the sake of symmetry. Their rule is not to speak justly, but to make just figures." The time spent on his own compositions shows that even such felicity as his could not dispense with that toil which is an essential condition of all perfect writing,—indeed of all human excellence,—and affords one other proof of the extreme shallowness of that theory which would have us believe that, to attain success, genius alone is all-sufficient. He is said, when engaged on his Lettres Provinciales, to have sometimes employed twenty days upon a single letter.

Another circumstance which, as already intimated, indicates Pascal's felicity of genius, is the peculiar delicacy and refinement of his wit. We say its delicacy and refinement; for the mere conjunction of great wit with great aptitudes for either philosophy or poetry cannot be considered as a felicity peculiar to Pascal. It is the character of that wit. The conjunction of distinguished wit, in one or other of its many forms, with elevated genius, is far too common to be regarded as a peculiarity of Pascal's mind. Paradoxical as the statement may at first sight appear to those who have been accustomed to consider wisdom and wit as dwelling apart, it may be doubted whether there is any one attribute so common to the highest order of mind, whether scientific or imaginative, as wit of

some kind. Plato, Bacon, and Shakespeare may be cited as examples.

The wit of Pascal appears even now exquisitely chaste and natural—attired in a truly Attic simplicity of form and expression. In one quality—that of irony—nothing appears to us to approach it, except what we find in the pages of Plato, between whom and Pascal (different and even opposite as they were) it is easy to trace a resemblance in other points besides the character of their wit. Both possessed surpassing acuteness and subtlety of genius in the department of abstract science; both delighted in exploring the depths of man's moral nature; both gazed enamoured on the ideal forms of moral sublimity and loveliness; both were characterized by eminent beauty of intellect; and both were absolute masters of the art of representing thought, each with exquisite refinement of taste, and all the graces of language. The Greek, indeed, possessed a far more opulent imagination, and often indulged in a more gorgeous style than the Frenchman; or rather Plato may be said to have been a master of all kinds of style. But his dramatic powers, in none of his dialogues, can be greater than those which Pascal has displayed in his Provincial Letters.

The moral aspects of Pascal's character are as inviting as those of his intellect: here, too, he was truly great. Some infirmities indeed he had, for he was no more than man. He is nevertheless one of the very few who as passionately pursue the acquisition of moral excellence as the quest after speculative truth; who practically, as well as theoretically, believe that the highest form of humanity is not intellect, but goodness. Usually it is far otherwise; there is no sort of proportion between the diligence and assiduity which men are ordinarily willing to expend on their intellectual and their moral culture. Nor is it less than an indication of something wrong about human nature, a symptom of spiritual disease, that of those three distinct orders of greatness which Pascal has so exquisitely discriminated in his Pensées—Power, Intellect, and Goodness—the admiration inspired by the two first should be so much greater than that inspired by the last.

Few men have ever dwelt on the ideal of moral perfection, or sought to realize its image in themselves, with more ardour than Pascal; not always, indeed (as regards the mode), with as much wisdom as ardour. Yet upon all the great features of his moral character one dwells with the serenest delight. Much as he is to be admired, he is yet more to be loved. His humility and simplicity, conspicuous as his genius and acquisitions, were those of a very child. The favourite of science, often crowned, as an old Greek might have said of some distinguished young hero at Olympia, with the fairest laurels of the successful mathematician and the unrivalled polemic,—making discoveries even in his youth which would have intoxicated many men to madness,—neither pride nor vanity found admission to his heart. Philosophy and science produced on him only their proper effect; and taught him, not how much he knew, but how little,—not merely what he had attained, but of how much more he was ignorant. His perfect love of truth was beautifully blended with the gentlest charity, and his contempt of fraud and sophistry never made him forget, while indignantly exposing them, the courtesies of the gentleman and the moderation of the Christian; and thus the severest raillery that probably ever fell from human lips flows on in a stream undisturbed by one particle of malevolence, and unruffled by one expression of coarseness and bitterness. The transparency and integrity of his character not only shone conspicuous in all the transactions of his life, but seem even now to beam upon us as from an open, ingenuous countenance, in the inimitable frankness and clearness of his style. It is impossible to read the passages in his philosophical writings, in which he notices or refutes the calumnies to which he had

Pascal. been exposed, and by which it was sometimes sought to defraud him of the honour of the discoveries he had made, in one instance even to cover him with the infamy of appropriating discoveries which had been made by others, without being convinced of the perfect candour and uprightness of his nature.¹ His generosity and benevolence were unbounded; so much so, indeed, as to become almost vices by excess, passing far beyond that mean in which the Stagyrite fixes the limits of all virtue. He absolutely beggared himself by his prodigal benefactions: he did what few do, mortgaged even his expectancies to charity. To all which we may add, that he bore the prolonged and excruciating sufferings of his latter years with a patience and fortitude which astonished all who witnessed them.

The failings of Pascal (for to these we must advert) were partly the result of that system of faith in which he had been educated; and which, though he did so much to expose many of the worst enormities which had attached themselves to it, still exercised considerable influence over him. It is lamentable to see such a mind as his surrendering itself to some of the most grievous extravagances of asceticism. Yet the fact cannot be denied; nor is it improbable that his life—brief, perhaps, at the longest, considering his intense study and his feeble constitution—was made more brief by these pernicious practices. We are told not only that he lived on the plainest fare, and performed the most menial offices for himself,—not only that he practised the severest abstinence and the most rigid devotions,—but that he wore beneath his clothes a girdle of iron, with sharp points affixed to it; and that whenever he found his mind disposed to wander from religious subjects, or take delight in things around him, he struck the girdle with his elbow, and forced the sharp points of iron into his side. We even see but too clearly that his views of life to a considerable extent became perverted. He cherished mistrust even of its blessings, and acted, though he meant it not, as if the very gifts of God were to be received with suspicion as the smiling tempters to ruin—the secret enemies of our well-being. He often expresses himself as though he thought, not only that suffering is necessary to the moral discipline of man, but that nothing but suffering is at present safe for him. "I can approve," he says in one place, "only of those who seek in tears for happiness." "Disease," he declares in another place, "is the natural state of Christians." It is evident that the gracious Master in whose school we all are, and whose various dispensations of goodness and severity are dictated by a wisdom greater than our own, does not think so: if he did, health would be the exception, and disease the rule.

Pascal was obviously misled, by these sentiments, into the self-imposed ascetic severities which aggravated all the sufferings of his later years. But it is at our peril that we interfere with the discipline which is provided for us. He who acts as if God had mistaken the proportions in which joy and sorrow, prosperity and adversity, should be allotted to us,—who seeks, by hair shirts, prolonged abstinence, and self-imposed penance, to render more perfect the discipline of suffering,—only enfeebles instead of invigorating his piety, and resembles one of those hypochondriacal patients—the plague and torment of physicians—who, having sought advice, and being supposed to follow it, are found not only taking their physician's well-judged prescriptions, but secretly dosing themselves in the intervals with some quackish nostrum. Thus did Pascal; and it is impossible not to

see that the experiment was attended in his case with very pernicious effects.

It is indeed pitiable to read that, during his last days, his perverted notions induced him to refrain from the natural expressions of fondness and gratitude towards his sisters and attendants, lest the affection with which they regarded him should become inordinate,—lest they should transfer to an earthly creature the affection due only to the Supreme. Something, indeed, like an attempted justification of such conduct occurs in his Pensées:—"Il est injuste qu'on s'attache à moi, quoiqu'on le fasse avec plaisir et volontairement. Je tromperais ceux à qui j'en ferais naître le désir; car je ne suis la fin de personne, et n'ai pas de quoi les satisfaire. Ne suis-je pas prêt à mourir? Et ainsi l'objet de leur attachement mourra donc. Comme je serais coupable de faire croire une fausseté, quoique je la persuadasse doucement et qu'on la crût avec plaisir, et qu'en cela on me fît plaisir; de même je suis coupable de me faire aimer." Madame Perier has cited this passage in the life of her brother as accounting for his apparent coldness to herself.²

It is wonderful that a mind so powerful should have been misled by a pernicious asceticism to adopt such maxims; it is still more wonderful that a heart so fond should have been able to act upon them. To restrain, even in his dying hours, expressions of tenderness towards those whom he so loved, and who so loved him; to simulate a coldness which his feelings belied; to repress the sensibilities of a grateful and confiding nature; to inflict a pang, by affected indifference, on hearts as fond as his own; here was indeed a proof of the truth upon which he so passionately meditated, the greatness and the misery of man,—of his strength and his weakness: weakness, in supposing that such perversion of all nature could ever be a dictate of duty; strength, in performing, without wincing, a task so hard. The American Indian, bearing unmoved the torture of his enemies, exhibits not, we may rest assured, greater fortitude than Pascal, when, with such a heart as his, he received in silence the last ministrations of his devoted friends, and even declined, with cold and averted eye, the assiduities of their zealous love. That same melancholy temperament which, united with a pernicious asceticism, made him turn his gaze even from innocent pleasure, and suspect a serpent lurking in every form of it, also gave to his representations of the depravity of our nature an undue intensity and Rembrandt-like depth of colouring. His mode of expression is often such that, were it not for what we otherwise know of his character, it might be mistaken for an indication of misanthropy. With this vice, accordingly, Voltaire does not hesitate to tax him. "Ce fameux écrivain, misanthrope sublime." Nothing can be more unjust. As to the substance of what Pascal has said of human frailty and infirmity, most of it is at once verified by the appeal to individual consciousness; and as to the manner, we are not to forget that he everywhere dwells as much upon the greatness as upon the misery of man. "It is the ruined archangel," says Hallam, with equal justice and beauty, "that Pascal delights to paint." It is equally evident that he is habitually inspired by a desire to lead man to truth and happiness; nor is there anything more affecting than the passage with which he closes one of his expostulations with Infidelity, and which M. Cousin finely characterizes as "une citation glorieuse à Pascal." "This argument," you say, "delights me. If this argument

pleases you, and appears strong, know that it proceeds from one who, both before and after it, fell on his knees before that infinite and invisible Being to whom he has subjected his whole soul, to pray that He would also subject you to Himself, for your good and for His glory; and that thus omnipotence might give efficacy to his feebleness."

In addition to this, it must be said that, in his most bitter reflections, this truly humble man is thinking as much of himself as of others, and regards Blaise Pascal as but a type of the race whose degeneracy he mourns. His most bitter sarcasms often terminate with a special application to the writer. Thus he says, "Vanity is so rooted in the heart of man, that a common soldier or scullion will boast of himself, and will have his admirers. It is the same with the philosophers. Those who write would fain have the fame of writing well; and those who read it, would have the glory of having read it; and I, who am writing, probably feel the same desire, and not less those who shall read it."

It is true, indeed, that some of his reflections are as caustic and bitter as those of Rochefoucauld himself. For example:—"Curiosity is but vanity. Often we wish to know more, only that we may talk of it. People would never traverse the sea if they were never to speak of it, for the mere pleasure of seeing, without the hope of ever telling what they have seen." And again:—"Man is so constituted that, by merely telling him he is a fool, he will at length believe it; and if he tells himself so, he will constrain himself to believe it. For man holds an internal intercourse with himself which ought to be well regulated, since even here 'evil communications corrupt good manners.'—"I lay it down as a fact, that if all men knew what they say of one another, there would not be four friends in the world. This appears by the quarrels which are sometimes caused by indiscreet reports."

Still, as it is the motive which gives complexion to all our moral actions, so Pascal's bitter wisdom, or even his unjust satire, is something very different from misanthropy. With what noble eloquence—with what deep sympathy with humanity—does he rebuke the levity of those infidels who tell us, as if it were matter of triumph, that we are the inhabitants of "a fatherless and forsaken world," and who talk as if their vaunted demonstration of the vanity of our immortal hopes gave them a peculiar title to our gratitude and admiration! "What advantage is it to us to hear a man saying that he has thrown off the yoke; that he does not think there is any God who watches over his actions; that he considers himself as the sole judge of his conduct, and that he is accountable to none but himself? Does he imagine that we shall hereafter repose special confidence in him, and expect from him consolation, advice, succour, in the exigencies of life? Do such men imagine it is any matter of delight to us to hear that they hold that our soul is but a little vapour or smoke, and that they can tell us this in an assured and self-sufficient tone of voice? Is this, then, a thing to say with gaiety? Is it not rather a thing to be said with tears, as the saddest thing in the world?"

We now proceed to make a few observations on the principal writings of Pascal. The one on which his fame, as a great thinker, chiefly rests, fragmentary as it is, is the Pensées. We have alluded to the literary history of this work as highly curious. The thoughts were written, as already said, on any scraps of paper that came to hand; these were strung on a file, and left till health and leisure should enable the author to develop and arrange them.

Health and leisure never came. But it was not this only which has rendered the work so fragmentary. Many of the thoughts are themselves only half developed; others, as given us in the literal copy of M. Faugère's admirable edition, break off in the middle of a sentence, even of a word. Some casual interruption—frequently, no doubt,

some paroxysm of pain, to which the great author in his latter years was incessantly subject—broke the thread of thought, and left the web imperfect for ever.

On the imperfect sentences and half-written words, which are now given in the volumes of M. Faugère, we look with something like the feelings with which we pore on some half-defaced inscription on an ancient monument,—with a strange commixture of curiosity and veneration; and, whilst we wonder what the unfinished sentences may mean, mourn over the malicious accident which has perhaps converted what might have been aphorisms of profoundest importance into a series of incoherent ciphers. One of the last things, assuredly, which we should think of doing with such fragments would be to attempt to alter them in any way; least of all, to supplement them, and to divine and publish Pascal's meaning. There have been learned men who have given us supplements to the lost pieces of some ancient historians; erudite Freinsheimius who hand us a huge bale of indifferent Latin, and beg us only to think it Livy's lost Decades. But what man would venture to supplement Pascal? Only such, it may be supposed, as would feel no scruple in scouring an antique medal; or a successor to those monks who obliterated manuscript pieces of Cicero that they might inscribe them with some edifying legend. But more noted people were scarcely more scrupulous in the case of Pascal. His friends decided that the fragments which he had left behind him, imperfect as they were, were far too valuable to be consigned to oblivion; and, so far, all the world will agree with them. If, further, they had selected whatever appeared in any degree coherent, and printed these, verbatim et literatim, in the best order they could devise, none would have censured, and all would have thanked them. But they did much more than this, or rather they did both much more and much less. They deemed it not sufficient to give Pascal's remains with the statement that they were but fragments; that many of the thoughts were very imperfectly developed; that none of them had the advantage of the author's revision,—apologies with which the world would have been satisfied; but they ventured upon mutilations and alterations of a most unwarrantable description. In innumerable instances they changed words and phrases; in many others they left out whole paragraphs, and put a sentence or two of their own in the place of them; they supplemented what they deemed imperfect by an exordium or conclusion, without any indication as to what were the respective ventures in this rare species of literary copartnership. It must have been odd to see this committee of critics sitting in judgment on Pascal's style, and deliberating with what alterations, additions, and expurgations it would be safe to permit the author of the Provincial Letters to appear in public. Arnould, Nicole, and the Duc de Roannes were certainly no ordinary men; but they were no more capable of divining the thoughts which Pascal had not expressed, or of improving the style where he had expressed them, than of completing a sketch of Raphael.

It appears that, large as was the editorial discretion assumed, they had contemplated an enterprise still more audacious,—nothing less than that of completing the work which Pascal had projected, partly out of the materials which he had left, and partly from what their own ingenuity might supply. It even appears that they had actually commenced this heterogeneous structure; and an amusing account has been left by M. Perier of the progress the builders of this Babel had made, and the reasons for abandoning the design. "At last," says he, "it was resolved to reject the plan, because it was felt to be almost impossible thoroughly to enter into the thoughts and plan of the author, and, above all, of an author who was no more; and because it would not have been the work of M. Pascal, but a work altogether different—un ouvrage tout différent." Very different indeed!

Pascal. If this naïve expression had been intended for irony, it would have been almost worthy of Pascal himself.

Subsequent editors took similar liberties, if not so flagrant. While the original editors left out many passages from fear of the Jesuits, Condorcet, in his edition, omitted many of the most devout sentiments and expressions, under the influence of a very different feeling. Infidelity, as well as superstition, has its bigots, who would be well pleased to have their index expurgatorius also.

It had been long felt that no trustworthy edition of Pascal's Thoughts had been published—that nobody knew precisely what was his, and what was not. M. Cousin, in his valuable Rapport, demonstrated the necessity of an entirely new edition, founded upon a diligent collation of the original manuscripts; and this task M. Faugère performed with incredible industry. We must refer the reader to his interesting Introduction for proof of this statement. There the editor has given the details of his labours. Suffice it here to say, that every accessible source of information was carefully ransacked; every fragment of manuscript, whether in Pascal's own hand, or in that of members of his family, was diligently examined; and every page offers indications of minute attention, even to the most trivial verbal differences. Speaking of the autograph manuscript preserved in the Royal Library at Paris,—a folio into which the original loose leaves are pasted, or, when written on both sides, carefully let into the page ("encadrés"),—he says, "We have read, or rather studied, this manuscript page by page, line by line, syllable by syllable, from the beginning to the end, and, with the exception of some words which are illegible, it has passed entire into the present edition." As the public, in the former editions, did not exactly know what was Pascal's and what was not, M. Faugère has been compelled to do what, under other circumstances, would have been undesirable, and, indeed, hardly just; what, indeed, any author of reputation would vehemently protest against in his own case. He has been obliged to give every fragment, however imperfect, verbatim; and the extracts, as we have already said, often terminate in the middle of a sentence, sometimes even of a word. M. Vinet justly observes in relation to this feature of M. Faugère's labours, that Pascal himself would hardly have been satisfied with "either his old editors or the new." At the same time, it must be confessed that, apart from this circumstance, it is deeply interesting to contemplate the first rude forms of profound or brilliant thoughts as they presented themselves to the ardent mind of Pascal. As M. Vinet says, "we are taken into the great sculptor's studio, and behold him at work chisel in hand."

It is impossible to determine, from the undeveloped character of these Thoughts, the precise form of the work Pascal contemplated; all we are told is, that it was to have treated of the primary truths of all religion, and of the evidences of Christianity. It is clear that about half the Thoughts which relate to theology at all have reference to the former, and form by far the profoundest portion.

In Pascal's day, however, both classes of subjects might have been naturally included in one work. The great deistical controversies of Europe had not yet commenced, and there had been little reason to discriminate very nicely the limits of the two investigations. Pascal himself could hardly have anticipated the diversified forms which the subject of the evidences of Christianity alone would assume; so diversified, indeed, that they are probably insusceptible, from their variety, of being fully exhibited by one mind, or consequently in one volume. The evidences of Christianity almost form a science of themselves.

Fragmentary as the Pensées are, it is easy to see, both from their general tenor and from the character of the

author's mind, where the strength of such a work would be. His proofs of the truths of natural religion would have been drawn from within rather than from without; and his proofs of the truth of Christianity from its internal rather than external evidences—including in this term "internal" not only the adaptation of the doctrines revealed, to man's moral nature, but whatsoever indications the fabric of Scripture itself may afford of the divinity of its origin.—It is evident that he had revolved all these topics profoundly. None had explored more diligently the abyss of man's moral nature, or mused more deeply upon the "greatness and misery of man," or on the "contrarieties" which characterize him, or on the remedies for his infirmities and corruptions. And there are few, even since his time, who seem to have appreciated more fully the evidences of Christianity arising from indications of truth in the genius, structure, and style of the Scriptures; or from the difficulties, not to say impossibilities, of supposing such a fiction as Christianity the probable product of any human artifice, much less of such an age, country, and (above all) such men as the problem limits us to. In one passage he gives expression to a thought very similar to that which suggested the Hora Paulina. He says, "The style of the gospel is admirable in many respects, and, amongst others, in this, that there is not a single invective against the murderers and enemies of Jesus Christ. . . . If the modesty of the evangelical historians had been affected, and, in common with so many other traits of so beautiful a character, had been affected only that it might be observed; then, if they had not ventured to advert to it themselves, they would not have failed to get their friends to remark it to their advantage. But as they acted in this way without affectation, and from a principle altogether disinterested, they never provided any one to make such a criticism. And, in my judgment, there are many points of this kind which have never been noticed hitherto; and this testifies to the simplicity with which the thing was done."¹

He has also, with characteristic comprehensiveness, condensed into a single paragraph the substance of the celebrated volume of Bampton Lectures on the contrasts between Mohammedanism and Christianity. "Mahomet founded his system on slaughter; Jesus Christ by exposing his disciples to death: Mahomet by forbidding to read; the apostles by commanding it. In a word, so opposite is the plan of one from that of the other, that if Mahomet took the way to succeed according to human calculation, Jesus Christ certainly took the way to fail; and instead of arguing that, since Mahomet succeeded, Jesus Christ might also succeed, we ought rather to say, that since Mahomet succeeded, it is impossible but that Jesus Christ should fail."

On the subject of the external evidences we doubt whether he would have been equally successful, partly because the spirit of accurate historic investigation had not yet been developed, and partly from the character of his own mind. On the subject of miracles, too, he scarcely seems to have worked his conceptions clear; and in relation to that of prophecy, he was evidently often inclined to lay undue stress on analogies between events recorded in the Old Testament and others recorded in the New, where Scripture itself is silent as to any connection between them;—analogies in some cases as fanciful as any of those in which the fathers saw so many types and prefigurations of undeveloped truths.

From certain passages in the Pensées, a vehement charge of scepticism has been preferred by M. Cousin, from which, says that writer, Pascal sought refuge in a voluntarily blind credulity. "Le fond même de l'âme de Pascal est un scepticisme universel, contre lequel il ne trouve d'asile que dans une foi volontairement aveugle."

These are certainly charges which, without the gravest and most decisive proof, ought not to be preferred against any man, much less against one possessing so clear and powerful an intellect as Pascal. It is, in fact, the most degrading picture which can be presented of any mind; for what weakness can be more pitiable, or what inconsistency more gross, than that of a man who, by a mere act of will—if indeed such a condition of mind be conceivable—surrenders himself to the belief of the most stupendous doctrines, while he at the same time acknowledges that he has no proof whatever of their certainty?

It appears to us that M. Cousin has forgotten that Pascal by no means denies that there is sufficient evidence of the many great principles to which scepticism objects; he only maintains that we do not arrive at them by demonstration. He has powerfully vindicated the certainty of those intuitive principles which are not ascertained by reasoning, but are presupposed in every exercise of reasoning. Let us hear him: "The only strong point," says he, "of the dogmatists is, that we cannot, consistently with honesty and sincerity, doubt our own intuitive principles. . . . We know the truth, not only by reasoning, but by feeling, and by a vivid and luminous power of direct comprehension; and it is by this last faculty that we discern first principles. It is vain for reasoning, which has no share in discovering these principles, to attempt subverting them. . . . The Pyrrhonists who attempt this must try in vain. . . . The knowledge of first principles—as the ideas of space, time, motion, number, matter—is as unequivocally certain as any that reasoning imparts."

But let us hear him still more expressly on the subject of Pyrrhonism: "Here, then, is open war proclaimed among men. Each must take a side; must necessarily range himself with the Pyrrhonists or the dogmatists—for he who would think to remain neuter is a Pyrrhonist par excellence. He who is not against them is for them. What, then, must a person do in this alternative? Shall he doubt of everything? Shall he doubt that he is awake, or that he is pinched or burned? Shall he doubt that he doubts? Shall he doubt that he is? We cannot get so far as this; and I hold it to be a fact, that there never has been an absolute and perfect Pyrrhonist." M. Cousin must suppose Pascal to have made an exception in favour of himself, if it be indeed true that he was an universal sceptic. It appears to us that M. Cousin has not sufficiently reflected that, in those cases in which conclusions truly involve processes of reasoning, Pascal does not deny that the preponderance of proof rests with the truths he believes, though he denies the demonstrative nature of that proof; and he applies this with perfect fairness to the evidences of Christianity as well as to the truths of natural theology. "There is light enough," says he, "for those whose sincere wish is to see, and darkness enough to confound those of an opposite disposition." Of Christianity he says, "It is impossible to see all the proofs of this religion combined in one view without feeling that they have a force which no reasonable man can withstand."

It is not without reason that M. Faugère says, in reference to the charge of scepticism urged against Pascal, "Faith and reason may equally claim him. If they sometimes appear to clash in his mind, it is because he wanted time, not only to finish the work on which he was engaged, but even to complete that internal revision (son œuvre intérieure) which is a kind of second creation of genius; and to unite into one harmonious whole the diverse elements of his thoughts. Amongst the inedited fragments of Pascal we find these remarkable lines:—Il faut avoir ces trois qualités; Pyrrhonien, géomètre, Chrétien soumis;

et elles s'accordent et se tempèrent en doutant où il faut, en assurant où il faut, en se soumettant où il faut." These bold words comprise the entire history of Pascal, and express in brief the state of his mind. But it is impossible in the limits of this article to enter with the requisite fullness into the question of Pascal's imputed scepticism. The subject will be found fully treated in the essay of which this article is an abridgment; in M. Faugère's admirable Introduction to his edition of the Pensées; and in some very acute papers of M. Vinet, first collected and published in 1848, under the title Études de Blaise Pascal; especially in those Sur le Pyrrhonisme de Pascal, and Du Livre de M. Cousin sur les Pensées.

If the Pensées are the most profound, the Lettres Provinciales are the most brilliant of Pascal's works, and among the very few which, though turning on local and transient controversy, are so instinct with genius, so beautiful in thought and style, as to command the attention of all time.

Nothing could be apter for the purpose—that of throwing into strong light the monstrous errors of the system he opposed—than the machinery the author has selected. The affected ignorance and naïveté of M. Montalte, seeking information respecting the theological disputes of the age, and especially the doctrines of the Jesuits; the frankness of the worthy Jesuit father, of whom he asks instruction, and who, in the boundless admiration of his order, and the hope of making a convert, details without hesitation, or rather with triumph, the admirable contrivances by which their casuists had inverted every principle of morals and eluded all the obligations of Christianity; the ironical compliments of the supposed novice, intermingled with objections and slightly-expressed doubts,—all delivered with an air of modest ingenuousness which humbly covets further light; the acute simplicity with which he involves the worthy father in the most perplexing dilemmas; the expressions of unsophisticated astonishment, which but prompt his stolid guide eagerly to make good every assertion by a proper array of authorities,—a device which, as Pascal has used it, converts what would have been in other hands only a dull catalogue of citations into a source of perpetual amusement; the droll consequences which, with infinite affectation of simplicity, he draws from the Jesuit's doctrines; the logical exigencies into which the latter is thrown in the attempt to obviate them;—all these things, managed as only Pascal could have managed them, render the book as amusing as any novel. The form of letters enables him at the same time to intersperse, amidst the conversations they record, the most eloquent and glowing invectives against the doctrines he exposes. Voltaire's well-known panegyric does not exceed the truth, that Molière's best comedies do not excel them in wit, nor the compositions of Bossuet in sublimity. "This work," says D'Alembert, "is so much the more admirable, as Pascal, in composing it, seems to have theologized two things which seem not made for the theology of that time—language and pleasure."

The success of the work is well known. By his inimitable pleasantry Pascal succeeded in making even the dullest matters of scholastic theology and Jesuitical casuistry as attractive to the people as a comedy; and by his little volume did more to render the formidable society the contempt of Europe than was ever done by all its other enemies put together. The Jesuits had nothing for it but to inveigh against the letters as "the immortal liars" (les menteurs immortelles).¹

Of the scientific writings of Pascal we have already spoken. (II. II.)