(Addressed to the Philological Society, XXXIII. ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART (From Essays in Philosophical Criticism, XXXIV. IMAGINATION AND JUDGMENT (Addressed to the London School of Ethics, XXXV. ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY XXI PASCAL THE ray of Pascal's genius was one of the keenest which have flashed across dark places. It shone in science first, then threw a light, fateful if distorting, on the morals of a great society; and then it travelled into the recesses of the heart and mind and soul, where it is still shining. For in the Pensées, through the guise of his time and creed, he lives and speaks to us vividly. Whatever may be the fate in store for him, it is not likely that his readers, who increased vastly in the last century, have much diminished in the last few years. So it is not a question of exhuming him for his tercentenary, nor is there much fear that dutiful celebrations may stifle him.1 The language of his heart is persuasive, and the unflinching light of his mind does not leave us as we were ; yet we may accept or reject his message. There are those whom it consoles and fortifies, and those to whom it only seems to reveal an abyss of contradiction and darkness. His own life makes a strong impression of contraries or disparates. A great mathematician and a master of the strictest logic, he is also master of a subtle and animated prose which belongs to another order; and these effects can be so diverse that there seem really not to be two gifts, but two minds in him. 1 June 1923. W.K.E. II. 1 A He learned the ways of the world, rejected them, and became an ascetic; yet having expelled brooms from his abode as superfluous things, he invents-if we may call him its inventor-that convenience of modern life, the omnibus. It was while he was living only for his faith and judging by no lighter standard that he wrote enthusiastically in a letter about l'honnêteté-the fine and purely human culture of the world; and then also, when he had carried self-renouncement to its extreme, that a sharp assertiveness came out in his last scientific controversy. So, if we try to call up the man, diverse images present themselves. One sees him in youth, on fire with intellectual ambition, a swift and peremptory talker; or at a loss as he first goes into the world, and then an amateur of society-he could not have been more than an amateur-but still delightedly absorbed by it. Then, having retreated to the "Messieurs de Port-Royal" in their secluded valley, he is discoursing by request on Montaigne and Epictetus to the innocent M. de Saci, who listens, a little disconcerted, to this redoubted philosopher. Or we may see him as he lived in Paris in his last years, devoted to an absolute simplicity and charity, working at a great Apology in such time as illness vouchsafed him. Thus his contemporaries may have seen him by turns as a savant, a man absorbed by the graces of the world, and a saint who lived for his religion; and Pascal, too, may have beheld himself as they did. We all, he says, project an imaginary being in front of us; we see ourselves as others see us or as we fancy we are, and our real being is something that we never think of. He conIcludes at last that the self-the ego which insists on being the centre of its world-is odious. And his emphasis shows how strong that assertive ego was in him. The whole of his life might be called one long effort to find a harmony between instinct, mind and spirit, and in doing so to find the secret of his being. In his life the solution which he found looks more like an exclusion than a harmony; yet nowhere did he express himself more completely than at the end, in the Pensées. Pascal After all, what is life but a contradiction? saw and exposed with an unmatched incisiveness the duality of human life and human nature. Man is a reed, but he is a thinking reed, and all his dignity lies in his consciousness. We show our greatness when we know our misery, which is something that a tree cannot know. Yet we are bound to seek our happiness, and by a last infirmity which is the noblest we covet glory. With a phrase or an image, like his misère d'un roi dépossédé, Pascal argues more cogently for the Fall than a host of theologians. There is a flaw and a splendour in creation which make us “feel that we are greater than we know." But Pascal, while he had a lucid sense of progress, looks back rather than forward by his creed. The fate of individuals, like free will itself, was balanced on the razor-edge of Jansenism. And if it were not proved that this doctrine, like the Calvinist, could steel the will so firmly, the thought of that minute, uncertain company of the chosen and the millions who were left to darkness might well have led only to despair. Yet he seems never to have been a sceptic, as we use the word in questions of faith. The vision of him as harassed to the end by intellectual doubts is another être imaginaire, perhaps, coming from the inverted sympathy which makes people want to see another as themselves and dramatise the likeness, and due in this case to the Romantics who rediscovered Pascal and wished to find in him their own incertitudes. His doubts were rather of his fate and his own nature, and how much of it religion might claim, than of religion. Tacitly a Christian from the first, he had that background of a customary and reasonable piety which was a second nature in his century. He was still very young when the austere Jansenist doctrine caught hold of his mind-it just matched his uncompromising nature and his logic; but it only swayed the whole of his emotions for a little. All the rest of his spiritual journey seems to be a turning of the heart, dubious for a long time, like the advancing and receding waves of a still gaining tide-for it is the way of nature, as he says, to come and go, but to creep onwards—until he reached his definite "conversion." You may say that the conviction of an intelligence like Pascal's is a great victory for faith, as it certainly was; but it is not the adherence of a doubter. For besides the love of truth he had, what is not quite the same thing, a passion for certainty. In science this may have helped rather than checked his original and exploring gift. It made him resolute to verify. Pascal's early education was very like Mill's, as it was a training of the reason carried out by his father; and since the father was determined that his child's mind should never be overweighted by knowledge, perhaps it was more rational than Mill's. Pascal was a youthful prodigy, but not so much of learning as of a free intelligence. There is a famous and apparently true story of his discovering the first thirty-two propositions of Euclid by himself; and whether he worked them out with his own figures and terms, or |