George Joseph Gustave Masson

“ Take the smallest of worms: see in its petty body a multitude of parts infinitely smaller,—the limbs with their joints, the veins in the midst of those limbs, the blood in those veins, the various humours in the blood, the globules composing the humours, the vapours in the globules. Subdividing these again, let him strain the force of his conceptions, and make the lowest particle that he can imagine the subject of investigation: he will suppose, perhaps, that he has arrived at the extreme of minuteness in nature. ”

“ We are left hesitating between the two infinitudes of greatness and of nothingness; in like manner, we feel puzzled by the conflicting claims of the world and of the body. The impressions we receive from each are constantly mis-appreciated by us, and their results misunderstood.
Besides, however, the desire for knowledge, which is one of the distinctive elements of our nature, we have also a longing after happiness,—longing never satisfied here below, and therefore furnishing an irresistible proof of our immortality. ”

“ On the other hand, had he never been otherwise than fallen, he could have had no conception at all of truth or happiness. But such is our misfortune,—and it is so much the greater on account of the original dignity of pur condition,—we have an idea of happiness, yet we are unable to realize it; we form conceptions of truth, but possess only falsehood: incapable alike of absolute ignorance or of certain knowledge, we exhibit evidence of the perfection we once possessed, in the very depth of our unhappy fall! ”

“ The essence of greatness in man, therefore, is knowledge. But knowledge is thought, and thought, however tainted by sin we may suppose it, is, after all, the constitutive element, the substratum of our greatness. Thought is often foolish, often ridiculous, but it is thought, and as such is superior to everything else. "Man is but a reed,"—the feeblest of created things,—but one possessing thought. It needs not that the universe should arm itself to crush him. ”

“ Readers alone thoroughly conversant with the history of the seventeenth century in France, and who have ascertained the amount of corruption, of wickedness, of moral disease, existing at that time in all classes of society, can feel how refreshing it is to meet with a few characters which it is possible to admire without reserve, and which we can hold up as patterns of everything that is praiseworthy, and noble, and good. Whilst we hear of such personages as Ninon de Lenclos, Marion de Lorme and Bussy-Rabutin, we find in the most opposite direction Jacqueline, Qilberte and Blaise Pascal ”

“ According to them, men were at liberty to do exactly as they pleased; every sin had its excuse, every dereliction of duty its apology; and if the noblest acts of heroism received their due mead of applause, on the other hand the grossest acts of wickedness could be explained away by a thousand various devices which left the conscience perfectly at ense. Only master the science of probabilism and you were beyond the shafts of the enemy. But what is probabilism? Here again we turn to Louis de Montalte and we have an explanation equally humourous and satisfactory. ”

“ Let man now hold himself at his true worth. Let him regard himself with complacency, as possessing a nature capable of good; with aversion, on account of the unworthiness mingled with it. Let him despise himself for the abortiveness of his powers; but moderate bis contempt in consideration of their original greatness. How can it be otherwise than that disesteem and admiration should thus alternate in him? He is capable of knowing truth and attaining to happiness ”

“ All men are seeking happiness: to this there is no exception. Different as may be the means employed, they all pursue the same end. That which urges one man to the battle-field, and leads another to remain at home in peace, is the same desire in both, acting by different tendencies. The will of man takes not a step in any direction, but for this purpose. It is the motive of every action of every man in the world,—not excepting even him whose fancy it is to hang himself. ”

“ For who will withhold his admiration, to find this body of ours, which before seemed an imperceptible speck in the midst of the universe, and that universe again imperceptible in the bosom of infinitude,—to see it now become a Colossus, a world, an infinitude itself, in the comparison of the nullity to which we have been striving in vain to discover?
"Whoever pursues such contemplations as these will tremble as he considers himself thus suspended, by the appointment of nature, between these two abysses of infinite magnitude, and of nothingness; curiosity will yield to admiration ”

“ Men may, amidst an unceasing round of excitement, succeed in stifling for a time the sense of misery which is at the bottom of every heart; but a day must come when we awake to a true sense of our position, and if we suppose that our view of things as they are lasts only for a moment, that is quite enough to refute Voltaire's assertion. ”

“ Scepticism and dogmatism cannot destroy one another; the latter is strong because it has on its side nature and a kind of internal necessity; the former triumphs through the logical weakness of its rival, but through that alone: "We labour," says Pascal, "under an impotency of furnishing conclusive proofs of things, which is invincible to dogmatism. We have an innate idea of truth, which is invincible to all Pyrrhonism." ”

“ The great boast of the infidels in every age is that they have replaced human nature in its proper position, and restored to it its true dignity; but we ask confidently whether the truth is not rather on the side of those who, like Pascal, paint in the gloomiest colours man's state since the fall, only that they may the more forcibly and with the greater earnestness disclose to us the glorious prospect of man's restoration to his pristine dignity through the merits of the Son of God. ”

“ Were man happy, his joy would increase in proportion as his amusement lessened, as is the case with the Saints, and with God. The only thing that dissipates our misery is amusement; yet this is the main source of our misery."*
Pascal next has a few remarks on what we may call objective happiness, namely, that which comes to us from without, from the circumstances amidst which we are placed. Men, he says, have not even the idea of what true happiness is, although they are constantly in quest of it; and the most accomplished philosophers give us very little information on the subject. ”

“ The heart is no dialectician, yet it is perfectly qualified to be a source of knowledge, and we do not see why sceptics should refuse to admit its conclusions.
"We acquire a knowledge of truth," says Pascal, "not only by the force of reason, but by our feelings; it is through these that we know first principles, and it is these which reason vainly attempts to combat, seeing she has, in fact, nothing to do with them. The sceptics, who make this their only object, spend their labours uselessly in it. ”

“ Doubt prevails amongst us, it is true; not as one of the normal qualities of our moral existence, but as a disease, as a plague-spot which requires a cure. It stands forth as a proof of our natural corruption, and it would suffice alone to demonstrate the truth of man's original fall. From the position he thus assumes, Pascal addresses his fellow-creatures, addresses himself, in strains of eloquence which have never been surpassed.
"Learn, then, O proud being, the paradox which you are to yourself! Humble yourself, vain reason! be silent, weak nature! Know how man infinitely surpasses man ”

“ We have our appointed position in the universe, but this is not peculiar to us; the characteristic feature in man is that he feels himself a stranger upon earth—that he is ever aspiring after some happiness which he cannot even conceive—that he is living in the past or in the future, never in the present—in fine, that hope and regret alternately make him miserable and claim him as their prey. ”

“ Pascal's book may be considered as the history of the soul's progress towards faith. He wishes to lead a man to religion; but having remarked how much our own will influences us, and how often our prejudices against religious truth arise from the circumstance that we do not know our own nature, he begins by a general consideration of ninn, compares him to the universe, and shows that whether we view the perishable or the imperishable part of his being, he is placed in the midst of infinitude. ”

“ Everything that is merely physical,—the firmament, the starry heaven, the earth and its royalties,—all is valueless compared with the lowest order of intelligence; for intelligence possesses a knowledge of all these things and of itself also: but mere physical substance knows nothing. All physical substances, all the intelligence of man, and everything which they can produce, bear no comparison with the least movement of charity; the region of charity is one infinitely above them. ”

“ Respecting the question of the Divine origin of Christianity, we should merely ascertain whether any school of philosophy has ever succeeded in explaining, with the help of reason alone, the different elements of our nature, and the motives of our actions. Voltaire indulged in many ridiculous jokes about Pascal's well-known remarks on charity. "The infinite difference," our philosopher says, " between the body and the mind is a figure of the infinitely more infinite difference between the mind and charity. ”

“ We know that here we are not deceived, however incapable we may be of establishing our positions by reason: this inability proves nothing more than the inability of reason,— not, as our opponents pretend, the uncertainty of our knowledge. Our knowledgo of first principles, such as that there is time, space, movement, numbers, is as strong as any of those revelations which we derive from reason. It is upon these attestations of feeling and instinct that reason must rest, and by them all her deductions must be supported. ”

“ We have here already a kind of refutation of Pyrrhonism; but Pascal goes farther, and he finds the sceptics guilty of begging the question. They defy human reason to prove the first principles, when, in point of fact, human reason never undertook such a task. It would be as fair to maintain that man neither suffers nor feels pleasure, because he can give no demonstrations of his pains or his enjoyments. How far back soever we may go, we shall at last discover elementary truths which are beyond the reach of argumentation, and these truths are the facts revealed to us by the heart. ”

“ Is not this, we repeat, probabilism? When the tempter came near Adam and Eve, the name of probabilism did not exist, and yet his insinuation which brought about man's first disobedience was presented in the form of a probable opinion. We do not give this an excuse for Escobar, Molina, or Father Bauny; we merely want to free them from the responsibility of having invented the doctrine of probable opinions.
There is apparent from one letter to another, in Pascal's chef d'amvre, a climax which reaches its height at the close of the work. ”

“ Thus they argue conversely, and oppose each other's views in a perpetual circle; each feeling that in proportion as men are enlightened, they see in themselves both greatness and misery. In a word, man knows that he is miserable. He is miserable in being so; but he is great in knowing it."!
We may remark, en passant, that however different from each other as to their conclusions, all true philosophers have taken as their starting- point man's original corruption and his wickedness by nature. ”

“ You describe to us the happiness enjoyed in a large city like London or Paris by those whoso life is spent without reflection, without any serious consideration of the problem of humanity. It is true that they are governed by wise laws, and that, in addition to the gifts of nature, they share in the blessings of the society to which they belong. ”

“ I have said to myself that all the misery of man springs from one source alone, which is, that he cannot endure to sit tranquilly at home, and be at rest. But when I pondered more deeply upon the matter, and after observing the more obvious causes, endeavoured to discover the deeper reasons of these disquietudes among men, I found one paramount over all—namely, the evil inseparable from our natural and mortal condition ”

“ He will see delineated, not only the visible universe, but all that he can conceive of the immensity of nature, in the compass of this concentration of an atom. There will be found in it an infinity of systems, each with its firmament, its planets, its earth, all bearing the same proportion to each other as in the visible world: in this earth, the infiuite variety of animal existence ”

“ As early as the year 1646, Pascal, as well as his sister Jacqueline, had felt deep religious impressions. He had become a christian man, and, to use M. Carlyle's forcible language, he " believed in God, not on Sundays only, but on all days, in all places, and in all cases." These impressions, nevertheless, had gradually worn off, when a memorable escape from death in 1654, entirely separated him from the world; and be sought at length for solitude at Port Royal, already endeared to him by the residence there of his sister Jacqueline. ”

“ We have here the key to that scepticism which has so often, ever since the publication of the "Pensees," been brought forward either as a reproach or as an encomium in the consideration of Pascal's character. Montaigne's essays, we know, were the favourite book of the author of the Provincial letters, and, to use the happy expression of a German commentator, Pascal climbed upon the shoulders of the Gascon gentilhomme, in order to reach the hand of faith. Both wished to pull down dogmatism; both would prove to man that he cannot find in his own unaided intellect the true criterion of certitude. ”