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 reason of attaining to a knowledge of the Deity is the height of absurdity, As Sir W. Hamilton did long afterwards, he quotes the Athenian inscription, 'To the Unknown God,' as the last word of religious philosophy. He will confute the unbeliever, he says, by trampling human pride under his feet; by making men feel their inanity and the feebleness of their reason, bow their heads and bite the earth under the authority of Divine Majesty. And of this method Pascal in the conversation expresses his cordial approval. He loves to see Montaigne humiliate the pride of reason by its own arms, and lower man's nature to the level of the beasts. Montaigne, indeed, had erred because he had stopped at this point: he had exposed the misery but not the greatness of man. How, indeed, could Montaigne go further? He is emphatically the man of this world. He has to deal with human passions as he finds them. He watches the drama as impartially as Shakespeare. He quietly puts aside conversion as impossible. He does not, as he puts it, hold with the Pythagoreans that men assume a new soul when they visit the realm of the gods. He is far more at home with Plutarch, or with his favourite Lucretius, than with Christian dogmas and traditions; and