Page:Studies of a Biographer 2.djvu/288

 logical proofs. He has, indeed, sufficiently broken with all mathematical demonstration. Epictetus, as he remarks, falls into the opposite error to Montaigne, for Epictetus imagined that we could rise by reason to a knowledge of God. Pascal had to some degree accepted Descartes's metaphysics in scientific matters. But, as he told his sister, he could not forgive Descartes as a philosopher. Descartes had tried to do without God as far as he could, and was only forced to retain a God in order to give a fillip to set the machinery of the world in motion. Grave metaphysicians have been scandalised at this criticism, and pointed out that Descartes actually invented or refurbished an argument to demonstrate the existence of God. Pascal, of course, did not explicitly deny its force. He only said that such languid arguments did not move men's hearts. It would, I fancy, be truer to say that, if conclusive, they prove the existence of a Being radically different from Pascal's. They go to prove the existence of a first cause and of the unity of the universe, and of a Being identical with the universe; but if anything they disprove the angry Deity, hating sin and punishing sinners, into whose hands Pascal feared to fall. His answer is therefore different. We are, said Pascal,