Page:The Harvard Classics Vol. 51; Lectures.djvu/475

Rh sometimes given such varying designations as "skeptic," "mystic," or "fideist"; that, moreover, his religious feeling is called by some the expression of diseased hallucinations, by others visions of a seer into the other world.

The underlying idea of the fragmentary "Thoughts" is the despair of man, his weakness and powerlessness. But there remains something in man’s own nature which protests against this despair. We have certainty that all is not as bad as it seems. Let us accept the truths of the Christian religion and we have then have the consolation that our suffering is not without cause, that we are expiating the original and primitive sin of mankind. This will at least make us understand our condition. Thus we shall, in a way, be proving Christianity and even God himself, beginning with man.

The fragmentary state of the "Thoughts" makes it impossible, however, for the reader to work out the stages of this argument. He will find it more profitable to take them as they stand, and he will then be fully satisfied by words of imagination and of true poetry. The language is permeated with lyrical inspiration: the poet is a thinker who sees the abysses of immensity, spatial and temporal, the infinitely vast and the infinitely small. He brings back from the contemplation of them a feeling of terror and yet of self-confidence. For though man be a prey to brutal outer nature, though he may be but a frail reed beaten before the blast, yet he feels that one thing lifts him above it all, the consciousness that he is a thinking reed. The work is full of the vagueness of love for the divine; consequently, in spite of Pascal's mathematical brain, it is no geometrical proof for the persuasion of reason, but rather a way to take hold of the feeling. Pascal is the intuitionalist of French classicism as Descartes, his philosophical rival, is its great rationalist.

The influence of Pascal upon French thought has been tremendous. In his own day he helped to free French prose and its content from the stilted rhetoric of certain self-conscious Latinists like Guez de Balzac. He helped some of the men of letters of his age to acquire a new gentleness of feeling without the sacrifice of stoical self-control. He familiarized writers who were taken up by considerations of a