bt, and which makes constant
progress,[1] but which does not satisfy, since it reveals nothing of the
infinite, of the whole, without which the parts remain unintelligible.
Hence all natural philosophy together is not worth an hour's toil. Pascal
consoles himself for our ignorance concerning external things by the
stability of ethics.

[Footnote 1: It is this uninterrupted progress which raises the reason
above the operations of nature and the instincts of animals. While the bees
build their cells to-day just as they did a thousand years ago, science is
continually developing. This guarantees to us our immortal destiny.]

The leading principles of his ethics are as follows: In sin the love to God
created in us has left us and self-love has transgressed its limits; pride
has delivered us over to selfishness and misery. Our nature is corrupted,
but not beyond redemption. In his actions worthless and depraved, man is
seen to be exalted and incomprehensible in his ends; in reality he is
worthy of abhorrence, but great in his destination. No philosophy or
religion has so taught us at once to know the greatness and the misery of
man as Christianity: this bids him recognize his low condition, but at the
same time to endeavor to become like God. We must humbly despise the world
and renounce ourselves; in order to love God, we must hate ourselves. Moral
reformation is an act of divine grace, and the merit of human volition
consists only in not resisting this. God transforms the heart by a heavenly
sweetness, grants it to know that spiritual pleasure is greater than bodily
pleasure, and infuses into it a disgust at the allurements of sin. Virtue
is finding one's greatest happiness in God or in the eternal good. As
morality is a matter of feeling, not of thought, so God, so even the first
principles on which the certitude of demonstration depends, are the object,
not of reason, but of the heart. That which certifies to the highest
indemonstrable principles is a feeling, a belief, an instinct of nature:
_les principes se sentent_. As a defender of the needs and rights of the
heart, Pascal is a forerunner of the great Rousseau. His depreciation of
the reason to exalt faith establishes a certain relationship with the
skeptics of his native land, among whom Cousin has unjustly classed him
(_Etudes sur Pascal_, 5th ed., 1857).[1]

[Footnote 1: Of the works on Pascal we may mention that of H. Reuchlin,
1840: Havet's edition of the _Pen