ES.

One of the most important phases of French thought in the great century
of its illumination is only thoroughly intelligible, on condition that
in studying it we keep constantly in mind the eloquence, force, and
genius of Pascal. He was the greatest and most influential
representative of that way of viewing human nature and its
circumstances, which it was one of the characteristic glories of the
eighteenth century to have rebelled against and rejected. More than a
hundred years after the publication of the _Pensees_, Condorcet thought
it worth while to prepare a new edition of them, with annotations,
protesting, not without a certain unwonted deference of tone, against
Pascal's doctrine of the base and desperate estate of man. Voltaire also
had them reprinted with notes of his own, written in the same spirit of
vivacious deprecation, which we may be sure would have been even more
vivacious, if Voltaire had not remembered that he was speaking of the
mightiest of all the enemies of the Jesuits. Apart from formal and
specific dissents like these, all the writers who had drunk most deeply
of the spirit of the eighteenth century, lived in a constant ferment of
revolt against the clear-witted and vigorous thinker of the century
before, who had clothed mere theological mysteries with the force and
importance of strongly entrenched propositions in a consistent
philosophy.

The resplendent fervour of Bossuet's declamations upon the nothingness
of kings, the pitifulness of mortal aims, the crushing ever-ready grip
of the hand of God upon the purpose and faculty of man, rather filled
the mind with exaltation than really depressed or humiliated it. From
Bossuet to Pascal is to pass from the solemn splendour of the church to
the chill of the crypt. Besides, Bossuet's attitude was professional, in
the first place, and it was purely theological, in the second; so the
main stream of thought flowed away and aside from him. To Pascal it was
felt necessary that there should be reply and vindication, whether in
the shape of deliberate and published formulas, or in the reasoned
convictions of the individual intelligence working privately. A syllabus
of the radical articles of the French creed of the eighteenth century
would consist largely of the contradictions of the main propositions of
Pascal. The old theological idea of the fall was hard to endure, but the
idea of the fall was clenched by such general laws of human nature as
thi