ellectual limitations of all men.
This compensation was ample enough to restore the human self-respect
that Pascal and Rochefoucauld had done their best to weaken.

The truth in that disparagement was indisputable so far as it went. It
was not a kind of truth, however, on which it is good for the world much
to dwell, and it is the thinkers like Vauvenargues who build up and
inspire high resolve. 'Scarcely any maxim,' runs one of his own, 'is
true in all respects.'[37] We must take them in pairs to find out the
mean truth; and to understand the ways of men, so far as words about men
can help us, we must read with appreciation not only Vauvenargues, who
said that great thoughts come from the heart, but La Rochefoucauld, who
called the intelligence the dupe of the heart, and Pascal, who saw only
desperate creatures, miserably perishing before one another's eyes in
the grim dungeon of the universe. Yet it is the observer in the spirit
of Vauvenargues, of whom we must always say that he has chosen the
better part. Vauvenargues' own estimate was sound. 'The Duke of La
Rochefoucauld seized to perfection the weak side of human nature; maybe
he knew its strength too; and only contested the merit of so many
splendid actions in order to unmask false wisdom. Whatever his design,
the effect seems to me mischievous; his book, filled with delicate
invective against hypocrisy, even to this day turns men away from
virtue, by persuading them that it is never genuine.'[38] Or, as he put
it elsewhere, without express personal reference: 'You must arouse in
men the feeling of their prudence and strength, if you would raise their
character; those who only apply themselves to bring out the absurdities
and weaknesses of mankind, enlighten the judgment of the public far less
than they deprave its inclination.'[39] This principle was implied in
Goethe's excellent saying, that if you would improve a man, it is best
to begin by persuading him that he is already that which you would have
him to be.

To talk in this way was to bring men out from the pits which cynicism on
the one side, and asceticism on the other, had dug so deep for them,
back to the warm precincts of the cheerful day. The cynic and the
ascetic had each looked at life through a microscope, exaggerating
blemishes, distorting proportions, filling the eye with ugly and
disgusting illusions.[40] Humanity, as was said, was in disgrace with
the thinkers. The maxims of Vauvenargues were