solitary "personality,"
absorbed in amused analysis of himself, is deceptive. Montaigne's is no
_limited_ Pyrrhonism, like that of Voltaire, Renan, or France. He
exists, so to speak, on a plan of numerous concentric circles, the most
apparent of which is the small inmost circle, a personal puckish
scepticism which can be easily aped if not imitated. But what makes
Montaigne a very great figure is that he succeeded, God knows how--for
Montaigne very likely did not know that he had done it--it is not the
sort of thing that men _can_ observe about themselves, for it is
essentially bigger than the individual's consciousness--he succeeded in
giving expression to the scepticism of _every_ human being. For every
man who thinks and lives by thought must have his own scepticism, that
which stops at the question, that which ends in denial, or that which
leads to faith and which is somehow integrated into the faith which
transcends it. And Pascal, as the type of one kind of religious
believer, which is highly passionate and ardent, but passionate only
through a powerful and regulated intellect, is in the first sections of
his unfinished Apology for Christianity facing unflinchingly the demon
of doubt which is inseparable from the spirit of belief.

There is accordingly something quite different from an influence which
would prove Pascal's weakness; there is a real affinity between his
doubt and that of Montaigne; and through the common kinship with
Montaigne Pascal is related to the noble and distinguished line of
French moralists, from La Rochefoucauld down. In the honesty with which
they face the _donnees_ of the actual world this French tradition has a
unique quality in European literature, and in the seventeenth century
Hobbes is crude and uncivilised in comparison.

Pascal is a man of the world among ascetics, and an ascetic among men of
the world; he had the knowledge of worldliness and the passion of
asceticism, and in him the two are fused into an individual whole. The
majority of mankind is lazy-minded, incurious, absorbed in vanities, and
tepid in emotion, and is therefore incapable of either much doubt or
much faith; and when the ordinary man calls himself a sceptic or an
unbeliever, that is ordinarily a simple pose, cloaking a disinclination
to think anything out to a conclusion. Pascal's disillusioned analysis
of human bondage is sometimes interpreted to mean that Pascal was really
and finally an unbeliever, who, in