, and his works are not to be
classified amongst mystical writings; but what can only be called
mystical experience happens to many men who do not become mystics. The
work which he undertook soon after, the _Lettres ecrites a un
provincial_, is a masterpiece of religious controversy at the opposite
pole from mysticism. We know quite well that he was at the time when he
received his illumination from God in extremely poor health; but it is a
commonplace that some forms of illness are extremely favourable, not
only to religious illumination, but to artistic and literary
composition. A piece of writing meditated, apparently without progress,
for months or years, may suddenly take shape and word; and in this state
long passages may be produced which require little or no retouch. I have
no good word to say for the cultivation of automatic writing as the
model of literary composition; I doubt whether these moments _can_ be
cultivated by the writer; but he to whom this happens assuredly has the
sensation of being a vehicle rather than a maker. No masterpiece can be
produced whole by such means; but neither does even the higher form of
religious inspiration suffice for the religious life; even the most
exalted mystic must return to the world, and use his reason to employ
the results of his experience in daily life. You may call it communion
with the Divine, or you may call it a temporary crystallisation of the
mind. Until science can teach us to reproduce such phenomena at will,
science cannot claim to have explained them; and they can be judged only
by their fruits.

From that time until his death, Pascal was closely associated with the
society of Port-Royal which his sister Jacqueline, who predeceased him,
had joined as a _religieuse_; the society was then fighting for its life
against the Jesuits. Five propositions, judged by a committee of
cardinals and theologians at Rome to be heretical, were found to be put
forward in the work of Jansenius; and the society of Port-Royal, the
representative of Jansenism among devotional communities, suffered a
blow from which it never revived. It is not the place here to review the
bitter controversy and conflict; the best account, from the point of
view of a critic of genius who took no side, who was neither Jansenist
nor Jesuit, Christian nor infidel, is that in the great book of
Sainte-Beuve, _Port-Royal_. And in this book the parts devoted to Pascal
himself are among the most brillian