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This Book is supplied by MESSRS. SMITH, ELDER & Co. to Booksellers on terms which will not admit of their allowing a discount from the advertised price.

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WITH A PORTRAIT

ON SMITH, EL LOO P

PASCAL

BY

VISCOUNT ST. CYEES

FORMERLY SENIOR STUDENT OP CHRIST CHURCH AUTHOR OP ' FRANCOIS DE FiN

WITH A PORTRAIT

LONDON

SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE, S.W.

1909

[All rights reserved]

PREFACE

A FEW years ago I had the good fortune to be introduced to a lady, who told me she heard that I was very clever, and wrote books. I pleaded guilty to the second half of her indictment. She asked what kind of books I wrote. I answered that I was thinking of writing something on Pascal. She inquired what that was. I explained that it was a man. She asked if he was alive now. I told her that he was an eminent Frenchman, who had been dead about two hundred and fifty years. A look of sudden interest came into her face, and she begged me to tell her how on earth I ever came to hear of him. This book is an attempt to answer her question. I have tried to bring together all such facts in Pascal's life as are likely to be of interest to an English reader. I have, indeed, skated lightly over his geometrical performances, for reasons of which my own mathematical incompetence is only one ; and I have cut as short as possible the technical detail of his quarrels with the Church of Eome. On the other hand, I have described at some length the more dramatic sides of his scientific career ; and I have given a good deal of space to the so-called 'worldly period/ when he consorted with

vi PEEFACE

pr6cieuses and free-thinkers in the drawing-rooms of Paris. Neither the ' Great Experiment of the Puy-de-D6me ' nor the friendship with the Chevalier de Mere were mere episodes in his career ; the ' Provincial Letters ' and the ' Pensees ' could only have been written by a scientific man who had also had considerable experience of the world of fashion. Lastly, I have done my best to profit by the wisdom of Professors William James and Leuba, and to deal with Pascal's conversion and its consequences as a ' variety of religious experience.' Some small portion of my debt to earlier writers I have endeavoured to discharge by giving a classified list of the books I have found most useful ; and I have added a short chronological table of the chief events of Pascal's life, viewed in relation to the general history of his time.

ST. CYKES.

October 1909.

CONTENTS

PREFACE .

COMPARATIVE TABLE . . . . .. ' . .

I. EABLY LIFE

II. ROTTEN .

III. THE DEAD HAND . . . . .

IV. UNIVERSAL MECHANISM . . .

V. PRESIDENT Dr VAIR

VI. THE FIRST CONVERSION

VII. THE GREAT EXPERIMENT OF THE PUY-DE-DOME

VIII. A BACKSLIDER

IX. THE CHEVALIER DE MERE . . .

X. THE HEIRS OF MONTAIGNE . • t

XL THE SECOND CONVERSION . . ...

XII. PORT ROYAL . . . „ . v .

XIH. THE CONVERT . . . . .

XIV. THE NEW LIFE . . . . .

XV. THE BEGINNINGS OF THE STORM

XVI. ESCOBAR .

XVII. THE PROVINCIAL LETTERS : I. — THE SORBONNE

XVIII. THE PROVINCIAL LETTERS : II. — THE CASUISTS

XIX. CHARLOTTE DE ROANNEZ

XX. THE FORMULARY AND THE CYCLOID .

XXI. THE APOLOGY FOR CHRISTIANITY

XXII. AFTER THE APOLOGY . . .

XXIII. THE END

BIBLIOGRAPHY .......

INDEX

PAGE V

viii 1

13 32 48 68 80 100 123 136 159 181 198 215 230 245 265 285 299 322 339 359 390 407 431 439

COMPARATIVE TABLE OF THE CHIEF EVENTS IN PASCAL'S LIFE, VIEWED IN RELATION TO THE GENERAL HISTORY OF FRANCE

PASCAL'S LIFE	POLITICAL HISTOEY	CHURCH HISTORY	SCIENCE	LITERATURE
_ 1623-1631. Pascal	1618-1648. The Thirty Years'	Age of St. Vin- cent de Paul. He	1626. Francis Bacon dies, iluy-	1621, La Fon taine born ; 1622
at Clermont.	War. 1624, Riche- lieu becomes	founds the Lazar- ists (1624). the	gens born (1629).	Molidre born. Be- ginnings of Cor
	Prime Minister to	Sisters of Charity		neille.
	Louis XIII. He	(1634).
	crushes the Hu-	1627. Bossuet
	guenots at La	born.
	Rochelle (1628).
	Abroad he con-
	sistently supports
	all enemies of the
	House of Haps-
	burg, whether in
	the Empire or
	Spain.
1631-1640. The	1638. Richelieu's	1636. Saint Cy-	1633. The In-	1632, Spinoza
Pascals settled in Paris. In 1638 Stephen is forced to fly to Cler- mont, but Jacqueline acts before Richelieu, and obtains her father's pardon. Mean- while her brother is at work on Conic Sections.	foreign policy in- volves a heavy drain on the finan- cial resources of France. Many complaints against the taxes ; revolt of the Va- nui-piedi in Nor- mandy. Richelieu	ran becomes chief confessor of Port Royal. 1638. Death of Jansen. Saint Cyran imprisoned as a religious in- novator.	quisition con- demns Galileo. 1637. Descartes writes the Dis- course on Method. Rise of Fermat and Roberval.	born; 1636, Boileau born; 1638, Male- branche born ; 1639, Racine born. 1636, Corneille's 'Cid'; 1640, 'Ho- race,' ' Cinna.'
	makes an example
	of Rouen.
1640-1647. The	1642. Richelieu	1643. Release	1642, Galileo	1644, Mrae. de
Pascals at Rouen. Pascal sets to work on his Arithmetical Machine, and dedicates it to the Lord Chancel- lor (1645). In 1646	dies. He is fol- lowed by Mazarin. 1643, Louis XIII dies. Anne of Austria becomes Regent for Louis	and death of Saint Cyran. An- toine Arnauld writes on Fre- quent Com- munion.	dies ; 1643, Isaac Newton born ; 1646, Leibniz born; rise of Torricelli, who dies young in 1647. Mersenne	S<5vign« starts writing letters ; 1646, Moliere forms a touring company. La Bruyere born.
Stephen dislocates his thigh ; La Boutellerie and Des Landes con- vert the whole family to Jansenism. In the	XIV, a child of five. Mazarin con- tinues the anti- Hapsburg policy of Richelieu. Rise		dies (1648).
autumn Pierre Petit arrives with news of	of Corult? and Turenne ; battles
the vacuum. In the spring of 1647 Pascal	of Rocroi (1643) and Nordlingen
denounces Saint Ange ; in the summer his	(1645). Peace of Westphalia (1648).
health breaks down,
and he is ordered to
Paris.
1647-1649. Pascal in Paris. He meets Descartes, and does battle with Father Noel. In November he commissions Pe'rier to make the Great Ex- periment. This is car- ried out in September 1648. Meanwhile Stephen has resigned his position at Rouen, and joined his children in Paris. He refuses	1648-1653. The Fronde. Princes, Judges, and Paris mob unite to de- mand the aban- donment of Riche- lieu's centralised system of govern- ment. Mazarin bows to the storm ; the Princes then demand the ban- ishment of Maza- rin himself. He
to let Jacqueline be- come a nun at Port TYnvol	country, and was twice recalled, the
ivoyai*	second time in
	triumph (1653).

viii

COMPARATIVE TABLE— continued.

PASCAL'S Lira	POLITICAL HISTORY	CKCRCH HISTORY SCDSHCE	LITERATURE
1649-1650. Pascal		1649. The Sor-
goes with bis family to Clermont.		bonne condemns five propositions from the Augus-
		tinus.
1650. Pascal		1650. Descartes	1651. Fenelon
comes back to Paris. He makes acquaintance with Roannez, and goes out		dies. Age of Gue- ricke. Huygens. and Robert Boyle.	born; 1652, Bos- suet begins preach'ing at Metz.
into society, but works
intermittently at the
equilibrium of liquids.
In 1651 Stephen dies;
early in 1652 Jacqueline
enters Port Eoyal.
1652-1654. Pas- cal's worldly period. He makes		1653. Innocent X confirms the cen- sure on Jansen.
acquaintance with
Mere and Miton. raises
difficulties about Jac-
queline's ' dowry.' and
writes on the Passion
of Love. Latterly.
however, he busies
himself much with
mathematical proba-
bility and the theory
of numbers.
1654-1656. The	1654-1659. Maza-	1655. Amauld
Second Conver- sion. Pascal re- nounces science, and spends much of his time at Port Eoyal.	rin carries on the war against Spain. Tur»nne campaigns in the Low Countries. Peace of the Pyre-	impeached before the Sorbonne. 1656. Amauld condemned by the Sorbonne : Alex- ander VII con-
	nees (1659).	firms the con-
		demnation of Jan-
		sen. The Rectors
		of Paris denounce
		the Casuists.	^
1656-1657- The		1657. Pirot pub-
Provincial Letters. Just after the Fifth		lishes his ' Apology tor the Casuists.'
Letter comes the
miracle of the Holy
Thorn ; in the autumn
Pascal corresponds
with Charlotte de
Roannez. In 1657 he
writes the last two
Letter?, and the Letter
of a Barrister on the
Inquisition.
1658-1659. A short return to science.		1658. Pirot gene- rally reprobated.
After denouncing
Pirot's ' Apology for
the Casuists,' Pascal
starts the competition
on the Cycloid.
1659-1662. ' The Apology for Christ- ianity.' Final break- down of his health. Death of Jacqueline (1661) ; his own death (1662).	1660. Louis XIV marries Maria Teresa of Spain ; Mazarin dies (1661). leaving Louis t o be his own prime minister.	1660. Louis XIV urges the As- sembly of the Clergy to take strong measures for the extermina- tion of Jansenism. The Formulary is	1659. Moliere's •Precieuse* Ridi- cules'; L» Roche- foucauld at work on his 'Maxims.' and Boileau on his 'Satires.' Bossuet begins preaching
		imposed on the	in Paris.
		nuns of Port Royal
		(1661).

PASCAL

CHAPTER I

EARLY LIFE

BLAISE PASCAL was born on June 17, 1623, at Clermont Ferrand in Auvergne. Like so many of his great con- temporaries— Descartes, Corneille, Bossuet, Malebranche, Racine — he sprang from the well-to-do professional class ; for generations one Pascal after another had audited the accounts of his province, or laid down the law from the Clermont Bench. His father, Stephen Pascal, chose the latter walk in life ; he was vice-president of the Clermont Cour des Comptes, or Court of Exchequer. But Stephen was not the man to let his energies be bounded by the four walls of his court-house. He was a considerable mathe- matician and a character singularly upright, worthy in every way to be the father of his son. Of his wife, Antoinette Begon, little is known beyond a family tradition that she was very pious and clever, and anything but superstitious. She died when her only son was three years old, also leaving behind her two little daughters, Gilberte, born in 1620, and Jacqueline, born in 1625.

From his mother Blaise inherited a feeble constitution. Most of his short life was passed in the clutches of a wasting disease, to which contemporaries could give no name, though it would nowadays be diagnosed as neurasthenia.

2 PASCAL

A little memoir of his life, written by his sister Gilberte, abounds in distressing details showing how much her brother's illness kept him apart from other men. Even in his infancy it gave rise to an incident that assuredly left its mark on so great an enthusiast for the supernatural. When about twelve months old, he sank into a mysterious decline beyond the skill of Clermont doctors to cure. Popular imagination — excited by the same epidemic of belief in witchcraft that had just swept through the England of James I — promptly set him down as ' overlooked,' and fixed on an old pensioner of his mother as the culprit. At first his parents laughed at the story ; but, as the child went from bad to worse, they became readier to catch at straws. Eventually Stephen summoned the old woman before him, and put her through a searching cross-examination. She ended by admitting that she had cast a spell on the child, adding that the charm could only be broken, if life were given for life. Stephen, now thoroughly unmanned, asked what kind of life was necessary. The witch answered that a cat would do. A cat was accordingly procured, and thrown out of the window. The witch then made a plaster of herbs, and laid it on the child. He sank immediately into a trance, from which he awoke at midnight perfectly recovered.

French critics cannot forgive the judge his share in this strange business. We Englishmen can be more merciful, remembering Sir Matthew Hale. Anyhow, Stephen made amends by giving up his life to his offspring. On his wife's death he sold his judgeship, and took his children to Paris ; for this widower of forty meant to bring them up on a system of his own, and would not risk the interference of grand- mothers and aunts at Clermont. The exact date of his departure was fixed by an engagement curiously prophetic. Stephen was to join a deputation from Clermont in petition- ing the Crown not to allow a Jesuit school to be opened in

that loyal city. For the Jesuits had made themselves obnoxious to good Frenchmen by ostentatiously maintain- ing the thesis that kings might be deposed by the Pope, which was only a theological way of saying that the interests of Rome ought to take precedence, whenever they clashed with the interests of France.

The end of 1631 found the whole party settled in Paris, and Stephen free to take the whole education of his son into his own hands. Whether he did wisely has often been doubted. Certainly experience at large is against educa- tion by a father ; what between the rival attractions of parental indulgence and parental ambition, it is felt that the natural equilibrium of things has small chance of coming into play. Montaigne's vague, shiftless upbringing is a witness to one side of the danger, as the familiar case of John Stuart Mill most glaringly exemplifies the other. Blaise was more fortunate than either of these. For in- dolence there was no place in the stirring neighbourhood of his father ; while again, that father was much too human to think that starving every natural affection was the best way of forcing on the intellect. Where James Mill only saw a mind, Stephen saw a son of flesh and blood. He was in no danger of pushing on too fast. His first thought was to save his delicate boy all he had suffered in his own youth from stupid and unreasonable masters — Pharaohs who expected many bricks, and dealt out but little straw. Per- haps he forgot that even the worst schools have their com- pensations, in that nothing can take the place of an education of the young by the young themselves. Blaise suffered all his life from various failings that beset the home-bred boy — a certain thin-skinned nervous petulance, a want of self- reliance and self-control. There is more than a grain of truth in Moritz Cantor's saying that Gilberte was the only one of Stephen's three children who really deserved to be called a man. But Stephen's contemporaries gave small

4 PASCAL

thought to the moral training of their children. Another sixty years must go by before Fenelon will point out that games have an important place in Christian education. And even Fenelon was thinking only of the physical effects of exercise, not of winning battles of Waterloo on the playing- fields of Eton.

Nor is it easy to discipline a mind already in the grip of neurasthenia. Blaise gave early proof of possessing what his sister Jacqueline calls an Jiumeur bouillante — the nervous impulsiveness that wih1 soon fling him headlong into science, and then carry him away from science to the world of salons and society, and from the salons to religion. Slow and steady progress seemed to Stephen the one means of bringing balance into such a mind. As Gilberte says in her memoir, he made it a rule to keep the boy's powers ahead of his work. Latin, for instance, was not begun tiU Blaise was twelve years old. The intervening time was spent in giving him some general notions of the art of learning. He was taught to pick out for himself what was important in a lesson, and shown enough of the uses of grammar to see in it a friend ; for his father made clear that the grim paradigms and syntax, which look so alarming at first sight, really bring order into a chaos, which would be far more alarming without them. And when the time for Latin eventually arrived, Stephen put the Propria quae maribus and kindred horrors aside, in favour of more sensible rules drawn up on a system of his own.

Really, however, the classics played but a small part in his system, though Blaise mastered Latin enough to read the Vulgate or a scientific treatise with ease. Greek he only carried so far as enabled him to moralise over the not very recondite point that neuter plurals in that language take the verb in the singular, when they are the subject of a sentence. His father was far too good a mathematician to have great faith in books. He thought them much too apt

EAELY LIFE 5

to suggest that knowledge is a thing of times and seasons localised in a study ; whereas he wished his boy to see that it is always capable of being acquired wherever reasoning and observation can be set to work. Accordingly he made his lessons as varied and unconventional as possible, and submitted to an endless catechism on the how and why of everything. He was not afraid of inquisitiveness, as a schoolmaster must be, when surrounded by a mob of merci- less young critics, any of whom would be glad to annoy him by putting questions that he cannot answer. Stephen's fatherly pride could afford to rejoice, if the budding reasoner now and then managed to drive him into a corner. Beady objections were a sign that Blaise had begun to think for himself, and was not going to turn his back on difficulties, or rest content with half an answer.

But the boy's best teacher was himself. Very soon he began to notice the little everyday oddities of Nature, and puzzle over their explanation. Thus Gilberte records that he was struck one day at dinner by the fact that a plate rings when rapped with a knife, but leaves off ringing at a touch. This led him to make other experiments with sounds, and even to write a little essay on the subject, which was thought excellent by good judges. Whatever the intrinsic merit of these youthful researches, of their moral value there can be no doubt. At an age when most boys are still gulping down masses of undigested statements on trust, Blaise felt himself a serious and responsible student bound in conscience to account for every step in his proofs. At an age when most boys think it no shame to run to a master or a text-book for absolution from their doubts, this future assailant of the Jesuits had learnt that certainty is one of the few things no man can give another ; inasmuch as true and certain knowledge can only be won by each inquirer for himself. And not till he has faced and overcome many difficulties alone does such inquirer begin to see what true and certain

6 PASCAL

knowledge is. ' The reasons that really convince a man,' Blaise afterwards wrote in the ' Pensees,' ' are those he has found out for himself.'

Hence the veracity, of which his sister speaks as his leading characteristic. ' Always and everywhere,' she says, ' truth was the one object of his life, and nothing would satisfy him but its possession. He had an extraordinary talent in detecting fallacies ; whenever bad reasons were given him for anything, he would set about discovering better reasons of his own, for he could not bear to leave a subject until he understood it through and through.' Such a mind turns naturally to mathematics, as the one branch of knowledge whose certainty is all that the most scrupulous can ask ; and before he was twelve Blaise had set his heart on learning geometry, the side of mathematics then chiefly in view. But here his father interposed. Stephen knew too well the charm of his own favourite science to expose his boy to its fascinations until he had done with Latin and Greek ; Euclid and Archimedes were put off till Blaise should be fifteen. And when the boy persisted in his questions, Stephen only locked up his books, and refused to hear another word on the subject. All he would say was that geometry was the art of making figures perfectly exact, and measuring their proportions. With this scanty equipment — eked out, no doubt, by a surreptitious peep at a text-book, or a few hints from one of his father's friends — the reasoner of twelve set out to build up a geometrical system of his own. Great was Stephen's surprise, on paying an unexpected visit to the play-room, to find his son busy with a lump of chalk drawing diagrams on the wall. He asked him what he was about. Blaise answered that he was trying to prove that the three angles of a triangle are together equal to two right angles. Stephen, still more amazed, put him through a catechism. He soon found that — if it is too much to say, with Gilberte, that her brother

EAKLY LIFE 7

had ' reinvented mathematics afresh ' — he could, at any rate, satisfactorily account for every step in his proofs. Thereupon the father felt it was useless to fight against Nature any longer. He unlocked his cupboard, and pro- duced a Euclid, which Blaise soon mastered in his play-time.

Startling as this performance may seem, it is by no means unexampled. Much the same story is told of Galileo, though on very shadowy authority ; but the eighteenth- century mathematician, Clairault, was certainly no older than Blaise, when he sent his first contribution to the Academy of Science. Mathematics, like music, take little account of age ; and in Pascal's youth mathematics were in the air as they have never been before or since. More especially were they in favour with grave lawyers of the type of Stephen Pascal. For the rough amusements of the nobles they had neither taste nor means. In the salons of fine ladies they could not be received, except upon the dubious footing of professional wits ; and that their dignity forbade. On the other hand, they could engage in geome- trical research as much as they pleased, without being suspected of frivolity or neglect of their professional duties. Amongst themselves, however, these lawyers threw dignity to the winds. Nothing can be less formal than the tone of Judge Fermat's letters, yet Fermat was one of the greatest mathematicians his country has ever produced. And in Stephen's own immediate circle a sufficient guarantee against exuberance of ponderosity was furnished by the presence of Le Pailleur, a practical jester whose best exploits almost foreshadow Theodore Hook. Indeed, the famous picture in the ' Pensees,' of Plato and Aristotle casting off their pedagogic robes, and talking and laughing at their ease, may well have been inspired by some childish re- miniscence of Stephen among his friends.

Certainly the father was genial enough at home. Every day, during and after dinner, he used to discuss with his

8 PASCAL

son what Gilberte calls ' philosophy ' — no doubt, the kind of general questions nowadays engrossed by a debating-club. This discipline was all the more needful, since Blaise was changeable and impulsive in no ordinary degree, as well as given to clothing his ideas in startling, paradoxical language. But here it behoved him to be careful, for his father was no tender critic of too ambitious metaphors or epigrams merely smart. He early impressed upon his son that to say clever things just because they were clever was to follow the practice of the bad architects, who think that blind windows improve a house. And when the young reasoner grew too self-assertive, Stephen handed him over to his daughters ; for Gilberte, the typical elder sister, was strong in common sense, and Jacqueline had a lively gift of wit — two qualities that make the most dogmatic brother think twice before he speaks. Their lettres de raillerie of later years were only the continuation of a schoolroom dialectic, wherein Blaise was not always master.

Both sisters played a large part in his life. Gilberte even shared some of his lessons — ' history, philosophy, mathe- matics,' says her daughter, obviously speaking rather at random. But her energies ran chiefly in more domestic channels — first as mistress of her father's household, after- wards as her brother's sick-nurse and general protectress, finally as his first biographer. Jacqueline was a more original character. While still in the nursery, she was writing verses — verses at least of average merit. At ten years old she produced a play ; it was ' a comedy in five acts, each divided into scenes, and with all the rules properly observed.' A few years later she was exchanging valentines with Mile, de Scudery, the great leader of the prfoieuses ; indeed, she herself was near becoming a prtcieuse in short frocks. Her verses abound with cruel nymphs and sighing swains ; and she bids the traitor, Love, adieu with all the energy to be expected from a poetess of fifteen. But these

9

affectations could not long survive in a clever and critical home like hers, whose various members by no means stood on formal terms with one another. Certainly Blaise was never backward in ridiculing Scudery's whole movement, with its tyrannical conventions and mincing elegance of language. Still, there was more in pr6ciosit6 than its con- ceits. It represented the first faint stirring of the revolt of woman ; Scudery was the lineal ancestress of Mary Woll- stonecraft. The great reproach contemporaries brought against her was that she made her followers too intellectual and too independent ; as disapproving Fenelon said, they did not ' shrink from learning as from vice,' but had an opinion on every subject, and joined in every dispute. Even their artificialities were a round-about plea for deference and refinement — a reminder to the dominant sex that the language of the tavern or the guard-room was inadmissible in the salons.

Jacqueline absorbed both the refinement and the independence. Like her brother, she cared exceedingly little for the small conventions of society ; it is characteristic that on her first entry at Port Royal she scandalised the nuns by sitting with one knee crossed over the other. Like her brother, she was fastidious, not only in the matter of language. Blaise, as his elder sister records, was ridden by a craving to find perfection everywhere. He must always have the best that money could buy, whether it was the best workmen to carry out his inventions, or the best sauces to his dinner. His books and papers were arranged with truly mathematical neatness ; there must be a place for everything, and everything in its place. With Jacqueline these tastes were equally strong, and more enduring. When Blaise was presently converted to Port Royal, and swung round from scrupulous tidiness to the opposite extreme, she rallied him on the love of ' holy dirt,' which made him rank brooms among the articles with which

10 PASCAL

a true Christian could dispense. Better than anyone she understood the restless excitability that swung him to and fro between science and society, society and religion. Along a part of this same road Jacqueline herself had travelled ; though her vagrant susceptibilities were earlier captured, and brought under the stern control of Faith. There they developed into a sanctity unsurpassed at Port Royal itself — ' a piety that knew no interruption,' says her Jansenist Director, ' a devotion with more of substance than parade a penitence none the less austere, because half hidden under the cloak of daily habit.'

As yet, however, there were few traces of a future saint in the bright little girl — ' endowed,' says her sister, ' with all the great qualities of every age ' — who scribbled her verses in the morning, and spent the afternoon among her dolls. Before long she blossomed into something of a personage, became known to several families of influence at Court, and even dropped a youthful curtsey to Queen Anne of Austria. These acquaintances had their use. In the spring of 1638, Richelieu — always in want of money — arbitrarily reduced the rate of interest on Government stock. Forthwith great indignation among the share- holders, amongst whom was Stephen Pascal ; a deputation, several hundred strong, waited on Lord Chancellor Seguier. Some angry speeches were delivered, and several of the speakers arrested ; in trying to get a friend released Stephen himself fell under suspicion. To avoid the Bastille he fled to Clermont, and remained there over a year, only venturing back to Paris by stealth in order to nurse Jacqueline through a sharp attack of smallpox. On her recovery she repaid him well. Richelieu, whose dramatic tastes were peculiar, was suddenly struck with the idea of having one of his favourite plays — it was ' The Tyranny of Love,' by Scudery, a brother of the prtcieuse — acted by a party of children. Influential friends recommended Jacqueline to the Duchess

EAKLY LIFE 11

of Aiguillon, niece of the all-powerful Minister. She gave the child a leading part, and promised to find her an oppor- tunity of interceding for her father. In these good offices she was abetted by the celebrated actor, Mondory, himself a native of Clermont. The performance took place on April 3, 1639 ; and on the following day Jacqueline sent an account of it to her father.

' As soon as the piece was over,' she says, ' I came down from the stage, meaning to speak to Mme. d'Aiguillon. But, as the Lord Cardinal was leaving, M. de Mondory pressed me to go straight up to him. So I stepped forward, and began my petition, which he received more kindly and caressingly than words can say. As soon as he saw me, he cried out : " Why, there 's the little Pascal ! " As I went on with my verses, he took me on his knee and kissed me many times over. When I had finished, he said : " Yes, I grant all you ask. Write and tell your father that he may come back in perfect safety." Thereupon Mme. d'Aiguillon came up, and said : " Eeally, my Lord, you should do something for the father ; I have often heard him spoken of as a most excellent man. It is a pity that his talents are wasted. Besides, he has a son, who is already very learned in mathematics, although he is only fifteen." As the Cardinal was so kind, I asked if you might come and thank him on your return. He answered : " Yes, tell your father to come and see me." Then, as Mme. d'Aiguillon seemed to be going, my sister came up to bid her good-bye. She spoke to her in the friendliest way, and asked where my brother was. My sister fetched him, and to him also she was very civil, and paid him great compliments on his learning. Then she took us into another room, where a splendid supper was laid out of jellies, fruit and lemonade. All the time she kept on petting me ; I cannot tell you how kindly I was treated by them all.'

12 PASCAL

This letter brought Stephen back post-haste to Paris. With his whole family he waited on the Cardinal, and was most graciously received. Kichelieu congratulated himself on having restored their father to such amiable children, and promised that he would one day make them into something great. A few months later he appointed Stephen assistant to the Intendant of Normandy, a position of very considerable importance. And before Christmas, 1639, the whole family had taken up their abode in Kouen.

CHAPTEE II

ROUEN

MADAME D'AIGUILLON said no more than the truth when she told Richelieu that Blaise Pascal was ' very clever at mathematics.' His powers had grown apace since the day when his father found him drawing diagrams on the wall ; and before he left Paris for Eouen, they had already attracted the notice of Stephen's learned friends. Following a usual practice of their country — for Frenchmen must be sociable, even in their mathematics — these ardent geometers had organised themselves into a club, which met every Thursday night at the house of one or other of its members. ' Celeberrima Academia Matheseos Pari- siensis ' Blaise will presently call it ; and a few years after his death it grew into the official Academie des Sciences or Royal Society of France. At present, however, it was simply a heterogeneous assemblage of men devoted to a science altogether free from what they hated and despised as ' pedantry.' The academic learning of the time was still in bondage to Aristotle and the past — still toiled wearily along behind a convoy of worm-eaten folios. As Galileo said contemptuously, it strove to interpret the face of Nature by comparison of texts, as though she were the yEneid or the Odyssey. Everywhere reigned the Dryasdust of Boileau's satire :

Un pedant, enivre de sa vaine science, Tout heriss6 de grec, tout bouffi d'arrogance, Croit qu'un livre fait tout, et que sans Aristote La raison ne voit goutte, et le bon sens radote. 13

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But geometry took little heed of Greek philosophers — ' Dead heathen blinking owl-like in the sun of Christian fact,' cried one enthusiast of the Paris Club. Its boast was that science meant solving problems for oneself, not knowing what other men had thought about them : that was the domain of history. To all who would listen it offered three things unobtainable elsewhere : definite problems to work at, a clear method to work by, and absolutely sure results. Starting from premises so simple and familiar that the feeblest brain could grasp them, it professed to guide the inquirer along a path unerringly exact from what was simple to what was complex, and so indefinitely on, so far as he had strength to follow.

Accordingly many sorts of men foregathered at the club. The world of fashion was represented by Stephen's jovial friend Le Pailleur ; he worked at geometry in moments stolen from gossiping with fine ladies, whose amusement was his business in life. A correspondent was Jean Louis Guez de Balzac, nicknamed the Grand Epistolier de France, or Lord High Letter-writer. Officially he ranks as one of the founders of French prose, but in private life he was a vainglorious chatterer ; the joke ran that he suffered from a chronic cold caught while promenading his Ego about in insufficient attire. For hearers of this class, papers were read on popular subjects, such as flying machines, or phonetic spelling.1 At the opposite intellectual pole stood another intimate friend of the Pascals, Gilles Personne de Roberval, an eminent but very cross-grained professor from the College de France. Original enough, but far from lucid, and very secretive in his habits, he loved, as he said, to gloat over his discoveries nimium juveniliter at home, instead of giving them to the world ; he had always

1 A good idea of the miscellaneous nature of the subjects discussed may be gathered from Father Mersenne's Questions Inouiea, ou Recreation des Savants, Paris, 1634.

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some great feud on hand with other savants who had failed to grasp his meaning, or forestalled him in the publication of some new idea. He is the original, also, of a story told of many Senior Wranglers. Being taken to hear a play of Corneille, he came back bursting with the question : ' What does all that poetry prove ? '

Between the professor and the wits came a crowd of lawyers — Stephen himself, Carcavi, and Judge Mydorge. The judge's mission was to uphold Cartesian principles at the club. He was one of the few whom Descartes ranked among his ' true and faithful friends,' and he repaid the compliment by spending a large part of his fortune on costly optical instruments for the philosopher's use. Yet a new element appeared in Pierre Petit, a young specialist in military engineering, and in Girard Desargues, alike mathe- matician, engineer and architect. Desargues has a special interest as the first master of Blaise Pascal, and as the practical philanthropist of the club. Full of pity for the poor mechanics of Paris and his native Lyons, he devoted himself to the invention of labour-saving appliances ; he gave lectures on popular science to working men, in the hope of bringing trained intelligence into the shops to replace traditional rule of thumb. It is to be feared that these efforts met with small success, and Desargues' genius had to wait two hundred years for recognition. But his example was not lost on the future inventor of the Arithmetical Machine ; and Pascal certainly laid to heart one of his favourite maxims — namely, that literary elegance has its place even in a scientific treatise. For Desargues duly passed on to others the advice that Descartes once gave him — to write down to the level of such readers as yawned each time they turned a page, and expected mathematics to be made as thrilling as the enchanted castle in a tale.

But the soul of the club was Father Mersenne, a Friar Minim of St. Francis de Paul. He was one of the most

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attractive figures of his time ; even the surliest, says Baillet, could not hold out against him long. Like many men of peace, however, Mersenne loved nothing better than to see his friends at war. The whole scientific movement of the age appeared to him like a vast tournament between the Ancients and the Moderns, and the great object of his life was to spur on his own side into making a brave show in the lists. His own share lay in organisation and corre- spondence. For years he kept the club in touch with half the learned men in Europe, and especially with its own non-resident members. First among these stood Descartes, whose moody, cross-grained genius proved unequal to suffering the fools of Paris. In 1629 he had left France for Holland, where there were no importunate visitors, and he could practise his favourite maxim : Bene vixit, qui bene latuit. Then there was the Abbe Gassendi, who set out to restore the Epicurean philosophy from the vantage- ground of a rustic cathedral close. Lastly came the great mathematician, Pierre Fermat, a judge of the Parlement of Toulouse.

Still, Mersenne was much more than ' Descartes' letter- box,' as he has sometimes been profanely styled. Pascal bears witness that he had an extraordinary talent for raising difficult and important questions ; thereafter he gave his friends no peace, till some one cleverer than himself had found the answer. If they were lazy, he pricked them on by appealing to very human motives ; indeed, he seems to have thought that scientific tempers were only made to be lost. Many a quarrel was of his brewing, notably the great dispute about infinitesimals between Descartes and Judge Fermat. ' Your Mr. Justice De Minimis,' the contemptuous philosopher wrote, in allusion to the title of his adversary's treatise. Into this feud Stephen Pascal was dragged on Fermat's side ; while as to Roberval, his professorial gown was always skimming, like a black- winged

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stormy petrel, over some scene of combat. For him Descartes had a special dislike — based, it would seem, on jealousy of what he thought was an ill- deserved reputation ; and Boberval was not the man to let ill-will go unrequited. But Mersenne cared not a jot for his choler. Science, he said, would never advance, unless savants could be got to criticise each other freely ; posterity would care no more about their incidental broils than one cares about a few scratches upon one's flint, after it has struck a light.

Such were the leading men of a club whose youngest member Blaise became. And although fate removed him from Paris before he could take much part in its discussions, he ever after looked back to them with a lively sense of gratitude. ' I was brought up amongst you from my tenderest years,' he once informed the members in a formal Latin letter, ' and all my labours have been fostered by the kindly patronage of your erudite Lyceum.' There was more truth in the stilted phrase than perhaps Blaise himself suspected ; the changes and chances of his career owe not a little to the fact that he first saw the light of reason in a scientific club. In the first place, it was his school of manners. Surprise has sometimes been shown at the variations in his behaviour. One day he would boldly defy men much above him in age and position, and the next day sit humbly at the feet of persons almost incredibly beneath him — as, for instance, the Chevalier de Mere, his mentor in polite society. And Catholic critics cannot forgive him for always refusing to acknowledge that men with tonsured heads — for example, his Jesuit opponent, Father Noel — ought to be treated with more respect than men who let their hair grow naturally. The truth is that he behaved to all his neighbours as though they were members of the club. There the right to speak depended simply on degree of information ; seniors who knew little of a subject must be content to sit and listen

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to juniors who knew much. Blaise was high-handed with Father Noel, because concerning atmospheric pressure the Jesuit was less learned than he ; equally he deferred to Mere, because in matters of etiquette the Chevalier was the wiser of the two. In other words, he measured his neighbours by purely intellectual standards ; and, no doubt, it showed sad ignorance of the world to suppose them capable of being so judged. Afterwards experience taught him better. ' Birth,' he wrote in the ' Pensees,' ' is a great advantage. It makes a boy of eighteen as much known and respected as hard-working commoners can hope to be at fifty. That means thirty years to the good.' l

As yet, however, such reflections had not suggested an inquiry into the nature of original sin. Blaise simply applied to the world at large the maxim of the club, that no one who attended its meetings must think himself beyond the reach of criticism. Often, no doubt, the criticism was crude and ill-directed enough. Leibniz draws a lively picture of the sufferings of Descartes under the hands of Roberval. ' Roberval,' he says, ' was a proud, excitable and disputatious man. M. Descartes saw much deeper into things, and was more capable of making dis- coveries. But, like all meditative characters, he was so lost in the contemplation of vast horizons as to have little leisure to spare for the petty details under his feet. M. Eoberval, on the other hand, had only his mathematics to think of, and was a teacher by profession ; every scrap of knowledge he possessed, was, so to speak, on the tip of his tongue. Hence he often seemed to have the best of it, at any rate to superficial judges.' 2 Leibniz sides with his brother-philosopher ; but most of Pascal's friends and masters thought that Descartes would have done better had he listened a little more to men like Roberval. No theory,

1 Pens. 322.

• Nouvelles Lettres de Leibniz, ed. Foucher de Careil (Paris, 1857), p. 35.

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however magnificent in outline, was worth much in their eyes, unless it could face the nibbling accuracy of small- minded pedants, or the rough iconoclasm of common sense.

Besides, an academic society is always critical rather than constructive. It has seen too many theories come and go to be much dazzled by their brilliancy. It knows how much their success depends on accidental advantages — on their propounder's force of character, on his skill in logical fence, or even on his strength of lung ; whereas a solid fact stands, so to speak, on legs of its own, and can dispense with dialectic. Facts, moreover, can be tested ; whereas the theorists are most successful on foggy, un- explored domains, where no one can be brought to book. There they can tear each other to pieces without any risk of running their heads against a stone wall of realities. ' Each of them,' Pascal will presently write, ' makes enemies of all the rest ; and as they all combine against him, his defeat is certain. Thus they are all successful, but only over one another ; and no one can get much good from a victory only made possible by his own want of accurate knowledge. For truth does not make her home among this noisy, puzzled crowd. She reveals herself only to those who make it their rule to assent to none but certain propositions, and refuse either to affirm or to deny whenever the evidence is doubtful. This is the perfect equilibrium ; this is the golden mean. Herein, by a stroke of good fortune, I can never prize enough, I was brought up with singular exactitude and more than fatherly care.' l

The seed that Stephen had so anxiously sown soon ripened into fruit. About the time of his departure for Rouen Blaise sent his first printed performance to the press ; it was the advertisement of a forthcoming work on conic sections, following the lines of an already published treatise by Desargues. This enterprise was the more

1 Lettre a M. Le Paitteur, Works, iii. p. 61.

o 2

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remarkable, since Desargues' book was a new departure — so new that many grown-up mathematicians failed to understand it. The innovation lay in treating all conic sections as varieties of a single curve, as opposed to the old-fashioned practice of considering each one by itself. Blaise not only fell in with this new method, but carried it much farther than its inventor had done ; this Desargues was the first to acknowledge, when he gave the name of la Pascale to the ' mystic hexagram ' which formed the pivot of his pupil's demonstration. No wonder that a chorus of praise uprose from the Paris Club, led by the ever-kindly and ever-hyperbolical Mersenne. At once he wrote off word to Descartes that a new mathematical prodigy had arisen in the person of President Pascal's son, who had climbed over the shoulders of all his contem- poraries on to an even higher pedestal than Apollonius. This comparison was scarcely judicious, since Descartes thought exceedingly little of the geometers of antiquity, and indeed was more than chary of admiring anyone ; he answered that beating the tedious old Greek was no great matter to boast of, even for a boy of sixteen. And when Mersenne sent him the pamphlet, he only drew attention to a sentence in which Blaise acknowledged his debt to Desargues. No doubt this discourtesy was chiefly intended for Mersenne, who had made no mention of Desargues, although in that ill-recognised genius Descartes took a special interest. But graciousness was not to be expected from a philosopher whose correspondence is a kind of scien- tific Dunciad ; Descartes was fond of telling his critics that he took no more notice of their objections than he did of a pack of little curs idly yapping round his heels. Besides, he may well have been nettled at finding his own book on geometry passed over in silence, although it had been two years in print, and was about to revolutionise the science. Nor was this neglect accidental. Blaise differed from

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Descartes on every point over which mathematicians could disagree — as to the value of their common science, its methods, and its scope.

At Rouen, however, these theoretical differences slept for a while. There Blaise was at once impressed into the business of his father's office. The work of an Intendant was at all times burdensome enough ; for on these newly- created officials — lineal ancestors of the modern prtfet — Richelieu's centralising policy had piled every sort and kind of function, administrative and judicial. Hitherto the provinces had been governed by a number of local bodies independent of each other and largely independent of the Crown. The rise of the Intendants meant the triumph of centralisation. Their first duty was to force the local bodies into touch with the executive in Paris ; their second was to wring as much money as possible out of their departments. For seventeen years of war with the Empire had brought the national exchequer very low, and Richelieu — always a hand-to-mouth financier — could only get supplies by reckless increase of the taxes, and still more reckless creation of new monopolies and dues farmed out to French analogues of Mompesson and Giles. Naturally his methods called forth much opposition, con- stitutional and otherwise. In the summer of 1639, the great industrial town of Rouen was goaded into open insurrection by the creation of a number of ' hereditary inspectors of dyeing,' with full power to enter any warehouse, factory or shop, and examine all the goods contained therein. One of the new inspectors was murdered, while trying to exercise his functions ; and the city police did not look very carefully for the guilty parties. Nor did they bestir themselves during the rioting which followed, when other monopolists were maltreated and their registers destroyed. So Richelieu resolved to teach the town a lesson. Most of the magistrates were suspended, and replaced by officials

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from the capital. Over the new finance department Stephen Pascal was set to preside.

His work was as irksome as it was unpopular. He had to decide on all claims to exemption made by the nobles or clergy ; he must assess to a kind of arbitrary income-tax all plebeians whom the law thought to be ' in easy circum- stances ' ; and he must apportion the incidence of general imposts as equitably as possible among the eighteen hundred townships in his district. Nor were his duties lightened by the unrestful state of the country. Half the local officials had been dismissed ; the other half could not be trusted. The new Intendant must fight his way through a chaos of lost account-books and inaccurate returns. Well might Stephen write to his daughter : ' I am ten times busier than ever I was before. Very little more would break me down completely. For four months I have never got to bed before two o'clock in the morning.'

At this point Blaise came to his father's assistance. Vast columns of figures had to be gone through, and naturally every kind of ready-reckoner was pressed into the service. But none of these could quite be trusted. One, known as * the counters,' was too cumbrous ; another, known as ' the pen,' left too much to the intelligence of the clerk who used it. So Blaise was struck with the idea of inventing a machine that should perform the four rules of arithmetic ' by necessary movements independent of the operator's will, and as simply as was possible to Nature.' The scheme was not absolutely new. At the close of the previous century the Scotch mathematician, Napier of Merchiston, had produced a set of calculating rods, which obtained a European celebrity under the name of Napier's Bones. A few years later the Dutch Jesuit, Ciermans, constructed a real calculating machine. But Napier's Bones were almost incredibly clumsy, and Ciermans' invention never came before the public ; Gilberte Pascal is justified in her

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boast that her brother ' introduced a novelty into nature, and reduced to mechanism a science whose seat is wholly in the human mind.'

The machine was begun in 1640, but before an even provisional success was reached, nearly five years had been spent, and more than fifty models constructed. Some were made with ' straight pins, some with curved, some with chains ; some with concentric, others with eccentric wheels ; some with upright, some with circular, or else conical or cylindrical action. Others were entirely different again, either in material or shape or working.' l Nor were these Pascal's only troubles. He soon found that beating metals with a hammer was a very different thing from drawing diagrams in a study ; and still harder was it to make himself intelligible to his workmen, ignorant of the very alphabet of science. Moreover, he was haunted by the fear that his invention would not get a hearing. It was ambitious and out of the common ; he himself was still obscure, although quite old enough to realise that the world has an ' unjust prejudice ' against the discoveries of unknown young men. Nor was it much comfort to remember that in one quarter he was sure of attention ; for that quarter was the hypercritical assemblage presided over by Mersenne. His imagination heard specialists in geometry calling his machine unduly complex, and specialists in mechanics scoffing at its clumsiness — as though mathematical nicety was the only thing to be considered, when an instrument is intended for hard, practical work.

Worst of all, came the news that a rival inventor had taken the field. At this Blaise lost his self-control. ' With my own eyes I have seen a travesty of my machine made by a watchmaker at Eouen. Guided merely by what he had heard of my first model, he had the effrontery to construct

1 Privilege du Roi four la Machine arithmttique, in Works, iii. p. 194-

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another of his own — and what is worse, with a different kind of action. It is true he is a worthy fellow, very clever with his tools, and not without some aptitude for matters only indirectly touching on his trade. But he scarcely so much as knows that such sciences as geometry or mechanics exist ; and although his machine looks neat and pretty enough on the outside, the interior is so radically defective that it never can be of any use. Still, its novelty has gained it a warm welcome from those who understand nothing of the subject ; and it has even found a place on the shelves of a gentleman of the same town, who collects rare and curious objects. The sight of this little monster filled me with disgust ; I sent away my workmen, and resolved never to give the matter another thought. For I was naturally afraid lest other such caricaturists might arise, and cover my machine with ridicule, before the public had a chance of deciding on its merits. But soon afterwards the Lord Chancellor deigned to inspect my first model ; and thinking well of it, he enjoined on me to proceed. And when he saw that it was fear that held me back, he was pleased to cut down the evil at the root, to prevent it doing further harm to my good name or the public advantage. For he issued an extraordinary patent in my favour, the effect of which is to strangle before their birth any other such monstrosities as may be begotten otherwise than in the lawful wedlock of theory and art.' l

The childish petulance of this outburst has been a stumbling-block to many critics. But there was much more than a young man's wounded vanity at stake. At first sight it seems strange to think of Pascal in connexion with the higgling of the market ; yet his Machine, begun purely in the interests of his father's office, was certainly continued as a commercial speculation. On its final completion some

1 Avis nicessaire a tout ceux qui auront curiositt de voir la Machine arithm&ique, Works, iii. p. 187.

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years later models were exhibited in Paris, and no less of a personage than Professor Roberval undertook to explain their workings to intending purchasers. Hence the watch- maker was detestable as a possible rival in trade. But he was also still more detestable for another reason. A member of the Paris Club — more especially its youngest member — was bound to stand very much on his dignity, whenever questions arose concerning the ' lawful wedlock of theory and art.' He was one of the elect of science condescending — as Desargues had before him — to turn his sacred deposit of learning to practical account ; whereas the poor watch- maker was no better than a quack, who laid his bungling hands on the ark of the scientific covenant. And to the odiousness of quackery Pascal's generation was peculiarly alive. To the mass of Frenchmen science was still an un- known land ; another half-century must go by, before Fon- tenelle would bring it within reach of every drawing-room. Hence the world did not trouble to distinguish between one man of science and another ; it included under a common ban the followers of Galileo and the recruits of Paracelsus. Thrilled to the marrow by lurid tales of Cardan and Vanini, respectability suspected all alike ; a strong smell of brim- stone still clung round every telescope or test-tube. Mer- senne was driven into public protest against the popular impression that mathematicians and medical men were necessarily atheists. Descartes was set down as an atheist, a Jesuit, a Rosicrucian, or an Anabaptist, according to individual taste ; while as to Blaise Pascal, the Memoirs of a prominent contemporary dismiss him as an adept at Black Magic.

Not but what the cloud of prejudice was slowly lifting. Among Paris wits a man of science was not so much an object of horror as an object of good-natured contempt. Mathe- matics were a harmless amusement, when not too openly paraded ; and Saint fivremond put the applied sciences in

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their place, when he said that a gentleman should show them every encouragement short of soiling his fingers by studying them himself. Centres of provincial enlightenment followed in the wake of Paris. At Rouen, Pascal found it easy enough to collect an audience to witness his early experiments in the vacuum. Nor were serious critics altogether wanting. There was Dr. Pierius from the Archiepiscopal College, who brought to the maintenance of ultra-conservative opinions considerable learning and a resourcefulness of criticism that caused the young innovator many anxious hours. There was Dr. Guiffart, a physician and specialist in ordnance questions, and an amiable, liberal- minded man, who valiantly defended Blaise against the onslaughts of Pierius. Lastly, there was young Adrien Auzout, who grew up to leave a permanent mark on the history of astronomy.

However, the greatest man in Rouen was not an astro- nomer, but a poet. When the Pascals settled there, Corneille was still dividing his time between the local Admiralty Court and the creation of a national drama in France. His ' Cid ' had taken Paris by storm at Christmas, 1636 ; Jacque- line's actor-friend, Mondory, could write in triumph that the seats in the gallery, usually given over to pages, were thronged with noblemen in blue ribbons. With Corneille himself Jacqueline was not long in making friends, and at his instance she competed successfully for a prize-poem of some local note. On her brother, however, the poet made but small impression. In conversation he was anything but lucid ; he himself admitted an incurable propensity to put the wrong word in the wrong place. And Blaise was far too much engrossed by his science to waste more time on poetry than was required to write it down as the very essence of affectation and unreality. The aim of science was to reach the literal truth of things ; the aim of poetry was to ' mask and disguise ' it under a coat of literary paint. In vain the

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poets urged that facts meant nothing, unless caught up and transfigured by the imagination of the writer. Blaise answered that here precisely lay the error. Any faithful copy of nature had a certain value — though art bore daily witness to its own futility by imitating worthless models — but a copy garbled by human fancy had no value at all. It is the principle of Napoleon, when he said that the worst of all faults in a general was carving ' pictures ' out of a battle-field.

For this gross misconception of their art the poets them- selves were largely to blame. Frenchmen have always been slow to admit that poetry is something other than a logical demonstration in holiday costume ; and hi the rational seventeenth century such a confession was doubly un- grateful. Corneille himself had no sure hold on the distinction between a truth of sentiment and a truth of fact ; and many of the smaller writers talked as though a lyric poem were a kind of rhyming affidavit. Desmarets de Saint Sorlin, for instance, was just now preaching a return from classical to Christian themes, on the ground that the actions of the true God — just because the God was true — could be told with greater literary charm than the exploits of the false. A generation later uprose Corneille's own nephew, Fontenelle, to defend verse as a useful means of putting difficult ideas into clear and simple language — much as the Covenanters defended their metrical version of the Psalms as being ' handy cantle to mind.' On such principles Blaise judged poetry, and condemned it. For exposition it was useless, because it lacked the necessary freedom. A sonnet cannot afford to wait, while conscien- tiousness develops its whole case ; ballads have no room for qualifying clauses, or exceptions to the rule. Let a writer begin to follow truth wherever it leads him, and Giants Order, Lucidity and Picturesqueness promptly block the way ; ever and anon they force him to say either more or less than

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he meant. The same gangrene of untruthfulness creeps into the wording of his very phrases ; long before his con- version to Port Boyal Blaise had adopted the dictum of its leaders that the exigencies of rhyme have turned many a poet into a liar. For argument poetry was worse than useless. The most cogent demonstration it admitted was a slip-shod metaphor ill-applied. So whenever Jacqueline read out some grandiloquent passage likening the stormy fortunes of the great to lightning that attracts the thunderbolt, Blaise inter- rupted her with the tart rejoinder that, if the lightning were to change its habits, and take to striking low-lying ground, the poets and people who thought that sort of thing was argument would be sadly at a loss for ' proofs.' l

Besides, he was not a little nettled at the quasi-scientific airs affected by the critics of the time. The great heroes of the sixteenth century had been over-ballasted by mis- cellaneous erudition ; by dint of reading everything there was to read, Rabelais and Montaigne had read themselves out of the power of steering any definite course. But now a reaction had set in towards uniformity and order. Success was everywhere proclaimed impossible, unless a writer knew exactly whence he started, whither he was bound, and what means he intended to employ. Not only a great poet like Corneille, but every little rhymester Jacqueline read could spin elaborate theories about his ' art ' ; while for the benefit of inexperience authoritative canons were drawn up, and soon acquired a superstitious sanctity. The rules of poetry were codified, so were the rules of eloquence, and even the rules of conversation — all with a show of compre- hensiveness and trenchancy that would have been in better place had poetry been mathematics. To Blaise the whole proceeding seemed an impudent caricature, aping the methods of the most exact of sciences on a field neither scientific nor exact. It would be time enough to determine

1 Pens. 39.

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the rules, when these wiseacres had settled between them wherein the essence of poetry lay. ' People talk of poetical beauty,' he said, ' but never of geometrical or medical beauty. The reason is that everyone knows that the object of geometry is proof, and the object of medicine is cure ; but no one knows what pleasure is, which is the object of poetry. And as they cannot furnish us with a natural model to imitate, they fall back on a string of fantastic expressions — "golden age," "marvel of our time," and the like — and call this stuff poetical beauty. But anyone who will imagine a woman built on this pattern (which consists in giving big names to little things) will have before him a pretty girl bedizened all over with looking-glasses and chains ; and these will make him laugh, for he knows much better what is charming in a woman than what is charming in a poem. But a man without taste will admire her the more because of her finery, and there are villages where she would be taken as queen. That is why we call sonnets composed on this model village-queens.' 1

This passage belongs to a later date ; it was not at Rouen that Blaise learned to criticise feminine attractions. But the idea is old enough. All his life long Pascal made relent- less war on ' village-queens ' — that is, on showy codes and systems drawn up without regard to the ' natural model ' of common-sense experience. It mattered not whether they took shape as precieux poetry, or Cartesian science, or Jesuit morality. Priests, philosophers and poets seemed to Pascal all alike. Impelled by the same desire for a ready- made standard of guidance, they had thrown themselves into the arms of system ; and system rewarded then: sub- missiveness by inspiring a most delusive confidence in itself. One and all took it lightly for granted that a question must be rightly answered, once the orthodox methods had been applied ; to a mind trained never to look beyond them these

lPens. 33.

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seemed so full, so sensible, so sure, that what was reached by their aid could never be wrong. Here and there, no doubt, some stubborn fact arose that would not fit in with their requirements ; but the world was large, and hundreds of other facts were forthcoming as to which no difficulty arose. But Pascal was one of those scrupulous spirits who cannot tie blinkers over their eyes ; unlike the traditional geologist, he would never roll an inconvenient boulder two hundred feet downhill ' into conformity with my system.' To him it mattered little whether a theory was sensible, or practical, or logically self-consistent ; the one and only question was whether the theory was true. And truth required some more objective guarantee than any amount of logic could supply.

This guarantee it was the task of Nature to provide. But what did Pascal understand by this Protean word ? The answer will vary much at different stages of his career. At Rouen ' Nature ' was simply the subject of science — a bare expanse of cold, dead matter stretched out to infinity — the boundless spaces, whose eternal silence will fill the Christian Pascal with affright. Kinship between them there was none ; and to speak as though there were, was to com- promise the fundamental dualism of things, and ' speak of the material in terms of spirit.' For no fault had Pascal less indulgence ; his own chief physical exploit lay in proving that Nature had not 'spirituality' enough to feel even a metaphorical horror of a vacuum. On the other hand, just because she was without any bias of her own, she made the best of witnesses ; once put a question fairly to her, and she could not choose but answer truly. Before he left Rouen, Pascal had begun to pass from mathematics to experimental physics. After all, geometry was a merely ideal science dealing with notions, not with things ; whereas in physics the decision lay with experiment, that is, with Nature herself.

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Apart from the scientific interest, Pascal could take no sort of pleasure in Nature. Most writers of the time admitted her to their presence, after the gardener and the architect had worked their will upon her. She was useful in pro- viding decorative backgrounds for a picture — ' horizons formes a souhait pour le plaisir des yeux,' as one of their own poets has said. Boileau admitted the value of a forest as an occasional refuge for jaded literary men ; and even Descartes felt ' a certain lightsomeness, when the weather was fairer than ordinary.' But neither forests nor trim lawns had any charm for Blaise. ' The weather and my humours/ he said, ' have little to do with one another. I have fogs and sunshine of my own within me ' * — perhaps the most ' unnatural ' declaration ever made by mortal man. Still, there is a grey magnificence in this entire detachment from the physical world around him. Here Pascal, the experimentalist man of science, joins hands with Pascal, the Jansenist ascetic. To both Nature is the enemy ; though one strives to conquer her by thought, the other by prayer and fasting. Their methods may be different, but their aim is one and the same. Each must subdue the flesh — must stamp upon corruptible matter the impress of incorruptible mind. ' Man is a reed — the feeblest in nature ; but he is a thinking reed. The universe need not arm for his defeat ; a fume, a drop of water will dispatch him. Yet crush him, and he still remains nobler than his destroyer, because he knows that he is dying; whereas the universe knows nothing of its victory. All our dignity is born of thought. The universe may en- compass me, and swallow up my body like an atom ; my mind still casts a girdle round it. Let us, then, strive hard to think well : there lies the secret of a moral life.' 2

1 Pens. 107. * Pens. 347.

THE DEAD HAND

BALZAC, the Lord High Letter-writer, once congratulated Descartes on introducing a new ' sovereignty ' into the world. And herein Balzac was right. During Pascal's youth natural science was slowly overflowing the narrow bounds of the Paris Club, and rising to be a great power in the realm of thought. Blaise grew up in the midst of a never-ending discussion of the principles involved by its rise. Was it a mere intellectual amusement, or did it reveal the universe in a new light ? What should be its attitude towards philosophy, towards the Church, towards its own traditions ? Must it remain content to develop principles already established, or might it strike out new lines of its own ? If so, should mathematics be its tool, or practical experiment ? At first the club had studied geometry simply for its own sake, without much thought of its practical application ; and some of its most distinguished members remained true all their lives to this earlier tradition. Judge Fermat, for instance, never deserved the reproach a whim- sical critic once brought against Sir Isaac Newton, of ' prostituting mathematics to the service of astronomy.' To other contemporaries of Galileo and Kepler such self- restraint was impossible. Why should new planets swim only into a German or Italian ken, when Frenchmen had at hand in their geometry an unfailing instrument of limitless

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discovery ? ' To arithmetic it is given,' cried Mersenne, ' to number the several parts of the universe, but geometry investigates its magnitude. Like a second Atlas, it labours until its head has touched the stars ; nor may the farthest reaches of the Firmament defy the visits of its measuring- rod.'

Accordingly, the good priest bestirred himself to translate Galileo's books, in the hope of inducing his fellow-members to take the great Florentine as their model, and turn their favourite study to serious account. Not that either master or disciple made astronomical discovery the one goal of their researches. Galileo was much more than a great explorer of the heavens ; his best services to science were rendered hi the department of mechanics, investigating their first principles — laws of motion, virtual velocities, and the like. ' To discover spots in the sun, or satellites round Jupiter,' said Lagrange, ' needed only patience and a telescope ; but it required a very great man to formulate the laws of things that are everywhere happening before our eyes.' It required also more than usual courage. Seventeenth century orthodoxy held that all these matters had been settled long ago by Aristotle — not, of course, the real Greek, but a Latinised, or ' Germanic ' Aristotle, wrought into conformity with medieval dogma by the schoolmen, and thenceforward covered by the mantle of the Church. Hence the superstitious reverence attaching to his name. Galileo's colleague, Libri, would not put his eye to a telescope, lest he should see what Aristotle had not seen ; Gassendi knew another professor, who thought he did God acceptable service by offering to shed his blood in defence of every syllable Aristotle ever wrote. ' Respect for the Ancients,' cries Blaise Pascal, ' has nowadays reached such a pitch that men make oracles of all they said, and sacred mysteries of what they did not understand. It is treasonable to con- tradict them, and misprision of treason to call them in

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question.' Nor was this ' Stagyrolatry ' — for Aristotle was the Ancient of Ancients — peculiar to the Catholic world. If Giordano Bruno may be believed, the proctors of Elizabethan Oxford exacted their customary fine of five shillings for every breach of the laws of logic laid down in Aristotle's ' Organon.' Hence the shattering of the idol was of capital importance ; and with this Galileo began his career. Aristotle having laid down that heavy bodies fall faster than light ones in proportion to their weight, Galileo marched up the Leaning Tower of Pisa ; and thence, in the presence of several scholastic professors, let fall a ten-pound and a one-pound weight. Both reached the ground at the same moment, and with them fell belief in Aristotle's infallibility.

But reverence for Aristotle's personal authority was not the only obstacle Galileo had to fight. Behind that rever- ence, and supporting it, was the scholastic theory itself, fortified by centuries of unquestioning acceptance, as well as by an intimate conviction of the grandiosity of its own aim. It had undertaken to prove that the universe only gains a meaning when read in the light of the Christian Church ; for the Church's service they had been created, and by the Church's dogmas they must be explained. Not man alone, but animals and trees and brute inanimate matter had their purpose ; and the task the schoolman set before him was to show how all these tiny brooks united in the broad river of the Catholic scheme. Before the Praeparatio Evangelica of human, must come the Prseparatio of natural history : the reason why fishes swim, why kettles boil, why sugar is sweet, must be found to be ultimately deducible from some attribute of God.

Such a theory was little likely to welcome new truths from the outside ; its business was not to discover, but to interpret, what already was. Again and again it rearranged the settled store of physical facts left behind by Aristotle,

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until the manner of arrangement began to appear of more importance than the facts themselves. Logic, which at first had been the servant, rose to be head of the house. Unchecked by rivalry with other sciences, it moulded all the thought of its disciples ; they soon came to believe that the laws which governed the inner world of their ideas must be equally obeyed by the external world of things. What was Nature for, except to work in syllogisms ? What were mere phenomena to do, but bow before a science that had its roots in the Divine ? Logic had built the schoolmen a continuing city well-garrisoned, four-square ; and they were in no mind to see its symmetry destroyed by new barbarian discoveries. Hence they made short work enough of any physical fact that did not fit in with their preconceptions. As Galileo said, they tried to tear his new planets out of the heavens by logical arts, as though by a kind of magical incantation. Nor did the most honest schoolman feel any shame at his own performance. On his principles God had first created Nature, and then human reason to explain her. Far from him, then, the Baconian precept to conquer Nature by obeying her — that is, by suiting our theories to her facts. What was this but exalting the interpreted above the interpreter — dead matter over living mind ?

This blind confidence in logic gave birth to the scholastic Vpedantry.' All argument, unless kept in continual check by experience, necessarily falls into the hands of a few men of genius ; the modest inquirer becomes less anxious to see things for himself than to know what his intellectual heroes had to say about them. Deliberately he refuses to grapple with questions at first hand ; as Galileo said contemptuously, he feels that his reason must remain unfruitful, unless it is mated with some greater mind. Nor was this cowardice peculiar to the clerical world. Whatever their official faculty, all scholastic professors were by instinct theologians ; even into an anatomical lecture-room they carried the

D 2

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methods of the divinity school. Their principles were not the principles of science, vast working hypotheses liable to ceaseless alteration ; they were inelastic dogmas fixed unalterably for all time. As there was an ecclesiastical ' deposit of faith ' depending on Scripture and the Fathers, so also there was a deposit of scientific faith implicitly con- tained in Aristotle or Hippocrates. This it was the student's business to elucidate and develop hi the light thrown on it by later accredited masters, Galen, Averrhoes, Fernel. But woe betide him if he dare advance original theories of his own ; the famous theological maxim, that a heretic is a man who has an opinion, applied quite as much to mechanics or medicine as to the doctrine of grace.

No doubt, thought is difficult to kill, and every inquisition has its limits. Artful reasoners of the type of Gassendi or Mersenne found it easy to throw dust in the eyes of their censors, and pretend that their most startling"" innovations had been forestalled by some unintelligible passage in one of Aristotle's less known works. But on less experienced shoulders tradition rested with a crushing weight. The least gleam of independent thought was cried down as no good sign in a young man's character — subversive of established institutions — tending to intellectual pride. Ignatius Loyola sternly denounced it as the very tap-root of disobedience ; whereas, to give up forming opinions of one's own on disputed points of scholarship was in his view a sacrifice peculiarly acceptable to the God of Wisdom.

From the tyranny of the expert was but one step to the tyranny of the official. Systems soon hardened into schools, and schools into powerful corporations, each with its own vested interests in darkness. ' Quid de medicina nostra fiet ? ' asked many a college of physicians, on hearing of Robert Harvey's discoveries about the blood. Members answered that they would rather err with Galen than circulate with Harvey — all the more readily, since circulator is low-Latin for

THE DEAD HAND 37

a tramp. To interpret truth thus became the monopoly of certain privileged bodies, whether they called themselves college of cardinals or faculty of medicine. They might be composed of capable men, or they might not ; that mattered little, since their authority flowed not from their competence, but from their official position. Common sense quite approved the arrangement. Why were the colleges there, unless they understood their business ? If they went wrong, who was left to put them right ? In short, authority was worshipped just because it was authority — tradition, because it was tradition. ' What pleases me most about my Son,' says Dr. Diafoirus in the ' Malade Imaginaire,' ' is that he is blindly attached to the opinions of the Ancients, and that he would never comprehend nor hear the Reasons and Experiments of our age concerning the circulation of the Blood, or other opinions of the same stamp.'

Thus Galileo and his followers were driven into violent protest — much as Luther had protested a hundred years before — against the ' vile habit of believing ' begotten of scholastic methods. They felt the foundations of authorita- tive science giving way under their feet. Why should they bow down to Aristotle ? He was a man like other men. What proof was there that the schoolmen understood him ? They differed violently about his meaning. But, even when he spoke quite clearly, was it certain he was right ? In the matter of falling bodies Galileo had proved him wrong, and he might be wrong again. Was, then, certainty an ideal beyond our reach ? Many writers thought it was, and echoed the mournful conclusion of Francis Sanchez that man was certainly born for knowledge, but that, in his present state, the gates of knowledge were inexorably barred against him. But bolder spirits refused to submit so tamely to defeat. They were not bloodless metaphysicians anxiously probing the inmost recesses of the human mind ; they were lusty adventurers born into an age of limitless

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discovery. Columbus had called into being one new world. Galileo had opened up another ; the development of the microscope was laying bare a third. They were resolved to live and learn all there was to know.

What, then, should be their test of truth ? For lack of more impressive criteria, they saw themselves thrown back on their individual judgment. Timidly enough at first, but soon with an increasing note of defiance, they preached that an honest man must brace up his courage to decide for himself, and hold such opinions as he thought true for no other reason than because he thought them true, reason being his sole law. Soon appeared Descartes and his Cogito, as a rationalistic counterpart to Lutheran justification by faith. Both deny that certitude can be gained by con- forming one's beliefs to a standard fixed by others ; if a man's faith is really to be living, he must create it for himself afresh — whether it be faith in the saving power of Christianity or in the truth of mathematics. Both insist that the only convictions really worth having are those a man has won for himself by the hard sweat of his brow. ' So far from making hearsay the rule of your beliefs,' writes Pascal, ' you ought to approach a question as though you had never heard of it before. It is the consent of yourself to yourself and the unchanging voice of your own reason that ought to make you believe, — not the voices of other men.' To listen to their voices was no merit, but a crime. Not a few of his French contemporaries might have said with John Milton : ' A man may be a heretic in the truth ; and if he believes things because his pastor says so, or the assembly so determines, without knowing other reason, though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds becomes his heresy.'

If a man's first duty is to exercise his judgment, it is manifest that he may suspend it on occasion. Doubt ceased to be a crime. To churchmen the doubting habit of mind

THE DEAD HAND 39

had been even more intolerable than independent thought itself. Accustomed to look everywhere for an ^immediate rule of practical guidance, they could not away with the slow march of science, its stuttering hesitations and provisional replies. They said that life was meant for action, not for speculation ; a man must make haste to choose his side, knowing that on that choice depended an eternity of weal or woe. Nor did it trouble them if his decision was reached after hasty, superficial inquiry. Unconsciously they let themselves be biassed by a false ethical analogy. As it is unquestionably meritorious to effect much with insufficient tools, so they thought it must be right to believe much on scanty proof. Then, too, they were led astray by the moral beauty of belief. To the acrid, critical, scientific spirit, always haggling over technicalities of evidence, they opposed the impulsive, trustful temper of mind, that squanders its credos and its alms with equal generosity. To Galileo and his friends, however, such arguments were no arguments at all. Once and for all, they refused to subordinate their science to any moral end outside itself. An honest search for truth was its own full, perfect and sufficient justification ; and truth, as Pascal said, only reveals herself to those who make it their rule to assent to none but certain propositions, and refuse either to affirm or to deny whenever the evidence is doubtful.

This stem sense of the value of facts kept scepticism at a distance. Pascal will one day have dealings with ' Pyrrhon- ists ' too indolent to make up their minds ; but Pyrrhonism would be sought in vain among the strenuous members of the Paris Club. Their doubts were a stimulant, not an opiate — a means of rousing themselves and their fellows out of the dogmatic slumber where everything is taken for granted. They were only continuing the work that Giordano Bruno had begun, when he cried to the scholastic professors : ' Inasmuch as the very pinnacle of ignorance is taking

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doubtful things for certain, I beseech you, let us for one moment think, suppose, pretend, that we are thorough ignoramuses. Perhaps we shall gain in wisdom and insight, if we find that hitherto we have been taking darkness — or, at any rate, faint twilight glimmerings — for noonday. Then we shall either go back to our first opinion, and hold it much more firmly than before ; or else we shall recognise that we were blind, and exchange it for a better.' Herein earnest Christians like Mersenne were at one with the martyr of free thought. The good priest thoroughly agreed that nothing was more absurd than the ' foolish and pedantic affectation ' of taking everything for certain ; the doubts of the sceptics were a thousand times to be preferred to the dogmatism of the other philosophical schools. In other words, he recognised that science knows no prescriptive rights. It holds that traditions — so far from acquiring credibility by growing older — are apt to lose whatever element of truth they once possessed under the reckless guardianship of successive generations. Hence Mersenne and his brethren of the club were always ready for an inquiry into anything. But they were none of them iconoclasts. Blaise Pascal speaks for them all when he says : ' I hold that we ought not lightly to depart from accepted beliefs, unless obliged by clear and cogent proof. In that case it seems to me the height of cowardice to have the least scruple about it ; for to defend established opinions merely because they are established is a sign of obstinacy rather than reverence for truth.'

The dogmatists might talk as they pleased about their one unchanging, supernatural dispensation, and contrast it with the variableness and uncertainty that clouds a merely human wisdom. Science, again speaking through the mouth of Blaise Pascal, answered that to enchain man within the iron circle of his present knowledge was not to make him little lower than the angels, but to degrade him to

THE DEAD HAND 41

the level of the brutes. ' It is the peculiar privilege of human reason to be ever on the increase ; whereas the instinct of the beasts moves unendingly along one plane. A thousand years ago bees built their hives no worse than now ; their hexagon of comb was just as neatly formed the first time as the last. Nature so contrives her hints as just to keep pace with their necessities ; and with the satisfaction of their needs that fragile knowledge dies away. Such is not the case with man, who was created only for infinity. He begins life in a state of boundless ignorance, but throughout his career he learns incessantly ; for he draws not only on his own experience, but on the experience of those who went before him. We of the present day stand where the ancient philosophers would have stood, had they lived until our time, busy from age to age in adding to their original stock of wisdom. Nay, our whole race, in the long course of its history, may be likened to a single man, continually alive and continually learning. How unjust, then, is the reverence we pay to the sages of old time. They lived during the childhood of the world, and were novices in everything. We ourselves, who have added the experience of many centuries to theirs, have by far the better title to that name of ancient, which we give to them.'

Still, Blaise and his masters only aspired to free a limited field from the control of the dead hand. Discoverers rather than philosophers, their interest did not go beyond the constructive sciences ; critical domains, like philology or history, they willingly left to the professors. ' If one wants to know who was the first king of France, or where geo- graphers place the first meridian, or what words were in use in a dead language, whither should one go, except to books ? ' Blaise Pascal asks — not without the implication that on matters so supremely unattractive one book was as good as another, and the methods of Scaliger neither better nor

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worse than the methods of Salmasius. Besides, all these inquiries started from some musty, old tradition ; and Blaise was a servant of geometry — a science, as he had already told the Lord Chancellor, whose peculiar privilege it was to advance nothing that it could not prove. History began with an act of faith in the veracity of some ancient chronicler ; whereas geometry involved no acts of faith at all. Its demonstrations lay absolutely open to the eye of reason, from the first enunciation of the problem to the final Q.E.D. Hence it could afford to bid tradition a lasting farewell. ' In physics,' Pascal told his Jesuit antagonist, Father Noel, ' we pay no attention to authorities. If we refer to earlier writers at all, we quote their demonstrations, not their names.'

In other words, science must be free from all authority except its own ; and the great quarrel with the Aristotelians arose because they would not recognise this independence. For theology, as such, the club had an unfeigned respect, and nothing was farther from its thoughts than religious innovation ; every member took to heart the advice a Eoman prelate once gave Galileo — to philosophise as much as he pleased, so long as he kept outside the sacristy. A rough dividing-line was drawn between such facts as could be proved by reason, and such as could not. The former the club kept within its own jurisdiction ; the latter were sacred mysteries belonging to the Church. Here authority was needful, because the facts passed all human under- standing ; whereas authority was useless, whenever reason could be set to work. ' We must deplore,' wrote Pascal, after his first Jansenist conversion, ' the blindness of those who settle physical questions by authority, instead of reasoning or experiment ; and we must reprobate the malice that brings argument to bear on theology, in place of Scrip- ture and the Fathers.' What he and his colleagues could not tolerate was the scholastic tendency to confuse the two

THE DEAD HAND 48

domains, and illegitimately deduce — as Descartes said — wrong opinions in physics from the words of Scripture. Clerical encroachments on its sphere were welcomed with ironical deference by the elder members of the club. When the cardinals condemned Galileo, Descartes said that their judgment would have as much influence on his public declarations as reason had upon his private thoughts. Mersenne explained that, of course, the Church must be right — though, to be sure, the arguments of the heliocentric party were hard to answer, and nobody would be damned for inability to refute them. The younger generation was much more outspoken. Blaise, who was ten years old when the condemnation was pronounced, grew up to place it almost on the same lines as the condemnation of Jansen — a fact all the more significant, since he thought, on scientific grounds, that Galileo had not fully proved his case. ' De- crees from Rome,' he told the Jesuits in the Provincial Letters, ' will not keep the earth stationary on its axis. If scientific observation proves that it moves, all the men on it will not stop it from moving, or themselves from moving with it.'

Following on this breach with the past came a new mode of scientific inquiry. The scholastic logic had been a highly elaborated technique accessible only to a few ; and those few were generally so much encumbered by the complexity of their own procedure as to have little leisure to spare for getting at the facts beneath. But now a belief in ' Nature ' was springing up — that is, in lay intelligence. It was thought that honest, reasonable laymen could solve important questions for themselves without professional assistance. Descartes wrote in French, instead of Latin, because he did not wish to have book-worms for his critics, but readers of average understanding. His great complaint against the professors was that they had always preferred the complex to the simple, the difficult to the easy. In the wish to seem

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subtle and profound, they had passed by, as unworthy of notice, the truths immediately under their feet. And it was precisely among these simple, commonplace truths that Descartes hoped to find the key of knowledge. To grasp them nothing was needed but good sense ; and of all human qualities good sense was the most evenly distributed. It was, as Descartes said himself, the one thing that people generally difficult to satisfy never desired a larger share of than they already had. Philosophers only differed from the rest of mankind in that their good sense moved in a more orderly, systematic fashion. Descartes himself, who was not a modest man, attributed his own discoveries to the excellence of his methods much more than to anything extraordinary in his brain.

Thus simplicity became the note of the new logic. * I doubt not,' cried Blaise Pascal, ' that its rules must be unsophisticated, clear and natural. Barbara and baralipton will not teach us reasoning. We must not screw our mind too high. Straining ambition ends in laughable pretentious- ness, and a bombast foreign to our nature. The mind prefers a swollen, windy diet to solid, wholesome food.' Still, even a ' natural ' system of logic does not spring fully armed from any man's brain. Its first principles must be taken over from some already existing science, and in the early seventeenth century that science could only be geometry. Its two characteristics were its clearness and its certainty, and both were guaranteed by its method. First it analysed every conception down into its simplest elements — notions of space, body, and the like — all of them so axio- matically clear that it seemed useless to dissect them further. ' Nature herself,' as Pascal said, ' has given us a surer insight into their meaning than philosophers could furnish by the most artistic definition.' This foundation once laid, mathematics proceeded to build upon it, admitting only so much as immediately followed from the original truth.

THE DEAD HAND 45

Thus the reasoner held certainty within the hollow of his hand. He need only let his mind run up and down the chain of arguments to feel sure that neither the chain itself, nor any single link thereof, could possibly be otherwise than they were. Indeed, the more enthusiastic geometers maintained that mathematical reasoning was a kind of spontaneous generation. Of their own free motion, as it were, and without the interference of the mind, these primary truths gave birth to others, as certain as them- selves ; and the whole work of science lay in watching these first simple axioms unfold into truths increasingly complex, just as naturally as a single seed breaks into stems and buds and roots. Thus mathematical reasoning became as certain as the course of nature herself ; one demonstration succeeded another, as summer follows spring.

Here, then, was the model dialectic our inquirers sought. Cast any argument into a mathematical mould, and its certainty and clearness were alike assured ; the spirit the reasoner must imbibe was the geometrical spirit. ' All the world,' will one day cry Blaise Pascal, ' seeks a safe- guard against mistakes. Logicians profess to offer it ; geometers alone succeed. Outside their science, and such others as follow it, there are no real demonstrations. The whole art of reasoning is contained in its precepts. They alone suffice ; they alone can prove ; all other rules are mischievous or useless. This I know from a long experience both of books and men.' Hence the geometrical enthusiasm of the century — an enthusiasm that took the strangest forms. It ranges from Spinoza's attempt to work out the mathematics of the Love of God down to the exploits of Sir Hudibras, who,

by geometric scale Gould take the size ot pots of ale.

The great Jansenist, Antoine Arnauld, applied geometry to morals in his ' Dissertation selon la methode des geometres

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pour la justification de ceux qui emploient, en ecrivant, des termes que le monde estime durs ' ; where he proves by A-f- B that it is sometimes right to say hard things of the Society of Jesus. Mersenne, still more greatly daring, proposed to introduce geometry into theology itself, and pressed on the superiors of religious houses a consideration of the question whether the saintly could not multiply their merits in geometrical progression.

Behind Mersenne's froth, however, lay a serious purpose. The geometrical spirit was not always lovely, when embodied in concrete flesh and blood. It fostered a temper of mind masculine to the point of aggressiveness, prone to criticise and cross-examine, exceedingly full of belief in itself, and exceedingly intolerant of all it did not understand. And it was quite as merciless in self-defence as in attack. It never brought forward a thesis without proving at inordinate length that every word it said had been correctly reasoned out from unexceptionable first principles. When Pascal presently forsakes the Paris Club for the world of salons and society, his fashionable friends will groan beneath his ' long demonstrations drawn out line by line.' Yet the demonstrations had their use. Men of science had many new truths to teach the world ; but, before they could expect the world to listen, they must inspire public confidence in their methods. They must show that they were not throwing over traditional opinions out of mere caprice, that Galileo's conclusions rested on quite as sound a chain of argument as Aristotle's own. Hence the need of making clear that they took never a word on trust, left nothing unexplained. But if the new philosophy was long-winded, it had one enormous advantage over the old. To follow the scholastic reasonings required a long and tedious apprenticeship, whereas the methods of the geometrical spirit could be understood by anyone. The whole secret lay in building up elaborate theories by slow and stately deduction from

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some self-evident commonplace. And in practised hands the commonplaces proved anything but barren. Give Descartes matter and motion, and he will construct the world. Grant to Jean Jacques Rousseau that all men are born free and equal, and he will draw out with infallible precision the only possible form that a civilised society can assume. No wonder if the geometrical spirit seemed capable of moving mountains. ' It is the last word in philosophy,' cries Condorcet. ' It is enough of itself to raise an eternal barrier between the human race and the hoary errors of its childhood.'

CHAPTER IV

UNIVERSAL MECHANISM

' I HAVE often wondered,' wrote Father Mersenne about the time of Pascal's birth, ' whether it would be possible to put morals on the same footing as physics and mathematics, and proceed by a priori reasoning and efficient causes, instead of doing like Aristotle and his disciples, and always looking to the final end.' l As regards morals, Mersenne's hope was doomed to disappointment ; but he lived long enough to help much in driving final causes from the domain of natural science. The first achievement of the geometrical spirit was to sweep away the old scholastic doctrine of the purpose. According to that doctrine the universe was created for the sake of Christian man, and all things in it must be explained with reference to this final end. Indeed, scholastic thought was primitive enough to credit the stocks and stones themselves with dim, half-human consciousness of their mission ; the old adage that nature abhors a vacuum was treated as a literal truth. And what was meant by this ' abhorrence,' Dr. Guiffart, the Rouen friend of the Pascals, shall explain. ' Belief in the impos- sibility of a vacuum is so generally held, and so obstinately defended, by all who follow the most famous of philosophers, that they would rather see the world return to primeval chaos than take one step towards admitting it. From centre to

1 Impitti des Diistea, Paris, 1624, L p. 39. 48

UNIVEKSAL MECHANISM 49

circumference, they hold that nature is one vast expanse of bodies, all joined together so exactly as to leave no room for any empty space between them. If such space were possible it would certainly be large, terms like more or less having no meaning for a vacuum, which is pure nothingness and negativity. And as it finds no place in nature, so also it can offer no support to other bodies. Thus its introduction would disturb the nice adjustment whereby they all balance and sustain each other ; the whole universe would fall together like a house of cards. To prevent this, nature has given each and every body a particular inclination, hi satisfying which it incidentally subserves her purpose. But she has further given the bodies a second inclination — common to all alike, and often at variance with the first — to support her in the resolution never to endure a vacuum. Thus heavy bodies have an inclination to descend, light bodies to mount up ; while the two fluids, air and water, act as the prompt and eager couriers of nature in filling up spaces that would otherwise be empty. Hence if violence be offered, and attempts be made to force a vacuum upon her, all these bodies are equipped in her defence. Sacrificing their private interests to the common good, they abandon their natural inclination — nay, if need be, they assume its opposite ; for they would rather die than fail to defend the Mistress of the Universe against the onslaughts of their deadly enemy.' *

However picturesque this theory, it was a serious obstacle to science. In the first place it explained obscure things by obscurer. How could a stone have ' inclinations ' ; and if it had, how could it set about their gratification ? Had it, as Blaise Pascal asked, arms or legs or nerves ? Further, scholastic utterances were dangerously final. Horror of a vacuum amply accounted for the wish of heavy bodies to fall. Accordingly it was assumed as an ultimate fact that

' Guiffart, Discours du Vide (Rouen, 1648), pp. 15-26.

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such bodies have a natural propensity for falling ; but what exactly ' heaviness ' implied, and why it should be connected with falling, were questions scholasticism left unanswered. Its work was done, once it had determined the inclination — that is, the purpose — of an object, and referred this to its place in the general economy of creation. Thus the doctors in the ' Malade Imaginaire ' ask why opium sends their patients to sleep, and think they have exhausted the subject when they answer : ' Because it has dormitive virtue.' For it never occurred to the Paris faculty that a single object could be intended for more purposes than one, or that opium might have properties which were not sedative. Antimony — discovered about the beginning of the seventeenth century — was a poison, and could not be anything but poisonous. The idea that it might be beneficial, when administered in moderate quantities, was only slowly making its way in the very teeth of scholastic medicine.

Geometry soon convinced Diafoirus and his brethren of screwing whatever minds they had too high, in that they asked the difficult question, Why, before they had satisfied themselves as to the simpler matter of How. Besides, not only the ' virtues ' and the ' inclinations ' but the whole scholastic fabric crumbled at a touch, once its foundations were laid bare. It was built up on nothing more solid than a huge conjecture as to the supposed intentions of the Deity in creating the world ; and to mathematicians conjectural know- ledge is no knowledge at all. How did we know, asked Descartes, why the universe was created? Had God called the schoolmen to his council-board ? How dare they assume that the firmament was created only for our use ? Was God so greedy of human praise, that He designed the sun and moon merely to get our thanks ? What, then, could be known for certain about material bodies ? Geometry was not slow in answering : their mathematical relations. Science might not be able to explain why

UNIVEESAL MECHANISM 51

keys had ' aperitive virtue ' ; it might fairly hope to calculate the exact amount of force involved in the principle of the lever. Hence the enthusiasm of the new school for weights and measures ; Galileo, its patriarch, cannot be thought of without his compasses and scales. In his eyes all the activities of nature were movements in space and time, and therefore fell under the jurisdiction of the man of science ; his only business was to measure them, and thence infer their formula, or ' law.' Some definite formula there must be ; for Nature was herself a mathematician, who kept to one invariable rhythm. To discover its mathematical equivalents, and thus ' bind together in one faggot ' whole masses of isolated facts, seemed to Galileo not only a useful, but a pious task. Mathema- tical language, in its crystal clearness and rigidity, symbol- ised the one unchanging Law of God, and enabled man to see the universe as He sees it, free from the shifting clouds of sense.

If mathematics held the place of honour in Galileo's heart — because the cord, that binds the faggots, is more important than the individual sticks — they did not stand alone. Calculation must everywhere be controlled by obser- vation of concrete facts ; otherwise it would be like the spiders which Francis Bacon denounced — for ever spinning systems sound enough in logic, but utterly out of touch with the realities of things. Galileo accordingly turned to experi- ment— that is, to disciplined observation ; and he showed a marvellous power of divining exactly what experiment would best determine?the" crucial point. In all this he was a pioneer. <- The very idea of appealing to experiment, as a serious test of truth, is no older than the seventeenth century, and still had many prejudices to overcome. Good Aristotelians pointed out how undignified it was for a learned man to leave his study, andFfumble with weighing machines and blow-pipes, just like any common mechanic. They

E 2

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never descended to such meannesses. On the few occasions when a practical demonstration could not be avoided — as, for instance, in anatomical lectures — the professor thun- dered from his desk above, while a servant stood below, and plied the scalpel under his orders. Herein some of Aris- totle's worst enemies agreed for once with the Peripatetics. Experiment holds a very humble place in Descartes' system of investigation ; and his great disciple, Malebranche, could seldom forego an eerie shudder, as he saw dead matter slowly conforming to laws already marked out by thought. !•$$ Not that Descartes was the visionary dreamer it pleases popular fancy to imagine : his objects were as practical as Francis Bacon's own. If he studied Nature, it was in order to reform the natural sciences, more especially medicine and mechanics, and such others as touch closely on human life. But whereas Galileo had held the balance between mathema- tics and experiment, Descartes was wholly mathematical — resolute, as he said himself, to force on physics the language of geometry. For this there were several reasons. He was a Frenchman, with all his country's love of broad, decisive generalities. He wished, as he said, to deduce effects from causes, not causes from effects — that is, to deal only with the general principle, and let the details take care of themselves. Galileo's teasing experiments were not for him. They were fragmentary ; they were inconclusive ; they left their work half-done. They were excellent in" determining when and how a thing happened ; but why it happened they could not tell. And Descartes was just as impatient as any schoolman to get on from how to why. He was a public character, bound to speak out with no uncertain voice. Scholasticism was the enemy ; friends like Mersenne were always telling him that the time had come to make an end of it ; and that he was the man to strike the final blow on behalf of truth and wisdom.1 Officially, Descartes declined

1 Baillet, ii. p. 86.

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the invitation. He said that the best way to refute the school- men was to appear politely ignorant of their existence. Eeally, however, he so drew out his own philosophy (not without a hope of seeing it adopted by more enlightened universities and religious orders) as to meet and turn ' Stagyrolatry ' at every point. He posed, in fact, as a kind of anti- Aristotle, much as Loyola thought himself the anti- Luther, or Metternich the anti-Buonaparte. Hence he easily descended to fight scholasticism with its own weapons. It was dogmatic : he must be equally dogmatic. It pro- fessed to explain the universe in general, and all that was therein ; he must leave no single point without an explana- tion. And in this article he had his reward. His bitterest critics cannot deny that scholasticism soon crumbled away wherever Cartesian principles made their entrance.

For Cartesianism professed to build up a complete philosophy of the universe on absolutely sure foundations. What could be known for certain about an external world ? Following his usual practice, Descartes began by putting aside all information of dubious pedigree. The evidence of the senses was immediately ruled out of court. These are subjective — in us, and not in the things that cause them. They do not tell us whence they come, nor why they vary, nor even whether they represent their originals correctly. Hence, if reality is to be reached, things must be stripped of every quality lent them by the senses. Take Descartes' own instance of a honeycomb. Its colour goes, for that is an affection of our retina. Its weight and malleability go, for they are relative to our muscles. Its present shape goes, for that would change — sense does not tell us how or why — if the wax was brought too close to a fire. Does, then, all our knowledge melt with it ? No. Quite apart from the evidence of our senses, we have certain ' clear ideas ' — intui- tions common to every rational being, and so luminous and self-evident as to be beyond the reach of doubt. One of

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these tells us the bare fact that an external world exists. But if material bodies exist at all, they must be extended in space. Being extended, they must have some sort of figure, however often that figure may vary. And as, in order to be, they must be somewhere, they can always be thought of as moved to somewhere else. Accordingly in these three things — extension, figure, motion — abides the ultimate reality of the whole material universe. Hence the Cartesian doctrine of universal mechanism. However diversified its play may seem to sense, the world of bodies knows but one activity : upon a background of extended matter motion is for ever determining new figures. This is the meaning of Descartes' famous boast — one of the most tremendous ever made by mortal man. ' Give me matter and motion,' he said, ' and I wih1 construct the world.'

Hence a final disappearance of the whole scholastic apparatus of ' purposes ' and ' virtues.' Galileo had left them on one side ; Descartes destroyed them by explaining them away. All material activities of every sort were caused by matter and motion ; and inasmuch as both of these were absolutely homogeneous and simple, there could be none but differences of quality between one object and another. Trees did not grow, nor pebbles fall, because they had an ' inclination ' to do so. Being simply bundles of matter, they could have no propensities at all. The reason why the tree mounts, and the pebble descends, is simply that the quantity of motion which impels the one upwards, and the other down, is greater than the quantity of motion acting in the opposite direction. But quantities can always be expressed in numbers ; and once science knows the way the numbers combine, it can calculate exactly the rate at which the tree will grow, or the pebble fall. Hence the practical advantage of introducing numbers everywhere, since power of forecast is power of control ; and this was the object of Cartesian physics. Light and heat were

UNIVEKSAL MECHANISM «5

resolved into mechanism offmoleeular vibration — ' a move- ment of globules,' says Blaise Pascal, ' and the pleasure they give a mere ballet des esprits,' or dance of nervous currents.1 Animals were automata, — machines — and so was the human body itself. ' All its movements,' says Descartes, ' follow naturally from the sole disposition of its organs, just as the movements of a clock follow naturally from the arrangement of its weights and wheels. So that there is no reason to suppose any principle of movement in the body, other than the blood and its animal spirits, agitated by the heat of the fire which burns continually in the heart, and which does not differ in nature from any of the other fires met with in inanimate bodies.' 2 In short, the whole universe was mechanism, and the laws of nature were the same as those of mathematics.

Manifestly so vast a thesis could not be proved experi- mentally, in the way Galileo would have demanded ; but for that Descartes did not care. Experiment was a mere affair of the senses, whereas universal mechanism rested on the surer basis of a metaphysical necessity of thought. Fully satisfied, Descartes proceeded to derive from his fundamental principle various corollaries as certain as itself. One was that the world is infinite, since nothing authorises our mind to set limits to extension. Another was the im- possibility of a vacuum — not, of course, because nature ' abhors ' it in the scholastic sense — but simply because a space empty of extended matter would be outside the uni- verse. The intervening spaces in his theory Descartes filled up with hypotheses — all of them brilliantly ingenious, though seldom able to boast of experimental verification. Hence they are often wide of the mark ; and their aberra- tions would be greater still, had not Descartes' practice

1 Pens. 368.

2 Quoted by Michael Foster, Lecture* on the History of Phytiology (Cam- bridge, 1901), p. 267.

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paid much more attention to experience than his principles demanded. Wherever it was there to guide him, his hypotheses steered a delicate middle course between the rights of universal mechanism on the one hand, and of observation on the other ; physical processes were described in the most mechanical manner that the facts would bear. Where facts were wanting, Descartes gave his mechanical propensities free rein. ' In order to make his expositions of the human machine clear and convincing,' says Michael Foster, ' he does not hesitate to attribute to its various parts features which he describes as though they belonged to the common knowledge of the time, although neither he nor anyone else had actually seen them.' 1 What degree of faith he expected such theories to gain it is not easy to determine. They began life as avowed conjectures. As they grew in number, they became mutually self-supporting. At last, in the hands of Descartes' disciples — naturally more Cartesian than their master — all trace of their hypothetical origin was lost.

The danger of this method was its greatest recommen- dation. On the imaginative and poetical side — as distinct from the side of prosaic achievement — no man ever did more than Descartes to further the advance of science. By preaching universal mechanism from the house-tops, by applying it recklessly on every side, he showed that a purely mechanical explanation of the universe was logically possible, however whimsical and mistaken some of his own theories might be. Even before the close of his own century men learnt to separate the shadow from the substance, and applaud his general design, without taking all the hypotheses quite seriously. ' Descartes was too clever,' wrote the greatest plrysi- ologist of the succeeding generation, the Dane, Nicholas Stensen, ' to explain the real nature of man. He is content

1 Op. cit. p. 261.

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to describe a machine capable of performing all the functions of which man is capable. He was the first who dared explain all the functions of man, and especially of the brain, in a mechanical manner. By means of this he opened up for us a way to investigate the other parts of the body, though it may be difficult to do so with the same clearness and fidelity.' 1

Stensen, belonging to a later period, could afford to praise ; but the contemporaries of the Paris Club saw matters in a different light. While Descartes was working out his ab- stract theories, they had been developing in an exactly opposite direction, and had embraced the experimental side of Galileo's teaching with all the zeal of neophytes. Even their interest in geometry relaxed, as they grew more and more wedded to their laboratory and its message of concrete, tangible fact. Mersenne himself was swept away by the current, and admitted that geometry had no advantage over physics or morals other than its greater certitude. He longed for the day when these latter sciences should be established on a basis as immovable ' both because they deal with matters more excellent than quantity, and because their principles are the real causes of their effects ; whereas the principles of geometry are only causes of the conclusions we draw.' 3 In their interest he became the crusader of experimental science, and was for ever discovering outrages on his liege lady in the most unlikely quarters — as for instance in the devotional works of St. Francis of Sales. That great master of fanciful comparisons — drawing, as was his habit, on some scrap of legendary folk-lore — once said that covetousness kept souls back from God, as a diamond hinders the attraction of iron to the magnet. To which Mersenne indignantly replied that diamonds had no effect on attrac- tion, as a very simple experiment would prove ; it was

1 Quoted : Michael Foster, op. cit. p. 62.

2 Questions Inouies, c. xix.

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inexcusable in Monsieur de Sales to make such utterly base- less assertions on matters so easily put to the test.1 And certainly, in stronger hands than his, experiment was a deadlier weapon than Cartesianism itself. Scholasticism never received a more resounding blow than Galileo's demonstrations on the Leaning Tower of Pisa — unless it was the investigations into atmospheric pressure, afterwards carried out by Blaise Pascal at the Puy-de-D6me. ' You may call my son's experiments foolish and dishonest,' Stephen Pascal was one day to write to Father Noel ; ' but permit me to tell you, Eeverend Sir, that they have at any rate disarmed you, and forced you out of the school-philo- sophy you teach at Clermont College.' 2

Aristotle was not the only victim. The younger members of the club soon began to turn their favourite weapon on the great contemner of experiment. At first they had welcomed Descartes as a prophet of deliverance out of the Egypt of scholasticism ; and with his universal mechanism they had no quarrel, when regarded simply as the assumption from which all physical inquiry must start. Blaise Pascal was quite willing to agree en gros — in a general way — that figure and movement were the universal causes. And he even found Scriptural warrant for his thesis in the Book of Wisdom : ' Thou hast ordered all things in measure, and number, and weight.' 3 But with Descartes universal mechanism was much more than a mere assumption ; it was a metaphysical certainty guaranteed by supposed neces- sities of thought. The club had no love for such necessities, nor, indeed, for metaphysics at all ; science had not escaped from its long bondage to the theologians only to enter on a new servitude to professors of philosophy. For, as time

1 Questions Inouies, c. xvi. The reference is to St. Francis, Traiti de V Amour de Dieu, vii. c. 14.

2 Lettre au Plre Noel, Works, iii. p. 71.

3 Wisdom, xi. 21, quoted by Pascal, in Esprit Geometrique, Works, ii. p. 168. See also Pens. 79.

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went on, new Cartesian mechanism showed more and more tendency to resemble old scholastic purpose writ large. Already Gassendi was angrily complaining that Monsieur Descartes only made war on Aristotle, in the hope of seating his own theories in Aristotle's vacant chair. Gassendi's caustic pupil, Sorbiere, declared that Aristotle himself did not ask for greater submissiveness from his disciples than did Monsieur Descartes. They must keep on absorbing his philosophy, until it had soaked through every winding of their brain. Often they ended by understanding it better than he did himself.1

And Pascal mocked at his ' universality,' just as Sorbiere mocked at his dogmatism. Science was growing sick of grandiose systems — ' fanciful endeavours to satisfy man's curiosity about the unknown, which, so far from increasing our knowledge, only serve to cloak the ignorance of their propounder, and to increase the ignorance of his disciples.' 2 With obvious reference to Descartes' 'Principia/ Pascal went on to urge that there was just as much idle parade in writing flashy treatises on the principles of philosophy as in the most flagrantly absurd scholastic thesis de omni scibili. But Descartes had done worse than make pontifical pronouncements on matters beyond our ken. He had laid down the law on matters where experiment could check him, and experiment had proved him wrong. Thus, his metaphysics requiring that the universe should be full, he had promptly invented a ' subtle matter ' to fill it, and pro- nounced a vacuum impossible. Whereupon Pascal set to work to prove that a vacuum is not only possible, but actual matter of fact. As to the subtle matter, he simply laughed ; and took the confusion between physical matter and geometrical space, which brought that imaginary substance into being, as his favourite example of the lengths to which

1 Baillet, ii. pp. 169, 264.

" Recit de V Ex-pbrience du Puy-de-D6me, Works, iii. p. 146.

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a hardened theorist could go. On many isolated points, it is true, he agreed with the Cartesians ; but his final judgment on their master is recorded in the ' Pensees.' There the Christian pronounces Descartes ' useless ' for salvation ; but the experimentalist does not forget to add that he is also ' uncertain.' J

No doubt, such a verdict is more than a little unfair to Descartes ; but men who spend their lives in a laboratory, slowly and painfully piecing together minute particles of truth, are never likely to be very respectful towards the cheap gains of a priori speculation. They know that in proportion as our knowledge advances — as universal mechan- ism itself is rightly understood — the more a final explanation of the world becomes a hopeless dream. ' All things being caused and causes, acted on and agents, mediate and immediate, and all being held together by a natural and invisible chain that links the farthest and the most unlike, I hold it impossible to understand the parts without a know- ledge of the whole, or to know the whole without a thorough comprehension of the parts.' And that was beyond the power of man ; that was where ' all the philosophers come to grief.' 3 Hence the strenuous efforts of the Paris Club to keep science out of their clutches. In a curious lecture, obviously aimed at the Cartesians, Boberval discusses the various branches of learning. Metaphysics he dismisses as a mere congeries of irresponsible fancies. Logic is full of traps, designed and undesigned. Morals leave far too large a place to accident and subjective caprice. Far above these stand mathematics. They are true, unchangeable and in- vincible within their own domain ; but then, that domain only extends to abstractions, and stops short of the com- plexity of material things. Physics, on the other hand, deal with the contingent, and yet keep altogether free from the vagaries of individual taste. ' Dixi,' writes Eoberval,

1 Pens. 78. 2 Pens. 72.

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' in rebus Physicis, quod verum fit aut falsum, non ab hominum voluntate, sed ab intrinseca rerum ipsorum natura pendere, quam mutare nobis non liceat, sed tantum quomodo ilia se habent, investigare.' l

Here at last, then, men could feel that they were face to face with nature. Here at last they had shaken off that intrusive subjective element, which a theological Pascal will presently call the tyranny of the Moi. No wonder that physics seemed to them the queen of sciences. ' In vain men band together against her,' cries Eoberval. ' She changes not for all the dreams of their hollow metaphysic. Morality may appeal to authority, to weight of numbers, to self-deception ; she will ensure herself a certain fall, if she tries a bout with Physics. Although she is as ancient as the world, she never grows old, for time is but her vassal ; she is as hoary in her methods as she is new in her results.' 3 And plainly she must be pursued in the most objective possible manner ; weighing-machines and test-tubes must take the place of human theories and guesses. Pascal fitly ushers in the age of Otto Guericke and Robert Boyle, when he lays down that in physics experiment is our true master. Nay, the whole history of science during the latter half of the seventeenth century is one long commentary on the motto that introduces the Experimenta Nova Magdeburgica into the world. ' All philosophy, except it be supported by experiments, is empty, fallacious and useless. What monstrosities philosophers, in other respects of the highest and subtlest genius, may produce by neglecting experiment. Experience alone is the dissolver of doubts, the reconciler of difficulties, the sole mistress of truth, who holds a torch before us in obscurity, unties our knots, teaches us the true cause of things.' 3

1 Seconde Narration sur h Vide, printed in Brunschvicg's edition of Pascal, vol. ii. p. 332.

2 Fragment Inedit, printed in Brunschvicg, ii. pp. 49, 50. s Quoted : Wheweli, Philosophy of Discovery, p. 169.

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Still, the experimental zeal of Blaise Pascal was some- thing more than a mere concession to the spirit of his time. It seems paradoxical to say of a great mathematician that his ruling passion was devotion to the concrete ; yet it was only the certainty of mathematics that induced Blaise to tolerate their abstractions. All his life long he preached that reasoning was like the giant Antaeus — only strong while he kept close to the solid earth. To desert the positive facts of experiment for vague a 'priori generalisations seemed to Pascal far worse than useless ; it was a deliberate for- saking of the road appointed for our mind to travel. ' Nature,' he wrote, * meant all her truths to be independent ; our art subordinates one to another. That is not natural ; each one ought to keep its place. " What ! A whole system com- prised in a word ! " you say. Perhaps ; but what is the good of that without an explanation ? And once you begin explaining you have to drop the general principle, and fall back on the individual facts. There you are, landed in the original confusion you were so anxious to avoid. The truth is you might just as well lock facts up in a box as hide them away behind the principle ; it is only in their primitive heterogeneous state that they can have any meaning for us.'1

This devotion to the concrete pursued him on to the mathematical field itself. Hence his life-long opposition to the methods of Descartes — first shown when he preferred Desargues as a guide in the matter of conic sections. Descartes' mathematical innovations were a direct conse- quence of his universal mechanism Inasmuch as all move- ments of every kind were products of a single cause, Des- cartes not only wished to measure them, but to compare the measurements themselves. ' I was not long in finding out,' he said, ' that^all the so-called physical sciences agree in this, that they consider nothing but the relations or

1 Pens. 20, 21.

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proportions of their objects, whatever those objects may happen to be. Hence I thought it well to devote myself entirely to these proportions at large.' Behind the various sciences that treat of special kinds of magnitudes — space, or sound, or force — he had caught the outlines of an all- embracing science of magnitudes as such. From a combina- tion of the data furnished by geometry, acoustics, and the rest, it would draw generalisations applicable to all these sciences, though wider than any of them could make on their more limited domain. In other words, it was to do the work nowadays performed by algebra. Algebra of a kind already existed, though in a very raw, imperfect state. Mathe- maticians had not yet learnt how to express the various sorts of magnitudes in a uniform language. Geometry, in particular, defied them. It was composed of figures and dimensions ; the dimensions could be expressed numerically, but the figures could not. Descartes met the challenge by inventing analytical geometry. Instead of waiting till the figure was drawn, he drew two fixed intersecting straight lines, called co-ordinate axes, and determined the position of any point in their plane by measuring its distance from the axes. Variations in its position were shown by changes in their distances, much as a rise or fall in the pressure gauge of an engine reflects the movements of the machine^. Thenceforward there is no more need to think of the figure as a concrete image ; an algebraical equation, connecting the co-ordinate of the moving point in all its positions take the place of the actual square or circle, and it becomes possible to compare different figures together by referring them to the same co-ordinate axes.

Fruitful as this invention was afterwards to prove, it met with little favour at the time. Old-fashioned mathematicians denied it as a device too clever to be honest. Many of them would not use algebra at all, holding it little better than a trick. Blaise Pascal stood by no means alone in preferring

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the^ longest geometrical routes to the short and easy way pointed out by so dubious a guide. ' The close and grasping character of the ancient reasoning,' says Augustus de Morgan, ' did not accompany the new method. Algebra was rather a half-understood art than a science ; and all who valued strictness of demonstration adhered as close as possible to the ancient geometry.' For the most part, however, a mathematician of the ancient, or ' synthetic ' school steered altogether clear of the questions that had brought analytical geometry into being ; his business lay not with relative values, but with individual figures. These he studied in their whole length and breadth until they had yielded up all their secrets. It became a triumph to discover fresh unsuspected consequences lurking in a definition — much as commentators in another field pride themselves on seeing :

Two points in Hamlet's soul Unseized by the Germans yet —

or to crystallise round some mystic hexagram a whole series of new truths. Blaise Pascal was a faithful mouthpiece of this spirit, when he deduces more than four hundred corollaries from one proposition in conic sections ; and the same influence runs through his speculations on number — for example, when he introduced his arithmetical triangle to the world with the declaration : ' I explain a few of its properties, but leave many more unnoticed. It is marvellous how rich this triangle is in properties ! There is room for everyone to discover fresh.' l

Thus the same causes kept Pascal attached to the ancient methods in geometry as made him an experimentalist in science and a Jansenist in religion. His interests were precisely opposed to the interests of Descartes. That philosopher was first and foremost a man of business. He had invented analytical geometry in the service of universal

1 Divers Usages du Triangle Arithmetique, Works, iii. p. 251.

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mechanism : he had formulated universal mechanism itself in the interests of practical scientific reform. Hence, he dealt largely in the general formulas, that bring a new discovery within the reach of commonplace intelligence. Analytical methods were developed and generalised, until they acted like a mill. Stripped of all but its essentials, the problem was put in at one end, and taken out again at the other, after undergoing an almost mechanical solution. But the geometers of the older school were anything but utili- tarian. They collected quaint problems — ' curiosities,' the scornful Descartes called them — much as other men might collect bric-a-brac or engravings ; and they were proud of the limitation of their sciences, which obliged them to find a separate procedure for every question attacked. Blaise Pascal, in particular, was the sworn enemy of all machine- made solutions, whether given hi answer to problems of Cartesian science or problems of Jesuit morality. This intellectual sportsman despised a mere result in comparison with the pleasure and healthy excitement of the chase; Then, too, he was attracted by the paradox of allying the most rigorous demonstration with freakish tours de force. From one inaccessible height to another he climbed, always by perfectly legitimate, but most unlikely routes, and he took a malicious pleasure in giving as few hints as possible to future mountaineers. But even this most individualistic of thinkers made one large contribution to the public good. Employment of Eoberval's method of exhaustions led him to the threshold of the integral calculus ; in technical language, he compared, transformed, and finally evaluated a large number of integrals. Yet he did so merely by the way, and without any thought of the general principle on which the calculus depends. To reach after such general principles would have meant desertion to the analytical camp ; and though Pascal was willing enough to attack the favourite problems of the rival school, he did so in a spirit rigorously

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synthetic. By what law bodies in general diminish infinitely he neither knew nor cared ; his one concern was for the concrete bodies immediately under his hand. Thus it was almost against his will that he smoothed the path for Isaac Newton and Leibniz, and hence is reckoned among the founders of modern higher mathematics. ' The period between 1615 and 1668,' says the historian of that science, ' was dominated by the discovery of the calculus, and in this Frenchmen played the leading part. Two of them stand out pre-eminent — Fermat, in leading up to the differential calculus, and Pascal in leading to the integral.' x

Still such a mind is not easily bound down to any definite plan of research. Pascal much preferred to pose as the knight-errant of geometry, wandering hither and thither hi search of questions hard enough to be worthy of his steel. Most of all, it pleased him to swoop down on questions that had already baffled others. As he began his mathematical career by improving on Desargues so he ended it by smoothing out Roberval's tangled speculations over the cycloid. Between these two came his disputes wibh Fermat — ' nos coups fourres,' his adversary called them — over mathe- matical probability and the theory of number. On this field alone he met with his match, as he himself most willingly acknowledged. ' I have dared to cross swords with you over probabilities,' he wrote to the judge, ' but for your speculations on number you must find another antagonist. They are far above my head. I can do nothing but admire, and beg you most earnestly to go on with them.'

Blaise, however, did not take these contests very seriously ; to him they were in a literal sense ' fights with the gloves.' It was only during the early Desargues period that mathematics could offer him the two things he most needed — difficult problems and sure results. Before he

1 Moritz Cantor, Oeschichte derMathematik (Leipzic, 1900), ii. p. 843.

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left Rouen, he had come to see that there are more important things in the world than difficult mathematical problems ; and his approaching first conversion is only the formal acknowledgment of this fact. ' In time of affliction,' he said (and affliction was soon in coming, in the shape of a long and wearisome illness), ' understanding of the natural world could not console me for ignorance of the moral ; whereas understanding of the moral world would always console me for ignorance of the natural.' For Blaise was no laborious professor, content to sit for ever in his study, placidly inquiring information ; every scrap of knowledge he possesses must immediately be translated into character, into life. And since mathematics are but a feeble guide to action, Blaise presently came to look upon them as having no more than an educational value as the envelope of the geometrical spirit. ' To tell you the truth,' he wrote to Fermat, ' I think geometry the finest training the human mind can have ; but at the same time it seems to me so useless, that I scarcely trouble to distinguish between a geometer who is simply a geometer, and a clever artisan. It is the finest trade in the world, and nothing more than a trade — excellent, as I have often said, for us to try our wings on, but not fit to be the object of our flight. For my own part, I would not walk two steps for geometry, and I fancy you are very much of my opinion.' l

1 Letter of 10th August, 1660, Works, iii. p. 237.

v 2

CHAPTEE V

PRESIDENT DU VAIR

UNTIL the close of their stay at Eouen, theological questions entered but little into the family life of the Pascals. Under the rule of Eichelieu, most secular of cardinals, the Church by no means held the position it afterwards gained under Louis XIV. Middle-aged memories still went back to the Wars of Eeligion in the previous century, when France had been torn in two by dogmatic discord ; and now that order was restored, most good Frenchmen had made up their minds that never again should dogma endanger the public peace. Catholicism, left outwardly on its throne, was brought under strict surveillance by the civil power ; its profession was not so much a duty to God as a duty to the State. Not that any self-respecting man wished to call its doctrines in question. The age of passionate negation had not yet dawned ; and scepticism of the lighter sort, though already common enough, was associated neither with sound learning nor with a reputable life. But the Church's hold on lay imaginations had seriously weakened, more especially in the cultivated bureaucratic class from which the Pascals sprang. Official guardians of the King's prerogative, these lawyers were always on the watch against the machinations of Eome ; official guardians of the common law, they were for ever suspecting some new encroachment of the spiritual courts. Of this general mistrust of the clergy Gui Patin's

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letters are only a half-humorous exaggeration — with their explosive diatribes against priests, monks, and especially ' that black Loyolitic scum from Spain,' which called itself the Society of Jesus. France would never have peace, he said, till she sent friars and friaresses packing off to the Isles of America, there to cultivate purgatory at their leisure. And his private confession of faith may claim, at least, the merit of brevity : ' Credo in Deum, Christum crucifixum, &c. . . . De minimis non curat praetor.'

Patin went farther than most of his class, but Patin was no sceptic. Jesters who made game of the kernel of religion, came quite as much under the lash of his tongue as bigots who dared defend its husks. He had a firm, though uncon- ventional, belief in Providence. ' Non est currentis, neque volentis, sed Dei miserantis,' this incorrigible dealer in quotations was wont to say of human fate. So also with regard to immortality. ' One Ancient,' he writes with airy reference to Lucretius and Horace, ' says he would rather not die ; although, once he was dead, he would know nothing about it. Another thinks that death is a gain, because there must be something beyond it. As for me, I say the same as my parish priest.' Not that he was in any hurry to discover whether the priest was right. ' Si post fata venit gloria, non propero,' was another favourite tag. Meanwhile he looked in hours of trouble to ' the three great judges mentioned by Apollonius : the Gods, Time and Philosophy.' And above his innumerable grumblings pierces a note of healthy Stoicism. * Never will I repeat the craven lines :

Quum rapiunt mala fata bonos, ignoscite fasso, Sollicitor nullos esse putare decs.

I am much more tempted to cry : "0 bone Romule, ista videbis et feres." '

Much more conventional minds than his sat very loose

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to Church observances. Listlessness naturally followed on the popular belief — already impressed by Stephen Pascal on his children — that faith and reason had nothing to do with each other. No doubt, Stephen's son will one day give this maxim a new and tremendous spiritual significance ; but on the father's lips it meant no more than that Catholicism need not be suffered to invade the sphere of daily life. Its place was on Sundays and State-occasions, such as the crisis of domestic history commemorated in Jacqueline's verse. Quite a large proportion of her poems deal with sacred subjects. On the death of a Huguenot friend she consoled herself with the reflection that there might, perhaps, be paths to Heaven uncharted on the Eoman maps ; and in thanking God for her recovery from the smallpox, she assured Him that the resulting scars would be guardians of her innocence. But this last phrase is not due so much to morbid piety as to a prttieux habit of using language vaguely felt to be fine without much inquiry into its meaning. At this time she certainly had small wish to emulate the Lives of the Saints. Although by no means anxious to marry, she was quite determined not to take the veil ; because she thought conventual practices unsuited to a reasonable mind. And so little did Church matters attract her that she was over twenty before she offered herself for Confirmation. The truth is that in families like hers a new lay religion was springing up — the religion of Gui Patin's letters — quite independent of Catholicism, although not yet its conscious rival. In the future its prophet will be Descartes ; at present its leaders were men like Guillaume du Vair, successively a chief justice, lord keeper, and bishop, and one of the foremost men in France during her father's youth.

jHy A papal legate once described Du Vair as an ancient Stoic in judicial ermine, whose only god was the temporal glory of France. In other words, he was a patriotic moralist,

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who had known the horrors of the Wars of Eeligion, and was burning to rally all good men to the service of their country. Dogma had divided, but sense of duty should unite them on a basis of purely rational morality. In general sentiment this would be Christian, but it must carefully avoid all points at issue between Huguenots and Leaguers. For these Du Vair cared little enough. ' The wise man,' he wrote, ' is the only true sacrificer of the great God, whose spirit is His temple, whose soul His image, whose affections His offering, whose greatest and most solemn sacrifice is His imitation. Not that you are not to perform the ancient ceremonies of your country with a decent moderation void of excess or avarice ; but you are to perform them with this opinion that God will be observed of the spirit.' The corner-stone of Du Vair's religion is harmony — that is, love of order, sense of duty. And, lest any man should escape him in an age when everything was called in question, Du Vair forswore scholastic generalities, and dealt experi- mentally with human nature. In his own words, he founded on man the greatness of man.

Nor did he hesitate to start with an analysis of our grosser pleasures. What is there in them that attracts us ? What but a certain harmony between our desires and their realisation ? But how pitiful appear such harmonies beside the mighty order of Nature. And yet greater than that order itself is the intellect that perceives it ; from a study of external things the mind rises to a study of itself. ' More magnificent than them all, it embraces heaven and earth, puts a girdle round the world, knows all that may be known, and is so beautiful that, were its first loveliness but kept untarnished, all the fine things of this vile earth would seem ugly and misshapen beside it.' Still the quest is not yet over. ' Having contemplated itself and been exercised in the search for origins and causes, our soul finds nothing to assuage its thirst for knowledge, and is constrained to rise

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above the world — above itself — and let the works conduct it to the Workman. Then we shall enter into the workhouse where so many rare objects have been fashioned. We shall gaze at the models, we shall handle the tools, we shall hold familiar converse with the Artificer Himself. He will do more than show us His labours, more than unravel His designs. He will teach us His art and His science, and make us perfect and divine.'

Knowledge of the harmonies is only vouchsafed us that we may embody them in our lives. The real strength of Du Vair lay in his ethical enthusiasm. In days when Philip II and Henry III were showing that it was possible to combine the minutest reverence for every ritual precept of the Church with utter indifference to the law of God, Du Vair came forward to proclaim that religion without morality was nothing worth. Nay, it could not so much as exist ; for this devotee of Epictetus everywhere inclined to follow the practice of his Stoic masters, and made faith a means to virtue rather than virtue a means to faith. On his principles Christianity teaches nothing new ; its whole work is to consecrate and continue what Nature has begun. As on the domain of faith it ' fans our first in- stinctive sparks of hope in immortality into a clear and lambent flame,' so on the domain of conduct it warms chill, Stoical precepts of benevolence into ' a charity that exacts the love of our fellow-men.' But although religion is the chief good, there are other goods beside it ; virtue can offer prizes of her own not wholly incommensurable with the rewards of faith. ' Those who rightly play their part are like singers in a chorus. Beside the contentment they receive from letting their voice ring sweetly forth, they feel a great and incredible delight, when their music accords with the music of others, and sinks into a cadence full of melody and sweetness. Truly it is pleasant to do well, and there is no rapture to compare with the inward

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peace we feel after performing some good and laudable action.'

Thus courageous self-dependence was the watchword of Du Vair. ' Let us gaily follow our wise Captain, Who loves us so well. If He leads us into the fight, He also leads us to victory. We shall stand up the stouter for the blows that are dealt us ; by our endurance we shall weary evil, and thus snatch victory out of defeat.' For all this Providence has furnished us with amply sufficient powers. It is true that our reason is sometimes perplexed, and then recourse may be had to prayer — that, ' as the corporal sun shines daily on our bodies, so may the Sun of Wisdom shine upon our minds.' But help from Above we do not need. ' If there is any truth more necessary than another, it is that our will is free ; ' while another ' holy and inviolable maxim, established since the first beginnings of the world, declares that, if we would possess any good, we must acquire it for ourselves.' On these central axioms — as Pascal will presently explain to the Jansenist priest, De Saci — rest the whole of Du Vair's theology. Life, fortune, honour are beyond our control ; therefore they do not lead to God. Will and reason, on the other hand, must lead to Him, because they are free ; our reason cannot be forced to believe what it knows to be untrue, nor can our will be made to love what it knows will prove to its hurt. Through them, therefore, we can make ourselves holy and friends of God.

That Du Vair should leave the individual soul wholly master of its fate was quite in keeping with the spirit of the time. The Middle Ages had thought and lived and moved in groups, but now an almost aggressive independence was everywhere in fashion. At all costs, men must be original, and strike out new lines of their own. For the great families still set the fashion in matters of moral and social taste ; and most of the nobles were rough soldiers

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brought up amid memories of the Wars of Eeligion. Their abiding representative is the finest outcome of those wars, King Henry of Navarre. Henry — or rather Henry's ghost, sanctified by the murderer's dagger — became the idol of his people to a degree hard for us Englishmen to understand ; for more than a generation after his death the virtues of her Re Galantuomo remained the darling virtues of France. These were capacity to take a side, and fight for it, dash, resourcefulness and energy, willingness to undertake responsibility — all qualities that go towards what philo- sophers call self-realisation, and common sense simply call making a man. Corneille was the high priest of this worship : what are his plays but a panegyric on the freedom of the will ? No less than his heroes, his great ladies all rise above the tyranny of circumstance.

Fortune, quelques maux que ta rigeur m'envoie, J'ai trouve les moyens d'en tirer de la joie,

cries Sabine in ' Horace ' ; while Dirce in ' (Edipus ' replies :

Je suis fort peu de chose, Mais enfin de mon cceur moi-meme je dispose.

Not that these two were driven on by violence of passion. In that iron-nerved generation sentiment was no quality to boast of, but rather matter for reproach. Du Vair and the Stoical moralists condemned it altogether. ' The flowers of Egypt, being continually charged and watered by the vapours of Nilus, which are gross and earthly, yield not such pleasant smells as they would do without these obstacles : even so souls troubled with passions cannot produce the virtuous actions, which they would do without these agitations.' And men of action quite agreed with the Stoics. To fritter time and energy away on fancies or emotions was simply to proclaim oneself unfit for the serious work of life. When Charmion reproaches Cleopatra

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with the feeble hold that love has on her, the sister of Ptolemy makes reply :

Les princes ont cela de leur haute naissance, Leur ame dans leur sang prend des impressions Qui dessous leurs vertu range leurs passions ; Leur generosite soumet tout a leur gloire.

For souls less generous than hers the only path to * glory ' lay through rigorous self-mastery, complete devotion to some definite end. It mattered little whether the aim was high or low, virtuous or vicious ; the need of discipline is equally preached by austere Du Vair and by such resolute scoundrels as Cardinal de Eetz. ' It requires much greater qualities/ wrote this strange priest, ' to become the successful head of a party than to rule the universe. Amongst these resolution ranks with judgment — I mean the heroic judg- ment, whose province it is to distinguish between what is merely extraordinary and what is impossible.' To these all other qualities must bow. Some place, it is true, was found for love and ambition, on the ground that they strengthened the will ; but pity and the tenderer feelings, which only paralysed and warped it, must be torn out root and branch. He was the best off, who could plume himself — as La Rochefoucauld did plume himself in fact — on finding no trace of them in his heart.

Certain small reservations being made, this view of human nature was countersigned by Descartes. With passion the prophet of universal mechanism could have no dealings, for the same reasons as made him brush aside the evidence of the senses. Passion was desultory and obscure. It dragged the soul no man knew whither ; it came, no man knew whence. Whereas, the weapons of the will were ' firm and determinate judgments concerning the knowledge of good and evil, according to which she has resolved to steer the actions of her life.' Between the passions and the will raged a deadly feud, and on the issue of the fight hung

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a man's position in the moral scale. ' Those who can most easily conquer their passions have, without doubt, the strongest souls. And the weakest soul of all is such a one whose will has not at all determined to follow certain judgments, but suffers itself to be swayed by its passions, which, being often contrary one to the other, draw it backwards and forwards from side to side, and put the soul in the most miserable state it can be.' Yet even for these wretches there is hope. ' Those who have the weakest souls can acquire a most absolute empire over their passions, if art and industry be used to manage and govern them. Wherein this art and industry consisted may easily be guessed. Half the secret lay in forming steady virtuous habits, half in adroitly playing off one emotion against another. In Descartes' ideal world thought is on the throne supreme over its own feelings and fancies, and governing a world of matter, whose mechanical constitution only brought it the more surely under the control of mind.

Thus to the worship of will for its own sake succeeds the worship of will controlled by pure intelligence. Such was the natural aspiration of the geometrical spirit. Clearness, rationality and order became the backbone of right conduct. Whatever he said, and whatever he did, a man should be able to give his reasons ; since the one sin without forgive- ness was acting on the spur of the moment, without any reasons at all. Nothing was more intolerable to members of the Paris Club than shiftless hanging on the skirts of chance. The physical world, as they well knew, did not live from hand to mouth. There nothing was isolated, nothing unimportant ; no energy was ever lost. ' The least movement,' cries Blaise Pascal, ' is felt throughout all nature ; the whole sea changes for a stone.' And herein the law of gravitation only symbolised the law of life. A man was not free to choose between a purposeful and a purposeless existence. If he did not take the helm in his

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hands, and steer his actions to some definite end, the actions themselves would take command, and sail off on some course of their own with small regard to his wishes. Hence, as Blaise Pascal said, it behoved men to walk warily.

But were they capable of walking warily ? Descartes saw no obstacle to his dream of a theocracy of reason ; but then Descartes lived the life of a learned recluse in a strange land. Pascal, on the other hand, was brought into daily contact with his fellows. He was his father's assistant in an important public office ; his sisters were great personages in precieux society ; he was always in and out of the work- shops, superintending the progress of his arithmetical machine. Practical experience soon taught him that human nature, when embodied in actual flesh and blood, is very unlike the grandiose abstraction that figured under that name in the ' Sainte Philosophie.' Official society at Rouen read Du Vair ; but it did not love his harmonies. Its sense of duty was but lukewarm ; its powers of self- mastery were held in check by a hundred temptations to self-indulgence. Before long Pascal had convicted the bishop of a pious fraud dear to many practical moralists. Because it often does men good to think them better than they are, he had systematically overrated their powers and aspirations, in the hope of spurring on a few to do what he declared possible to all. Pascal thought morality strong enough to stand on its own legs, without the help of pious frauds. Here and there, no doubt, were men capable of heroic impulse ; but it was sinning the philosophic sin to turn these exceptions into the rule, and argue to the whole of human nature from ' a few feverish movements, which health cannot imitate.' For even these chosen athletes of virtue could not rest on their high plane. ' They leap up thither for a moment — not, as on to a throne, for ever.'

With Du Vair fell Descartes and Corneille. Later on, when his view of poetry had somewhat softened, Pascal

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paid Corneille the indirect compliment of classing his plays among the dangers a true Christian should avoid ; in only too seductive language they presented a view of human nature radically false. Rouen audiences came away from the theatre, fancying that, with ' a little art and industry/ they too might develop into an Emperor Augustus :

Je suis maitre de moi, comme de 1'univers, Je suis, je veux 1'etre.

Thereupon came the grim comment from Pascal : ' Man is neither a beast nor an angel, and the worst of it is that he who tries to be an angel ends as a beast.'1 But, in fact, few Kouen audiences did so try. They might applaud the poet's declamation, and even feel a sneaking kindness for strong-willed scamps like Cardinal de Ketz ; but all their own ideas and interests were bound up with the immediate satisfactions of the moment. Jacqueline's pr6cieux friends might talk at large about the necessity of steering a definite course in literature ; but neither they, nor the Philistines who made game of them, knew what was meant by steering a definite course in life. Looked at sub specie aeternitatis — and Pascal would apply no other standard to a race ' created only for infinity ' — their career resolved itself into a congeries of trivial, disconnected events. Each was stitched on to the next with infinite care, and yet the whole was as void of inward symmetry or meaning as the patchwork of a child. Their absorption in a question varied inversely with its real importance. Let the issues only concern to-day, and nothing could exceed their anxious care ; let it concern also yesterday and to-morrow, and they left to-morrow to solve the problem for itself. ' It is pitiful,' Pascal cried, ' to see men take so much thought for the means, and so little for the end. Everyone works hard to make the best of his calling ; but what the calling itself shall be, accident decides. " That 's a fine upholsterer," cry the man's friends. Or

1 Pens. 358.

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perhaps they fall to talking of soldiers. " They are all mad," says one ; while another declares that there is nothing fine but war : the rest of mankind are scullions. By dint of hearing one trade praised, and another cried down, a lad is led to fix on his own. That is the way our tastes are fashioned, and our choice of callings made.' x

Thus the end of the matter was a sickening contradiction between what should be and what was. As to the first, Du Vair was right ; science only confirmed his teaching on the infinite perfectibility of mind. As to the second point, he was worse than useless. By all means tell the Rouen house- holder that he ought to have ideals ; but, for pity's sake, go on and show him how to frame them, and give him strength to carry them out. He could do nothing for himself. ' Man is certainly born for thought ; therein lies all his dignity and all his merit, and his whole duty is to think aright. But what does the world think about in fact ? Never of this ; but about singing and dancing and duels and scribbling verses and making oneself king — without ever pausing to reflect on what is meant by being a king, or by being a man.' 2

1 Pens. 97, 98. 2 Pens. 146.

CHAPTEE VI

THE FIRST CONVERSION

PASCAL had not long to wait for an answer to his riddle. One frosty morning in January 1646, his father went out in a hurry, slipped on the ice, and dislocated his thigh. Ortho- dox surgery failing to cure him, he put himself into the hands of amateurs. These were two brothers, small landowners near Eouen, and known from their respective estates as MM. De la Bouteillerie and Des Landes. They are interesting as an early example of" the lay philanthropist, religious motives having led them to place their unusual skill in bone-setting at the service of their neighbours. Their work lay ordinarily among the poor ; but Stephen Pascal was a personage, and his case a hard one. For three months they devoted them- selves entirely to him, taking up their quarters in his house. Here, while curing the father, they had an opportunity of talking religion to his children ; for the two brothers were zealous followers of the Abbe Guillebert, a country clergy- man near Rouen, and one of the first recruits to a party about to make much noise in the world. He had come deeply under the influence of a most remarkable man no longer alive, Jean Du Vergier de Hauranne, titular Abbot of Saint Cyran, a Benedictine monastery in central France. And Saint Cyran had interpreted to his countrymen the theories of a Dutch divine, Cornelius Jansen, Bishop of Ypres in the Low Countries, and author of a bulky treatise

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on the theology of St. Augustine published posthumously in 1640.

The bishop was a theologian, who had spent three- quarters of his life within the walls of Louvain University ; but the movement he headed aimed very much less at dogmatic innovation than at a revival of personal religion. To men like La Bouteillerie and Des Landes Jansenism meant no more than this — a much chastened conscience, unusual inwardness of life, and an unusually strict per- formance of Catholic religious duties. Nevertheless, behind the piety lay a formal doctrine ; and it was this doctrine that first interested Blaise Pascal at once by its likeness and unlikeness to the theories of Du Vair. Both prelates believed that the only hope for their fellow-creatures lay in setting before them sternly practical ideals of conduct ; and, in order to discover what those ideals should be, both forswore scholastic generalities, and ' founded on man the greatness of man.' Here the resemblance ends. Du Vair, a busy man of action, had studied humanity where and when he would — sometimes in the market-place or law-court, more often in the ' Manual ' of Epictetus — dwelling on what- ever suited his moralistic prepossessions, and contentedly blind to the rest. Jansen's method was less captious. A divine and nothing else, he drew his views of human nature from the Bible ; and the Bible forced upon his notice, along with the proud destinies of man, his misery and his de- pendence— dependence not only on a higher power, but also on the ignoble forces of the physical nature round him. These Du Vair had overlooked — at best, had handled in the spirit of a Stoical Pangloss. To the strong soul, at any rate, all was for the best in this best of possible worlds. Next Descartes had taken up the tale to prove that, with a little ' art and industry,' the feeblest wretches might become strong souls.

Every syllable of the ' Augustinus ' is a disproof of this

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thesis. Blaise Pascal has already discovered that average man by no means fulfils the expectations of the ' Sainte Philosophie ' ; Jansen is now at hand to explain that he could not do so, if he tried. In their present state men are weak and helpless creatures ; yet this very weakness is a blessing in disguise, because it peremptorily throws them back on their Creator. So long as they have confidence in their own strength, they will build up systems of morality, wherein religion is but one ingredient. Once crush that confidence, and religion is reinstated in its sovereign rights. Powerless to do anything alone, their soul must recognise that the one and only path to righteousness lies through the grace of God.

Accordingly, the first position of the ' Augustinus ' is the helplessness of man. Much is said of the way our soul is linked with a body, of the horrible reality of physical pain, and its influence on the will. Jansen's Church-Latin takes on a grim relish, as he dwells on the more repulsive forms of illness — plague, smallpox, hydrophobia — then, as now, the curse of a country where dogs are used as beasts of burden.;l|Against these what can human science do ? ' Surgical instruments,' Jansen cries, ' are themselves in- struments of torture. Their cruel aid may avail to save man for other and worse pains in the future ; but, at best, they can only stave off for a moment the approach of death, most terrible of terrors.' Let pinchbeck optimists deny that such things were serious evils. Let them hope to stifle the voice of Nature groaning in her travail, when they had stilled the roaring of the sea by shouting louder than its waves.

From the miseries of the body Jansen passes to the miseries of the mind. ' Who does not know with what ignorance, with what store of vain cupidity, man comes into this world ? Were he but suffered to live as he pleased, he would fall into a multitude of vices beyond my power to

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name. But inasmuch as Divine guidance does not wholly forsake the damned, there arises within the human breast — though not without great pain and labour — a check on its natural inclinations. Why should children be driven with threats and rods, unless war must be waged against their ignorance, and limits set to their cupidity ? Why should it be hard to remember and easy to forget — hard to be industrious, and easy to be idle — unless some cruel blight had warped our nature through and through ? '

And that our nature is thus blighted is the second thesis of the ' Augustinus.' Scripture and experience alike bear witness that our present is not our rightful state. Behind his present feebleness and misery may be described faint traces of a time when man was all, and more than all, the ' Sainte Philosophie ' conceived him. ' Naturally the human soul, being rational and the image of God, is of such immense capacity that it can find neither rest nor satisfaction, save in His infinitude.' But from this high state man has fallen, because he preferred himself to God. ' This evil choice fell, as it were, from a most high place on to the self-glorifying soul with such force that its traces remain deeply imprinted therein. What the will has once embraced in the plenitude of its judgment can never again become displeasing to it. This is the very essence of concupiscence that the will should be caught in itself, and held fast as though by bird- lime ; so that it cannot shake off this unnatural passion otherwise than by the help of God.' For once the evil is let in, it eats into the very marrow of man's being. He transmits it to his descendants, just as the Ethiopian passes on his black skin to his children, ' not simply like a garment, but as the very quality of his body.' And one manifesta- tion of concupiscence gathers others round it. It becomes the ' mother and the child of sin,' being at once itself a transgression and the heaven-sent punishment of past offences. Jansen has often on his lips the words of an

o2

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ancient Christian poet : ' In vulnera vulnere surgit.' By a wound man rises to fresh wounds.

So desperate is his state that only a heaven-sent remedy can avail to save him. The third thesis of the ' Augustinus ' is the redeeming power of grace, Gratia mcdicinalis Christi Salvatoris. And by grace Jansen simply meant the birth of a religious sense. This may be strong, or it may be weak ; but even its humblest forms are enough to distinguish him who has it from those who have it not — to draw all his actions into a new perspective, and put a different colouring on all his thoughts. In other words, it involves a radical change of character ; and, as such a change is beyond man's power to effect, grace must descend upon him like a whirl- wind— as once it descended on Jansen's two spiritual heroes, St. Augustine and St. Paul — and draw his will ' irresistibly, unfailingly, victoriously,' out of darkness into light. Thereby he undergoes what Protestants call conversion. This need not be violent or instantaneous : it was left for the de- generate Jansenists of the eighteenth century to develop ' convulsions ' quite as morbid as ever disgraced a revivalist camp-meeting in New England. Yet the seeds of re- vivalism are already in the ' Augustinus ' ; and Jansen never put his case so clearly as did President Jonathan Edwards, author of many a Great Awakening in Massachusetts. ' There are many in these days,' he writes of the professed defenders of free-will, ' who say that the manner of the Spirit of God is to co-operate in a silent, secret and undis- cernible way with the use of means and of our own en- deavours ; so that there is no distinguishing by sense between the influences of the Spirit of God and the natural operations of our own minds. But Scripture abundantly teaches that grace in the soul is so the effect of God's power that it is fitly compared to those effects which are farthest from being owing to any strength in the subject, such as a being be- gotten, or being raised from the dead. So it was with the

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cases of particular persons recorded in the New Testament. They were not effected in that silent, secret, gradual and insensible manner, which is now insisted upon ; but with those manifest evidences of a supernatural power wonder- fully and suddenly causing a great change, which in these days are looked upon as certain signs of delusion and enthusiasm.'

Delusion and enthusiasm were freely enough set down to the count of the Jansenists, but their founder cared little for such charges. To worldlings conversion might seem weird and unaccountable enough ; to the theologian nothing was more natural. Grave as they looked, the soul's disorders were functional rather than organic. Break the bonds of self-love, and the soul sprang back to its rightful place in the universe. Then, and then only, was it free. ' When a man lives in the land where he was born,' says Jansen, ' we call it his country ; when he obeys his lawful sovereign, we speak of him as free. Whereas, if he is carried thence by force, he endures slavery and exile. Such is also the case of the soul. Its fatherland is truth, which is none other than God. Truth is its country, God is its Father ; whereas the dominion of the creature means servitude in a strange land.'

Freedom, however, could only be reached through the portals of conversion ; the rest of mankind were slaves. Not that Jansen dealt much in total depravity, as inter- preted by Calvinist divines ; had he done so, he would never have made a convert of Blaise Pascal, wont to regard his fellow-creatures as neither angels nor beasts. Jonathan Edwards must denounce — though not without a protest from the more practical side of his nature — the common run of men as ' vipers spitting poison at God ' : Jansen dwelt rather on their hopeless mediocrity — their ' concupis- cence, blindness, desertion of God' — three qualities more easily discoverable among the average citizens of Rouen. Then, too, he was readier than Edwards to find signs of

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good in the natural man — intuitions of Divinity in Plato, a certain honourable respect for virtue and fear of the reproach of conscience among the mass of unconverted men. This tribute to fact once paid, however, Jansen's logic sweeps him away. The good deeds of the unregenerate have their value, but they are ' not so much seeds of virtue as ruins left over from the integrity of man's first state.' Plato or Fabricius will be punished less than Catiline, but all three will be delivered over to the body of one death. For it matters little whether the sinner be a degenerate Christian lacking love, or a heathen philosopher lacking knowledge of God. The one real good is the good will, and only in its Christian form is the good will worthy of its name. In other words, the only actions pleasing to God are those done from religious motives. Why should I claim to be more in His sight than my drunken neighbour, when only thrift or self-respect or worldly prudence keep me from the public-house ? And how can a heathen, who does not know God, act from religious motives at all ?

Thus the doctrine of conversion melts into predestination. God made certain races Christian ; from these He chose out whom He would, and left the rest to perish in their sins. Surprise has sometimes been expressed that Pascal should have lightly accepted so terrible a doctrine. Even in his own day Deists had arisen to protest against its arbitrary narrowness, and denounce the God of superstition whose ' justice ' human ills exalted, whose ' essence ' human misery enriched. But then, the Deists were dissolute folk quite out- side the circle of decorous lawyers frequented by the Pascals. Judges have never been specially humane in their ideas of moral accountability, as any history of the criminal law, or any leading case in criminal insanity will show. In every country they are quick to punish undoubted breaches of the law, without much stopping to consider whether or not they were the prisoner's fault. Then, too, a professional

THE FIBST CONVEESION 87

instinct led Stephen Pascal and his colleagues to carry to the farthest point a common habit of the age, and conceive of their Maker as a hypostatised absolute sovereign : like the Louis XIV of Saint Simon, He ' commanded, and gave His reasons to none.' Why, indeed, should He not do so ? What did absolute sovereignty mean, but doing what one liked with one's own ? Of all the Churchmen of the age Fenelon stood nearest to the modern world — was most free from the theological perversity of clinging to obnoxious opinions just because lay humanity disliked them. Yet Fenelon applied the favourite Calvinistic figure of the potter and his wheel with a ruthlessness worthy of Jonathan Edwards. Malebranche, again, was no friend to autocratic whimsicality either in God or man, and explains at length how He is bound by rigid laws of His own. But amongst these justice to His creatures finds no place. Malebranche maintains predestination in its most repulsive, because most arbitrary, form. It is necessary to God's purposes to save a certain number of souls, but which particular souls these are He does not greatly care. Nor may He save too many, 4 lest His mystical temple grow unshapely through being spacious in excess.'

Besides, it was hard for a keen young mind to go through life without seeing that some men are naturally religious, while others are not, excellent as they may be in other ways. Nowadays this difference would be set down to variety of temperament ; but Pascal's century dug a deep gulf between the natural and the supernatural worlds, and would not refer a theological result to any but theological causes. If some men were more religious than others, it could only be because God had called the first, and hardened the hearts of the second. And that their hearts were really hardened the age found no difficulty in believing. It was vaguely supposed that the Ten Commandments — or, at any rate, the latter five — were imprinted on the conscience

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of every man born into the world ; so that a Samoyede or Hottentot knew that murder and adultery were wrong quite as well as any educated Christian. If the Hottentot forgot this, his guilt was all the greater. The famous Huguenot controversialist, Pierre Jurieu, lays down as the united utterance of sound theology and common sense that a man who sins through ignorance of his duty is morally helow a man who sins with his eyes open. And the reason he gives is that in the first case will and reason are alike corrupted ; whereas in the second the intellect, at any rate, is clear. Such Catholic enemies of Jansenism as Fenelon only escaped from this conclusion by a quibble. Huguenot children were not damned for sucking in heresy with their mother's milk. Their spiritual blindness was the punishment of their nursery peccadilloes ; and of this richly merited blindness reprobation was the natural result. The Jansenist controversy did not turn on whether God was just or unjust — only on whether His injustice was a little greater or a little less.

Moreover, Jansen's doctrine only bore intolerably hardly on those in whom he felt no practical interest. Protestants and Greek philosophers and babies dying unbaptised might be abandoned without scruple to the tender mercies of a syllogism ; but with living, unregenerate Catholics the case was very different. Here there was no room for despair ; who could say but what God would one day please to convert them ? Jansen's thoughts went back each moment to an Apostle, once ' the chief of sinners.' Then, too, the language of the ' Augustinus ' is often more repellent than its meaning. Jansen was torn asunder between his instincts as a practical reformer and his training as a pro- fessional divine, brought up to use a highly cumbrous and inelastic language framed much more in the interests of consistent logic than of spiritual truth. His tongue runs into universals, when his heart means only relativities ; and

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confusion is the result. Take, for example, the fundamental position of the ' Augustinus,' that man cannot do, or wish to do, good without the help of grace. This, in itself, is a sufficiently awkward way of saying that only in proportion as his character is righteous can a man do righteous actions ; but the difficulty becomes still greater, when the ' Augus- tinus ' goes on to declare that we must co-operate with grace. How, if co-operation is essential, can it be said that grace does all ?

And yet Jansen's meaning is perfectly clear. He falls alternately under the spell of two opposing tendencies. -| On the one hand he must minimise the value of men's efforts, in order to humiliate them, and teach them to trust not at all in themselves, but only in their Maker. On the other hand he must screw out of their conscience the greatest possible activity, since ' God does not build His temple out of lifeless stones, nor suffer His elect to lie supine like sick men, while grace rains on them from Above.' The obvious conclusion to draw is that neither principle is absolute ; both are simply relative to certain states of mind. Indispensability of grace bars out presumptuous self-dependence ; need of co-opera- tion is a spur to indolence and despondency. And perhaps Jansen's followers would have put this interpretation on his teaching, had they been free to do so. But they were not free. The ' Augustinus ' had become the subject of a bitter controversy before it left the printer's hands ; and a contro- versialist cannot pick and choose. The world's charity writes him down a renegade, unless he is prepared to fight for every thread in the surplice, and every comma in the rubric. The Jansenists felt— and felt quite rightly— that they could not tamper with a single line in their master's book without abandoning to the Jesuits his whole doctrine of conversion. And so they stoutly defended the ' Augus- tinus ' ; though all they meant thereby was that something more than human effort was necessary to regeneration.

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Sooner or later there must come the touch of a Spirit that waits not at our beck and call ; though at the same time they told the natural man that the merest wish to reform was a sign that grace was already stirring within him.

Naturally, such a doctrine made a vast appeal to the will. To the will grace came, through the will grace triumphed, by our will we should be judged. Of this most excellent proof is afforded by the two great Jansenist abbesses, Angelique and Agnes Arnauld. In the first place they held before the will the most tremendous motives for exertion. 1 Time is short,' wrote Angelique, ' but eternity is very long. Those who have been slaves in time will be freemen of eternity ; but those who have been free in time will be slaves eternally.' Secondly, they refused to allow that any action could be morally indifferent ; whatever was not good was bad. ' The world,' wrote Agnes, ' calls certain pleasures innocent, and it is true that they are not actually destructive of grace. But the weak and sensual souls that indulge in them soon become stagnant, like water cut off from its source.' Thus all a man's thoughts and all his acts were drawn into a single focus. Port Royal felt itself caught up into the very purposes of God. ' We are em- barked,' cried Agnes, ' on the sea of His predestination, which will carry us whither it will. Our whole duty is to pray, to gain His favour by our trustfulness and honesty, and not to rely on our own efforts.' Men need no longer pick and choose between several religious ideals : all objects but one were swept from their path. They were not even tempted to make too much of success. ' God did not ask you to gain victories, only to do your best,' Agnes wrote to a dispirited friend. ' You must not make success your end, but leave that to His Providence ; indeed, success would not matter at all, did it not often bring advantage to our neighbour.' Lastly, when inspiration failed for the moment, they could afford to wait without indolent repining. ' Let

THE FIEST CONVERSION 91

us rather go before the Bridegroom, like the Virgins in the parable, doing what we can.'

Such utterances do not make up the most original side of Jansenism, but they might well prove attractive to a young man in the position of Blaise Pascal. He had already learnt from Du Vair that the most important thing in life was conscious direction of the will towards some definite end. But experience had gone on to teach him that there were two fatal objections to the ideals of the ' Sainte Philosophic.' They ignored the seamy side of nature's dealings with mankind ; and they expected from man himself efforts wholly beyond his power to make. Jansen made demands on the will as strenuous as those of Du Vair ; but, in doing so, he overlooked neither the cruelty of nature nor the helplessness of man. Unlike more commonplace theologians, he was quite prepared to face the worst aspect of the worst, and welcome both cruelty and helplessness as a sharp reminder of the omnipotence of grace. Souls were adrift no longer, knowing neither what they could, nor what they should perform ; for grace brought them alike the power to form high resolves, and the power to carry them out. Here, then, Pascal found an answer to the contradiction between man's actual faculties and his ideal end ; and hereon his so-called first conversion followed as a logical necessity. It was no emotional transport — no Methodist ' sense of sin ' — that drove him, but simply a conviction that the human race is powerless to fulfil its destinies without the help of God. ' I should not have the boldness to direct my cries to Thee, were there any other that could hear and could relieve them,' he writes in one of the ' Prayers in Sickness ' composed about this time. God must be loved, because without love there is no grace, and without grace no full development of the moral self. Hence emotion would do well to follow, where logic shows the way. ' 0 the happiness of those who, with an absolute choice and preference and an

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invincible bent of inclination, can love perfectly ancTfreely what they are engaged to love out of duty and necessity.'

Exactly when the change'took place there is no evidence to determine. Gilberte was no longer at home to chronicle her brother's movements ; in 1641 she had married her cousin, Florin Perier, a judge of Stephen's old court at Clermont. According to a family tradition, Blaise was the first convert. He brought over Jacqueline in the late autumn of 1646 ; and their united efforts were successful with Stephen. Lastly the Periers followed, during a long visit paid to Eouen in the spring of 1647. Evidently the process was no short one. Blaise was interested and impressed by La Bouteillerie and Des Landes — all the more so since his father's long illness cast a gloom over the house- hold, and his own health had been failing ever since Gilberte's marriage. He began by talking over the new ideas with Jacqueline, as a subject more worthy of discussion than her favourite prtcieux poets. For a while, however, she turned a deaf ear to his arguments. Kespectably pious she was already ; but she also ' loved the world,' and saw no reason for changing her way of life. But Blaise was not the man to stomach opposition, least of all from his own younger sister. Her objections only intensified his zeal ; as she afterwards reminded him, he plied her with more and more urgent exhortations against the folly of allying two things so utterly incompatible as the spirit of religion and the spirit of this world. When she at last took genuine fire, its warmth reacted on his emotional nature ; Jacqueline's conversion unmistakably set the coping-stone on his own.

Nor was she the only sufferer from his intemperate zeal. Appetite for theological controversy grows with its practice ; and in the first flush of his conversion Blaise rushed headlong into the ugliest chapter of his life. In February, 1647, there drifted to Rouen a derelict ex-Capuchin friar, known as Frere Saint Ange. He belonged to a class of eccentrics

THE FIRST CONVERSION 93

common to every age and country. In the lay world they square the circle, or solve the problem of perpetual motion ; if clergymen, they reconcile faith and reason on lines as unacceptable by reason as they are distasteful to faith. Not that Saint Ange's theories were altogether lacking in interest. A humble Raymond of Sabunda, he carried on to the theo- logical field the revolt against scholastic technicality already so much in evidence with Descartes and the Paris Club. His ideal was to make philosophy talk the language of common sense. Men were to rack their brains no longer over ponderous treatises ; surer guides were offered them in ' the truths of faith, whereof every Christian may possess himself through the liberality of his Redeemer, and in those first truths of nature and morals, which appear indubitable to all men, so soon as they consult their reason.' Indeed, his enthusiasm for common sense pushed him on to dangerous ground. Only by a hair's breadth did he escape the heresy of maintaining that in a ' powerful and vigorous mind ' reason can take the place of faith, and discover the truths of Revelation for itself.

Lodged in the house of his patron, the Attorney- General of Normandy, Saint Ange developed his theories to anyone who would listen. One day he called on two young friends of Pascal, Du Mesnil, son of a Rouen judge, and Adrien Auzout, the future eminent astronomer, now a boy of eighteen. He was launching forth on his favourite subject, when Blaise himself appeared on the scene, and conversation took a different turn. Saint Ange began to explain how it was possible to calculate the total numbers of the human race. All things came from God, and to God all must return. Mind, being incorporeal, could return of itself ; but matter must be conveyed by mind. That was why God had coupled souls and bodies together. The end of the world could only come, when every particle of matter in the universe had served to form a human being, whose soul could duly claim

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it at the Resurrection. Hence it was only necessary to know the cubic dimensions of the universe, in order to calculate exactly how many inhabitants it must have. The three young men received this theory ' with as much laughter as civility would allow/ and began to make objections. What proof had Saint Ange that there was any connexion between the substance of the sun and that of this planet ? The Capuchin answered that they did not understand the real meaning of substance ; it was the unity, of which the things we see were only ' accidents and appearances.' He was going on to illustrate his meaning by an odd comparison — substance was the sea, and perceptible objects were bottles of water bobbing about on its surface — when he was inter- rupted by a general burst of laughter. He wound up promptly with a vague compliment to young M. Pascal, whose researches into the vacuum in nature were already attracting great attention in Paris.

Young M. Pascal was not mollified. Quite apart from natural disgust at all this frivolous ingenuity, his new Jansenist instincts rose in revolt against a divine who made belief independent of grace ; and he undertook the part of an amateur Holy Office. A few days later, he and his two friends called on Saint Ange at the Attorney-General's house ; with them they took the Abbe Le Cornier, son of another Rouen judge, and lately come back with high honours from the Sorbonne. Pascal opened the battle with some mathematical calculations to prove that, if Saint Ange was right, the world must last at least four thousand million years. But conversation soon drifted off on to the question of grace, and the unsuspecting Capuchin began to expound a system of his own for re- conciling Jesuits and Jansenists. Before he had finished, however, he realised that he was speaking to inquisitors. He broke off discussion and showed his visitors out, stopping them at the hall-door to emphasise that what he had said

THE FIEST CONVEESION 95

must not be treated as dogmas, but simply as casual suggestions.

The three young men paid no heed to his caution, and began to denounce his heresies about the town. Public opinion soon grew excited. The lawyers and the parish priests were for Saint Ange ; the monasteries naturally sided against a renegade from his order ; the cathedral clergy hated his patron, the Attorney- General, whose healthy Erastianism had tried to interfere with their plu- ralities and general indecorum. Matters came finally to a head, when Eichelieu's brother, the sinecure Abbot of Saint Ouen, presented Saint Ange to a living. There now appeared on the scene a personage almost as strange as Saint Ange himself. This was Jean Pierre Camus, formerly Bishop of Belley, now suffragan to the invalid Archbishop of Eouen. Camus was famous for his jocular, often tactless, but extremely downright sermons, and still more famous with his pen. He was one of the first in any country to indite what would nowadays be called improving literature for the young ; a contemptuous Jansenist lady describes his books as a ' mixture of tales and pious discourses. They always ended with a martyrdom or a vocation to the cloister, and yet were as full of human passions as any secular romance.' Such a man was well fitted to understand Saint Ange, and raised no objection to his institution. The three young men, annoyed to find that their denunciations had such small effect, complained to the Archbishop direct. He ordered an official inquiry, which Camus made as easy as possible for Saint Ange.

However, the three young men were resolved not to let their prey escape. On their first genuine religious excite- ment followed the thrill of delicious self-importance felt when youth for the first time sets the criminal law in motion. Disregarding the advice of their own elder friend, Le Cornier, who begged them to leave the matter alone, they went off

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to the Archbishop's country-house, and denounced Saint Ange again. Fran£ois de Harlai was the best scholar on the Bench — he had been known to preach in Greek — but his judgment was by no means equal to his learning ; the wits compared his mind to a library turned topsy-turvy. Besides, he was on exceedingly bad terms with the Government officials in Rouen. He suddenly descried behind Saint Ange the malign hand of the Attorney- General, plotting against the independence of the Church. In a sharp letter he reminded Camus that the theology of lawyers was not always that of the Apostles, and elaborately contrasted the godly zeal of these young laymen with the supineness of the clergy. Camus decided that the matter was now slipping beyond the region of his common sense, and called in Stephen Pascal. A treaty of peace was eventually patched up, Saint Ange being inducted to his living.

A few months later Blaise bore more acceptable witness to his new beliefs. His various scientific labours had undermined his health, and in the summer of 1647 he suffered a complete collapse. Gilberte Perier gives many distressing details — violent and prolonged neuralgia, partial paralysis of the lower limbs, inability to swallow — all pointing to a grave attack of neurasthenia. It was now that Jansenism appeared to him as something more than a clever answer to the ethical riddles thrown out by Du Vair — as much more than an orthodox stick to beat misbelievers like Saint Ange. For the first time he felt himself useless ; and, as he well knew, neither science nor Du Vair cared much for the service of loiterers able only to stand and wait. Jansen dealt with illness in another fashion. ' For comfort,' wrote Pascal a little while later, ' we must never look to ourselves, or mankind, or the rest of creation : we must look to God alone. Creatures are never the first cause of the accidents we call ills ; God's Providence is their one and only cause, their arbiter and their sovereign. Therefore, if we wish for

07

relief, we must follow the evil to its source. We must cease from regarding it as a stroke of ill-fortune, as a fatal necessity of our nature arising from the composition of our organs ; for God has not abandoned His elect to hazard or caprice. We must conceive of it as a decree of His Providence, willed from all eternity to take place in a certain year, on a certain day, at a certain hour, in a certain place, in a certain manner ; we must believe that all that happens is foreknown and foreordained of God. Then we shall venerate His holy judgments ; we shall bless the guidance of His Providence ; we shall unite our will with His, and will in Him, with Him, for Him, whatever He has willed for us from all eternity.'

Resignation to the Will of God Pascal might have learnt from Du Vair, but the ' Sainte Philosophie ' could not teach him the chastening effects of illness. ' I know, 0 Lord, that at the instant of my death I shall find myself entirely separated from the world, stripped naked of all things, standing alone before Thee to answer to Thy justice con- cerning all the movements of my heart and spirit. Grant that I may look upon myself as dead already, separated from the world, stripped of all the objects of my passions, placed alone in Thy presence to implore Thy mercy for the conversion of my heart. Grant that I may find exceeding comfort in the thought that Thou art pleased to send this image and appearance of death as the subject of Thy mercy, before Thou sendest a real dissolution to exercise Thy justice. I pray not to be exempted from pain, for that is the glorious recompense of saints ; but I pray that I may not be aban- doned to the pains of nature without the comforts of Thy Spirit, for that is the curse of Jews and pagans. I pray that I may feel at once the pains of nature for my sins, and the consolation of grace by Thy Spirit ; for that is the true state of Christianity.'

Still, it was not enough to consider the moral lessons

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of illness. Blaise — impelled by a sick man's sick fancies — passes on to consider his ill-health as an actual merit in the eyes of Heaven. ' 0 God, Who so lovest bodies exercised by suffering, be pleased to accept my body — not for its own sake, nor for what it contains, for all deserves Thy wrath — but for the evils it endures, which alone deserve Thy love.' In other words, he was in danger .of idealising asceticism ; and asceticism, when practised for its own sake, is more purely moralistic than Du Vair himself. In fact, the first conversion left Pascal very much nearer the ' Sainte Philo- sophie ' than ever he imagined. Its civic virtues are, indeed, replaced by Catholic monastic ideals. Pascal will pray for 1 a divorce from the sweetness of health and the pleasures of the world.' He will lament ' the entire loss of that time which Thou hast given me for no other purpose than wor- shipping Thee, and becoming penitent for my daily tres- passes.' As yet, however, he had not passed beyond the stage of Luther in his cell at Erfurt, before he learned to ' send away Moses and his Law.' He had not penetrated far enough into the inner meaning of religion to see that evil does not lie in the mere things round us ; it lies in the use we make of them — that is, in ourselves. And unless a man manages to rise above them, things will remain his masters. By them he will be tempted to measure his own position in the moral scale, the amount of love he bears his Maker being conceived to vary inversely with the amount of interest he takes in that Maker's works. If he cannot continue to regard ' all that is perishable as perishing — nay, as already perished,' sooner or later he will grow disheartened, give up the effort, and drift back again to the world.

Such was the case with Pascal himself. Zeal and intelligence he had in plenty ; but that did not save him from reading through the * Augustinus ' without the least eye to its principal lesson. For the great work of Jansenism was to insist that religion does not mean believing a particular

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opinion, or adopting a particular mode of life ; it means conversion, becoming a new creature. That is precisely whereat differs from the Stoicism of, Du Vair. Morality is an end outside myself ; I can hold it up at arm's length, as it were, examine, and gradually approach it. But in religion this is impossible. There, as a maturer Pascal will lay down, God cannot be the end, unless He is also the beginning. I cannot commence to do religious actions, until I have become religious. In a certain sense, I must have reached the goal, before I start to run the race. I must live as though my higher were my only — as it is already my true — self. That is what the Apostle meant, when he said : ' I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me ; and the life, which I now live in the flesh, I live by the faith of the Son of God.'

H 2

CHAPTER VII

THE GREAT EXPERIMENT OF THE PUY-DE-DOME

CONVERSION to Jansenism by no means necessarily entailed a breach with science. No doubt, the Port Eoyal preachers thundered against the pride that went with useless know- ledge ; and Blaise will presently convince himself that pride and the pursuit of knowledge always went hand in hand. As yet, however, he was satisfied to follow his official leaders ; and they were by no means hostile to sound learn- ing. Fromond, Jansen's favourite pupil, and editor of the posthumous 'Augustinus,' was an astronomer of mark ; Antoine Arnauld, the rising hope of Port Royal, was no mean geometer. No one believed more fervently than he in the moral value of mathematics. In themselves, he quite agreed that the sciences were nothing worth. Those who had not studied them were better off than those who had ; for they escaped alike a very laborious exercise and the risk of thinking themselves wiser than their neighbours. On the other hand, he argued that conscience was ill-equipped for its functions, unless the judgment had been trained. And that training science gave, when studied simply as a mental gymnastic, instead of as an end in itself.1

Besides, old habits of thought are not put off in a day ; and in the autumn of 1646 the Paris Club suddenly put an overpowering temptation in Pascal's path. The engineer, Pierre Petit, arrived at Rouen with news of a most remarkable

1 First Preface to the Logic of Port Eoyal, Works, xli. p. 105. 100

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experiment made some years before in Italy by Galileo's illustrious pupil, Torricelli. Petit had heard about it from Mersenne, who had tried unsuccessfully to repeat it. There were difficulties about getting the right kind of tubes in Paris, whereas at Eouen was one of the best glass-factories in France. Petit came to see Stephen Pascal in a state of great excitement. The experiment promised to determine whether nature really could endure a vacuum, one of the most burning questions between the old science and the new : and it was well known at the club to which side Stephen's sympathies inclined. Tubes were soon ordered and blown, and the experiment was performed in the presence of Stephen and Blaise, ' a worthy son of his illustri- ous father,' says Petit in his report.1 They filled a tube with quicksilver, and plunged it, mouth downwards, into a basin containing the same liquid. To their surprise, instead of emptying itself entirely, a column of quicksilver re- mained suspended above the mouth of the tube. Petit triumphantly pointed out the vacuum in the upper part of the tube. Blaise, whose scientific enthusiasm always went hand in hand with caution, replied that the Aristotelians would certainly say that air had come in through the pores of the glass, in order to prevent a vacuum. Petit objected that there was still quicksilver in the tube. If air could make its way through the glass, why did it not fill the tube entirely, and let the quicksilver run out ? Next they moved the tube up and down, but found that, whatever they did, the column remained at its original level. Clearly, the vacuum could be lessened or increased at pleasure. Then they poured water into the basin, and raised the tube, till its mouth was in the water. The quicksilver then sank out of the tube ; water rushed in, and filled it to the top. This effectually replied to Blaise's objection. If there was air in the tube, Petit asked, why did water drive it out ?

1 The report is printed in Brunschvicg and Boutroux, i. pp. 329 fit.

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How could it do violence to its own nature, and rise above air?

The Aristotelians, however, were not so easily beaten. Their leader, Dr. Pierius from the Archiepiscopal College, was entirely unimpressed by Petit's elaborate precautions to keep the air out of his tubes. Somehow it must have got in, he said ; and once inside, it could rarefy or condense at will, and thus prevent a vacuum. But, if such rarefication really took place, its effects would presumably be more marked in the case of a large vessel than a small. Pascal accordingly set to work with tubes of all shapes and sizes, to show that the height of the quicksilver always remains exactly the same, whatever the size of the vessel. Pierius now changed his ground, and said that the apparently empty space at the top of the tube was filled by volatile spirits given off from the quicksilver. Pascal invited him to meet Dr. Guiffart and other persons interested in science in the court-yard of the glass-factory. Here he got the Aristotelian to admit that wine was more spirituous than water ; hence, if the Torricellian experiment was tried with these two liquids, the column suspended in the tube would be higher in the case of water than in that of wine. Pascal promptly took him at his word. Two gigantic tubes, each forty feet long, were brought forward; in one the experiment was performed with water, in the other with wine. Careful measurement revealed Pierius as a false prophet ; for the column of water only just exceeded the height of thirty-one feet, whereas the wine stood fully half a foot higher. Finally, so as to clinch the matter, Pascal performed the experiment over again, only making the two tubes change places, and that which had held water now hold wine.1

These results altogether cut away the ground from under the feet of the Aristotelians. ' Occlusum est os misellis

1 See Roberval's account of the matter in his Premiere Narration sur le Vide (September, 1647), reprinted in Brunsohvicg and Boutroux, ii. pp. 28 ff.

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illis sciolis,' said grim Professor Roberval. Pierius, indeed, tried his hand at a reply, but his special pleading was dismissed by Guiffart as a string of ' metaphorical, not categorical discourses ; M. Pierius was too good a philosopher to take them quite seriously himself.' For Pascal's experi- ments had won the honest physician's heart ; they delighted all those who were already philosophers, and made philo- sophers of those who were not yet so. And to their inventor he paid a delicate personal compliment. Whether or not there were a vacuum in nature, he said, there was certainly none in the brains of young M. Pascal. For Guiffart, like most moderate men, was only half convinced. Pascal had certainly proved that Pierius was wrong in maintaining that nature could not endure a vacuum ; but it was still possible to strike a judicious balance between old opinions and new, and hold that nature abhorred a vacuum, although without always being able to prevent it. Nor did Pascal feel that, as yet, he had any right to challenge this position. A long series of experiments, performed during the first half of 1647, simply went to show that a vacuum was possible, whether nature liked it or no ; that she had no greater repugnance to a large vacuum than a small ; and that, in the case of water, her abhorrence never exceeded the height of thirty-two feet.1

These triumphs of the Rouen laboratory soon became known in Paris. Saint-Ange had already heard of them in February, 1647 ; and in the following July an eccentric Capuchin friar, one Father Valerio Magni, Apostolic Mis- sionary in Poland, printed an account of the original experiment, in which he claimed priority over both Torricelli and Pascal. The assertion was preposterous ; but seven- teenth century etiquette required that a charge of priority, which generally included a charge of plagiarism, should

1 It will be remembered that the French foot waa slightly longer than the English,

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be rebutted with a vigour wholly out of keeping with the flimsiness of its foundations. As Pascal was too ill to reply himself, Eoberval wrote a detailed rejoinder, which effectually disposed of Magni. This intervention, however, had a curious consequence. The professor was a man of many quarrels, and had had a peculiarly vitriolic dispute with Torricelli a few years before over the question of the cycloid. So, when Blaise printed an account of his performances in the autumn of