Returning from Holland to France, we find a combination of Cartesianism and mysticism similar to that which we have noticed in the former country. Under Geulincx these two forces had lived peacefully together; in Spinoza they had entered into the closest alliance; with Blaise Pascal (1623-62), the first to adopt a religious tendency, they came into a certain antithesis. Spinoza had taught: through the knowledge of God to the love of God; in Pascal the watchword becomes, God is not conceived through the reason, but felt with the heart. After attacking the Jesuits in his _Provincial Letters_, and unveiling the worthlessness of their casuistical morality, Pascal, constrained by a genuine piety, undertook to construct a philosophy of Christianity; but the attempt was ended by the early death of the author, who had always suffered under a weak constitution. Fragments of this work were published by his friends, the Jansenists, under the title, _Thoughts on Religion_, 1669, though not without mediating alterations. The Port-Royal _Logic (The Art of Thinking_, 1662), edited by Arnauld and Nicole, was based on a treatise of Pascal. His thought, which was not distinguished by clearness, but by depth and movement, and which, after the French fashion, delighted in antitheses, was influenced by Descartes, Montaigne, and Epictetus. He, too, finds in mathematics the example for all science, and holds that whatever transcends mathematics transcends the reason. By the application of mathematics to the study of nature we attain a mundane science, which is certain, no doubt, and which makes constant progress,[1] but which does not satisfy, since it reveals nothing of the infinite, of the whole, without which the parts remain unintelligible. Hence all natural philosophy together is not worth an hour's toil. Pascal consoles himself for our ignorance concerning external things by the stability of ethics. [Footnote 1: It is this uninterrupted progress which raises the reason above the operations of nature and the instincts of animals. While the bees build their cells to-day just as they did a thousand years ago, science is continually developing. This guarantees to us our immortal destiny.]