forgive Descartes, so Cousin cannot forgive him for his depreciation of Descartes. One who saw nothing in Cartesianism or philosophy in general beyond what these rash sentences, freshly restored in all their audacity, declare, could be nothing but an “enemy of all philosophy.” It is impossible not to feel that there is some ground for this accusation, and that, if we were to draw our knowledge of Pascal merely from such passages, Cousin makes out something of a case against him. But many other passages, hardly less emphatic, must make every candid reader pause before he comes to any definite conclusion on the subject, if it is necessary to come to such a conclusion at all. It must never be forgotten that we have nowhere the complete mind of Pascal; that it was of the very nature of thoughts rapidly dashed upon paper—as the very form of many we have quoted clearly indicates they were—to be one-sided and often extravagant. Pascal, of all men, is not to be measured by his strong expressions. His intellectual nature, while profound, was narrow and intense. He put his whole soul into what moved him for the time; and a certain excess of passionate intellectual emotion evidently speaks in some of the most striking of the ‘Pensées.’ We may imagine how in some—perhaps in many—cases they would have been toned down had he lived to revise and refashion them into a harmonious whole. That interior elaboration,—“a kind of second creation of genius,” as M. Faugère says—which no one else may venture upon,—would undoubtedly have come from his own masterly hand, if it had been given him to bring fragment to fragment, and to fit them together into a complete fabric. It would be a hard thing to judge any student, and especially a student like Pascal, by the scattered notes of his library table; and precious as these fragments are, we must remember that this is their character, and nothing else. The fact that we now have them in all their native _hardiesse_ makes this caution not the less but all the more necessary. In passing on to consider more particularly Pascal’s philosophical and religious attitude, we shall see more fully the bearing of these remarks. Pascal, in point of fact, embraces many points of view; and, if he leans sometimes to scepticism, he sees also the strong side of what he calls dogmatism or rational philosophy. The very exaggerations of his language, now on this side and now on that, show that he himself is more than either, as his own words bear. “It is necessary,” he says, “to have three qualities—those of the Pyrrhonist, of the geometrician (the dogmatist), and of the humble Christian. These unite with and attemper one another, so that we doubt when we should, we aim at certainty when we should, and we submit when we should.” He certainly thought that he had found a surer road to truth than either Dogmatism or Pyrrhonism. Whether he succeeded in doing so will appear as we proceed.