These two states, Pascal goes on to argue, must be taken together before the truth can be reached. Apart, they give a false picture of man; and generate on the one hand pride, on the other hand immorality. It is only the Gospel which unites them, in a right manner, “by a divine art.” It brings together the opposites, and explains, by a wondrous, truly heavenly way, how they may coexist, not as attributes of the same subject, as systems of human philosophy have made them, but as different endowments—the one of nature, the other of grace. “Behold the new and surprising union which God alone could teach and alone accomplish, and which is only an image and an effect of the ineffable union of two natures in the one person of the God-man.” In these latter sentences—which we have been obliged, for the sake of brevity, to compress—we have the suggestion of Pascal’s philosophy both of human nature and of Divine revelation. He recurs over and over again to the same idea, that man is great and yet weak, full of capacity and yet miserable, and that the Gospel alone holds the key to this enigma of human nature. This, more than any other, is the pervading thought round which all the others gather. “This twofoldness (_duplicité_),” he says, “is so visible, that some have conceived that man must have two souls—a simple subject appearing to them incapable of such and so sudden variations; an immeasurable presumption on the one hand, a horrible abasement on the other. In spite of all the miseries which cleave to us, and hold us, as it were, by the throat (_nous tiennent à la gorge_), there is within us an irrepressible instinct which exalts us. The greatness of man is so visible that it may be deduced from his very misery. His very miseries prove his greatness. They are the miseries of a great lord, of a dethroned sovereign. The greatness of man consists in his knowledge of his misery. A tree does not know itself to be miserable. . . . He is miserable—the fact is beyond question; but he is great in knowing it.” {186} Again, reverting to the very same line of thought, as in the conversation with De Saci—