“Philosophers have propounded sentiments not at all adapted to the twofold condition of man. They have sought to inspire emotions of pure greatness; but this is not man’s condition. They have sought on the other hand to inspire sentiments of mere baseness; but neither is this man’s condition. Man needs abasement, not of nature, however, but of penitence; not that he remain degraded, but that he may rise to greatness. He needs to feel within him the emotion of greatness,—not of merit, however, but of grace. . . . Two sects have sprung out of this conflict between reason and sense in man. The one, in renouncing passion, has aspired to divinity; the other, in renouncing reason, has sunk to mere brutality. . . . The principles of the respective philosophies are so far true—Pyrrhonism, Stoicism, Atheism even. But the conclusions are false, because the opposite principles are equally true. . . . We labour under an incapacity of demonstrating all things invincible to Dogmatism. We have an innate idea of truth invincible to all Pyrrhonism. . . . Nature confounds the Pyrrhonist, and reason the Dogmatist;”— or, as the passage was originally written,— “We cannot be Pyrrhonists without violating nature; we cannot be Dogmatists without renouncing nature.” {187} These and other passages sufficiently show Pascal’s relation to philosophy, and to Pyrrhonism in particular. He is no enemy of philosophy, but he certainly does not believe it capable of explaining the riddle of human nature. He is so far from being a Pyrrhonist in the sense of resting on Pyrrhonism, that he seeks to mount on its shoulders to a higher truth. Nay, he clearly recognises that man has an inborn faculty for truth which not all the contradictions of his experience can belie. We may and must doubt as to many things; but there are principles lying at the root of human life which are invincible to all doubt. We can demonstrate many things; but there are natural realities beyond our power of demonstration. On the side of sense, all things seem to fluctuate and waver in uncertainty; on the side of mere intellect we soon cross the limit of our powers. But Humanity is more than either sense or intellect. There is, as he believes, a primitive endowment of spiritual instinct in man, which looks forth upon a higher world of reality. Repeatedly, and in various applications, he recurs to these three radical sides or elements of Humanity; “the sensible—the intellectual, or the exercise of reason left to itself—and the spiritual or divine.” Pascal despairs of a philosophy which is either a mere generalisation of sensible experience, or which aims at demonstrating everything from a purely rational point of view; but he is so far from resting in mere intellectual doubt, that he tries to find a ground for human certitude in a deeper stratum of Humanity than either sense or what he calls “reason.”