But it is in these detached fragments that Pascal has expressed his spiritual and intellectual struggles; they contain his philosophy of life. And, however unsystematic in arrangement, they do reveal a fairly definite temper and attitude of mind. PASCAL'S PHILOSOPHY.--In the first place, the _Thoughts_ voice a reaction against the "Cartesian intellectualism" which was then the prevalent tendency in scientific and philosophical circles. "The last attainment of reason is to recognise that there is an infinity of things beyond it" might perhaps have been published by Pascal's predecessors. "To laugh at philosophy is to be a true philosopher" would have seemed like blasphemy or nonsense to most of his contemporaries, but it was neither of these. Behind sayings of this description lay the strong conviction that mere logic was incapable of probing the depths of existence. "The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing," is sound psychology, and not scepticism or obscurantism. Of course it all depends what one means by "reason." Too many of Pascal's contemporaries applied the word to a more or less shallow rationalism utterly opposed to a spiritual view of things, whereas reason properly understood is "the logic of the whole personality."[12] That Pascal was no mere narrow anti-rational obscurantist is evident, not only from his own extraordinary insight, but from his continual reiteration of his idea that the essential dignity of man lies in his thought: "All bodies, the firmament, the stars, the earth and its kingdoms, are not worth the smallest mind, for a mind knows them, and itself, and bodies know nothing." Here lies the true greatness of man. In respect of material bulk he is nothing, but his thought cannot be measured. "Man is only a reed, the feeblest reed in nature, _but he is a thinking reed_." The saying has become famous, and the words that follow are hardly less so; they remove the overpowering and crushing incubus of man's illimitable material environment, which, since Copernicus, had weighed upon thinkers like a nightmare: "Were the universe to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which slays him, because he knows that he dies, and the advantage that the universe has over him: of this the universe knows nothing. Thus all man's dignity lies in his thought."[13] PASCAL'S PESSIMISM.--It has been said that an unbridgeable gulf lies between those who believe and those who disbelieve in mankind. It is to the latter category that Pascal belongs. His faith in the dignity of man is paradoxically associated with a realisation of his weakness and imbecility: "What a chimera, then, is man! What an oddity, what a monster, what a chaos, what a subject of contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, senseless earth-worm; depository of truth, cloaca of uncertainty and error; the glory and the refuse of the universe."