"We desire truth, and find in ourselves only uncertainty; we seek happiness, and find only misery and death. We are unable not to wish for truth and happiness, and incapable either of certainty or felicity." In fact, we may say that Pascal was the first, in an age of exaggerated reverence for logic (the _damnosa hereditas_ of the Scholastic theologians) to understand that the best arguments for religion are the facts of human experience, and the conditions of human life. "In vain, O men, do ye seek within yourselves the cure for your troubles! All your knowledge can only teach you that it is not within yourselves that ye find the true or good!" Here we have the language of religious experience. The result of Augustine's meditation upon life was the same: _Inquietum cor nostrum dum requiescat in te._ It is a tongue that the "psychic man" can never understand; it seems to him affectation; such language is foreign to the easy optimism of an age of confidence. Indeed Pascal, though so intensely modern, is a stranger, and his words often enigmas to our time. _Vanitas vanitatum_ is thus the verdict that he passes upon human experience. "The last act is tragic, however fine the comedy of all the rest." SIGNIFICANCE OF PASCAL.--It is not as a systematic thinker that Pascal is of importance to the historian of thought. He typifies that more or less inarticulate and unreasoned revolt which the arrogance and optimism of a new science or a new philosophy arouse against themselves. He voices the eternal protest that it is not by bread alone that men live. As is generally the case with such protests, the pessimism of Pascal was no doubt exaggerated; but exaggeration is necessary if minds are to be impressed; and those who feel strongly see only one side of a question. RESULTS.--Thus in the three figures that have passed before us, we see a threefold protest against that exclusion of the spiritual from the human view of life. Spinoza, the pantheist, sees God everywhere;[14] Leibniz finds in every recess of nature the principle of personality; Pascal finds the only cure for human frailty and misery in religion. CHAPTER V RISE OF AN ANTI-RELIGIOUS SCIENCE ATMOSPHERIC CONDITIONS.--As we have seen, a mechanical view of the universe was not felt by thinkers like Descartes or Newton, or even Hobbes, to involve any consequences that were necessarily hostile to religion. The new science sometimes might be anti-theological, because the current theology still seemed too much infected with Scholasticism, but it was not, in the hands of its most notable exponents, anti-religious. Science had no quarrel with religion as such, nor even with a rational type of theology.