"He is he and I am I," and as long as we are what we are, in our flesh, in our blood, in our bones, nothing, while we live, can sever the bond between us. And in death? Ah! how much nearer to the pagan heart of this great mystery is the cry of the son of Jesse over the body of his beloved than all the Ciceronian rhetoric in the world--and how much nearer to what that loss means! Montaigne does not really, as Pater so charmingly hints, break the flexible consistency of his philosophic method when he loves his friends in this unbounded manner. He is too great a sceptic to let his scepticism stand in the way of high adventures of this sort. The essence of his unsystematic system is that one should give oneself freely up to what the gods throw in one's way. And if the gods--in their inescapable predestination--have made him "for me" and me "for him," to cling fast with cold cautious hands to the anchor of moderation were to be false to the philosophy of the "Eternal Now." The whole of life is an enormous accident--a dice-throw of eternity in the vapours of time and space. Why not then, with him we love by our side, make richer and sweeter the nonchalant gaiety of our amusement, in the great mad purposeless preposterous show, by the "quips and cranks" of a companionable scepticism; canvassing all things in earth and heaven, reverencing God and Caesar on _this side_ of idolatry, relishing the foolish, fooling the wise, and letting the world drift on as it will? "What do I know?" There may be more in life than the moralists guess, and more in death than the atheists imagine. PASCAL There are certain figures in the history of human thought who in the deepest sense of the word must be regarded as _tragic_; and this not because of any accidental sufferings they have endured, or because of any persecution, but because of something inherently _desperate_ in their own wrestling with truth. Thus Swift, while an eminently tragic figure in regard to his personal character and the events of his life, is not tragic in regard to his thought. It is not a question of pessimism. Schopenhauer is generally, and with reason, regarded as a pessimist; but no one who has read his "World as Will and Idea" can visualise Schopenhauer, even in the sphere of pure thought, as a tragic personality. The pre-eminent example in our modern world of the sort of desperate thinking which I have in mind as worthy of this title is, of course, Nietzsche; and it is a significant thing that over and over again in Nietzsche's writings one comes upon passionate and indignant references to Pascal. The great iconoclast seemed indeed, as he groped about like a blind Samson in the temple of human faith, to come inevitably upon the figure of Pascal, as if this latter were one of the main pillars of the formidable edifice. It is interesting to watch this passionate attraction of steel for steel.