The will of France has been adverse to that of Spain: France has worked from a social sense to the creation of a personal conscience. She has moved from the group-mystical to the personal-rational; from the Gothic church to the modern realistic; from social vision to the individual; from Substance to Essence; from France herself to man. Blaise Pascal is an exemplar of this pattern of his people’s progress. He and the Jansenists reveal the effort of the conservative French to transform the old Catholicism into an individualistic faith that shall be consonant with France’s future. Pascal’s sense of Grace as a determined individual gift of personality places his conflict with the Jesuits on its fairest ground: it is the will of social France for personal autonomy, at odds with this invasion of personalized Spain whose will is to create a social spirit.[21] Pascal, Racine, Descartes are the last great minds of France to believe in the persistence of their nation’s progress _within_ the Church. Calvin, greatest of the Protestant thinkers and a true Frenchman, marks the break. France accepts a destiny outside of Rome which, in this logical people, swiftly leads to a destiny outside the whole structure of Christian revelation. Pascal and Racine within the Church, Calvin in a church of his own, Montaigne the skeptic, begin not by accepting man--but by the desire to create him. The social body exists: the individual soul does not. All French classic literature converges in this effort to establish it ... converges, indeed, upon Romanticism (Diderot, Rousseau, Stendhal). In Germany, the same trend passes from Luther to Goethe, Schopenhauer, Novalis, Nietzsche. The French problem of creating the personal conscience above the accepted group marries with the will of northern Europe to break up the social synthesis of medieval Rome by the creating of individual souls that shall be _atomic_, _anarchic_, but once more creative. The antistrophe is the tragic will of Spain, and the heroic Jesuit effort, to revive a Body that was doomed.