superficial debates of the schools, in 1100-50, had so exhausted
the subject that the most intelligent men saw how little was to be
gained by pursuing further those lines of thought. The twelfth
century had already reached the point where the seventeenth century
stood when Descartes renewed the attempt to give a solid,
philosophical basis for deism by his celebrated '_Cogito, ergo sum_.'
Although that ultimate fact seemed new to Europe when Descartes
revived it as the starting-point of his demonstration, it was as
old and familiar as St. Augustine to the twelfth century, and as
little conclusive as any other assumption of the Ego or the Non-Ego.
The schools argued, according to their tastes, from unity to
multiplicity, or from multiplicity to unity; but what they wanted
was to connect the two. They tried realism and found that it led to
pantheism. They tried nominalism and found that it ended in
materialism. They attempted a compromise in conceptualism which
begged the whole question. Then they lay down, exhausted. In the
seventeenth century--the same violent struggle broke out again, and
wrung from Pascal the famous outcry of despair in which the French
language rose, perhaps for the last time, to the grand style of the
twelfth century. To the twelfth century it belongs; to the century
of faith and simplicity; not to the mathematical certainties of
Descartes and Leibnitz and Newton, or to the mathematical
abstractions of Spinoza. Descartes had proclaimed his famous
conceptual proof of God: 'I am conscious of myself, and must exist;
I am conscious of God and He must exist.' Pascal wearily replied
that it was not God he doubted, but logic. He was tortured by the
impossibility of rejecting man's reason by reason; unconsciously
sceptical, he forced himself to disbelieve in himself rather than
admit a doubt of God. Man had tried to prove God, and had failed:
'The metaphysical proofs of God are so remote (_éloignées_) from the