[Transcriber's Note: Footnotes have been moved to end of book.]




VAUVENARGUES.


One of the most important phases of French thought in the great century
of its illumination is only thoroughly intelligible, on condition that
in studying it we keep constantly in mind the eloquence, force, and
genius of Pascal. He was the greatest and most influential
representative of that way of viewing human nature and its
circumstances, which it was one of the characteristic glories of the
eighteenth century to have rebelled against and rejected. More than a
hundred years after the publication of the _Pensées_, Condorcet thought
it worth while to prepare a new edition of them, with annotations,
protesting, not without a certain unwonted deference of tone, against
Pascal's doctrine of the base and desperate estate of man. Voltaire also
had them reprinted with notes of his own, written in the same spirit of
vivacious deprecation, which we may be sure would have been even more
vivacious, if Voltaire had not remembered that he was speaking of the
mightiest of all the enemies of the Jesuits. Apart from formal and
specific dissents like these, all the writers who had drunk most deeply
of the spirit of the eighteenth century, lived in a constant ferment of
revolt against the clear-witted and vigorous thinker of the century
before, who had clothed mere theological mysteries with the force and
importance of strongly entrenched propositions in a consistent