philosophy.

The resplendent fervour of Bossuet's declamations upon the nothingness
of kings, the pitifulness of mortal aims, the crushing ever-ready grip
of the hand of God upon the purpose and faculty of man, rather filled
the mind with exaltation than really depressed or humiliated it. From
Bossuet to Pascal is to pass from the solemn splendour of the church to
the chill of the crypt. Besides, Bossuet's attitude was professional, in
the first place, and it was purely theological, in the second; so the
main stream of thought flowed away and aside from him. To Pascal it was
felt necessary that there should be reply and vindication, whether in
the shape of deliberate and published formulas, or in the reasoned
convictions of the individual intelligence working privately. A syllabus
of the radical articles of the French creed of the eighteenth century
would consist largely of the contradictions of the main propositions of
Pascal. The old theological idea of the fall was hard to endure, but the
idea of the fall was clenched by such general laws of human nature as
this,--that 'men are so necessarily mad, that it would be to be mad by a
new form of madness not to be mad;'--that man is nothing but
masquerading, lying, and hypocrisy, both in what concerns himself and in
respect of others, wishing not to have the truth told to himself, and
shrinking from telling it to anybody else;[1] that the will, the
imagination, the disorders of the body, the thousand concealed
infirmities of the intelligence, conspire to reduce our discovery of
justice and truth to a process of haphazard, in which we more often miss
the mark than hit.[2] Pleasure, ambition, industry, are only means of
distracting men from the otherwise unavoidable contemplation of their
own misery. How speak of the dignity of the race and its history, when
we know that a grain of sand in Cromwell's bladder altered the destinies
of a kingdom, and that if Cleopatra's nose had been shorter the whole