behave nicely, and those who are not will behave otherwise in any case:
and this is surely a form of predestination--for the hazard of being
born a nice person or not is as uncertain as the gift of grace.

It is likely that Pascal was attracted as much by the fruits of
Jansenism in the life of Port-Royal as by the doctrine itself. This
devout, ascetic, thoroughgoing society, striving heroically in the midst
of a relaxed and easy-going Christianity, was formed to attract a nature
so concentrated, so passionate, and so thoroughgoing as Pascal's. But
the insistence upon the degraded and helpless state of man, in
Jansenism, is something also to which we must be grateful, for to it we
owe the magnificent analysis of human motives and occupations which was
to have constituted the early part of his book. And apart from the
Jansenism which is the work of a not very eminent bishop who wrote a
Latin treatise which is now unread, there is also, so to speak, a
Jansenism of the individual biography. A moment of Jansenism may
naturally take place, and take place rightly, in the individual;
particularly in the life of a man of great and intense intellectual
powers, who cannot avoid seeing through human beings and observing the
vanity of their thoughts and of their avocations, their dishonesty and
self-deceptions, the insincerity of their emotions, their cowardice, the
pettiness of their real ambitions. Actually, considering that Pascal
died at the age of thirty-nine, one must be amazed at the balance and
justice of his observations; much greater maturity is required for these
qualities, than for any mathematical or scientific greatness. How easily
his brooding on _the misery of man without God_ might have encouraged in
him the sin of spiritual pride, the _concupiscence de l'esprit_, and how
fast a hold he has of humility!

And although Pascal brings to his work the same powers which he exerted