produced whole by such means; but neither does even the higher form of
religious inspiration suffice for the religious life; even the most
exalted mystic must return to the world, and use his reason to employ
the results of his experience in daily life. You may call it communion
with the Divine, or you may call it a temporary crystallisation of the
mind. Until science can teach us to reproduce such phenomena at will,
science cannot claim to have explained them; and they can be judged only
by their fruits.

From that time until his death, Pascal was closely associated with the
society of Port-Royal which his sister Jacqueline, who predeceased him,
had joined as a _religieuse_; the society was then fighting for its life
against the Jesuits. Five propositions, judged by a committee of
cardinals and theologians at Rome to be heretical, were found to be put
forward in the work of Jansenius; and the society of Port-Royal, the
representative of Jansenism among devotional communities, suffered a
blow from which it never revived. It is not the place here to review the
bitter controversy and conflict; the best account, from the point of
view of a critic of genius who took no side, who was neither Jansenist
nor Jesuit, Christian nor infidel, is that in the great book of
Sainte-Beuve, _Port-Royal_. And in this book the parts devoted to Pascal
himself are among the most brilliant pages of criticism that
Sainte-Beuve ever wrote. It is sufficient to notice that the next
occupation of Pascal, after his conversion, was to write these eighteen
"Letters," which as prose are of capital importance in the foundation of
French classical style, and which as polemic are surpassed by none, not
by Demosthenes, or Cicero, or Swift. They have the limitation of all
polemic and forensic: they persuade, they seduce, they are unfair. But
it is also unfair to assert that, in these _Letters to a Provincial_,
Pascal was attacking the Society of Jesus in itself. He was attacking