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PASCAL
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provinces of the two, or to make anything of either without virtually mixing up everything.

This problem is one which still exercises many minds in different dialects; and I, of course, am content to notice the fact. It indicates also the connection between the Provincial Letters and the Thoughts. The problem which has met Pascal in the controversy with the Jesuits is really besetting him in the Thoughts, and there he finds the solution which on one side is sceptical and on the other orthodox. For Pascal, as for the great men whom he follows, the starting-point is precisely this identification of all goodness with divine grace. Augustine, more fitly than Spinoza, might be called 'God intoxicated,' and in the Confessions we have the most impressive example of an imagination which interprets the world as everywhere permeated by the divine presence and the heart moved by a sense of personal relation to its Creator. Pascal gives an embodiment of the same pervading sentiment, and his work involves one dominant thought: If you attribute every good impulse to the Creator, what is left for the creature? Clearly only the bad or the absolutely neutral. Belief in divine grace, thus understood, has, therefore, for its correlative doctrine the cor-