us most forcibly by such a man as Pascal. He is himself, as he declared man to be in general, a kind of incarnate antinomy. As he brings the heart into hopeless conflict with reason; as he manages at once to exaggerate the baseness and the grandeur of human nature; as he urges alternately with extraordinary keenness two aspects of truth, and is forced to make them contradictory instead of complementary; as his moral position is on one side pure, elevating, and a standing rebuke to all the meaner tendencies of his generation, and yet, on the other, becomes morbid, perverse, and impracticable, because he has separated life into its incommensurable elements,—he leaves to us not a final solution but a problem: How to form a system which shall throughout be reasonable and founded upon fact, and yet find due place and judicious guidance for the higher elements, which he has really perverted in the effort to exaggerate their importance?
Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to Her Majesty
at the Edinburgh University Press
