Pascal re-echoes Montaigne then in asserting the paradoxical character of man and his experience. The old headings under which the Port-Royalist editors grouped the "Thoughts" recall the titles of Montaigne's "Essays"--"Of the Disproportion of Man," and the like. As strongly as Montaigne he delights in asserting the relative, local, ephemeral and merely provisional character of our ideas of law, vice, virtue, happiness, and so forth. Comme la mode fait l'agrément aussi fait-elle la justice. La justice et la vérité sont deux pointes si subtiles, que nos instruments sont trop mousses pour y toucher exactement. Bien suivant la seule raison n'est juste de soi: tout branle avec le temps. Sometimes he strikes the express accent of Montaigne: Ceux qui sont dans un vaisseau croient que ceux qui sont [85] au bord fuient. Le langage est pareil de tous côtés. Il faut avoir un point fixe pour en juger. Le port juge ceux qui sont dans un vaisseau, mais où prendrons-nous un port dans la morale? At times he seems to forget that he himself and Montaigne are after all not of the same flock, as his mind grazes in those pleasant places. Qu'il (man) se regarde comme égaré dans ce canton détourné de la nature, et de ce petit cachot où il se trouve logé, qu'il apprenne the earth, et soi-même à son juste prix. Il ffre, mais elle est ployable à tous sens; et ainsi il n'y en a point. Un même sens change selon les paroles qui l'expriment. He has touches even of what he calls the malignity, the malign irony of Montaigne. Rien que la médiocrité n'est bon, he says,--épris des hauteurs, as he so conspicuously was-- C'est sortir de l'humanité que de sortir du milieu; la grandeur de l'âme humaine consiste à savoir s'y tenir. Rien ne fortifie plus le pyrrhonisme--that is ever his word for scepticism--que ce qu'il y en a qui ne sont pas pyrrhoniens: si tous étaient ils auraient tort. You may even credit him, like Montaigne, with a somewhat Satanic intimacy with the ways, the cruel ways, the weakness, lâcheté, of the human heart, so that, as he says of Montaigne, himself too might be a pernicious study for those who have a native tendency to corruption.
The paradoxical condition of the world, the natural inconsistency of man, his strange [86] blending of meanness with ancient greatness, the caprices of his status here, of his power and attainments, in the issue of his existence--that is what the study of Montaigne had enforced on Pascal as the sincere compte rendu of experience. But then he passes at a tangent from the circle of the great sceptic's apprehension. That prospect of man and the world, undulant, capricious, inconsistent, contemptible, lâche, full of contradiction, with a soul of evil in things good, irreducible to law, upon which, after all, Montaigne looks out with a complacency so entire, fills Pascal with terror. It is the world on the morrow of a great catastrophe, the casual forces of which have by no means spent themselves. Yes! this world we see, of which we are a part, with its thousand dislocations, is precisely what we might expect as resultant from the Fall of Man, with consequences in full working still. It presents the appropriate aspect of a lost world, though with beams of redeeming grace about it, those, too, distributed somewhat capriciously to chosen people and elect souls, who, after all, can have but an ill time of it here. Under the tragic éclairs of divine wrath essentially implacable, the gentle, pleasantly undulating, sunny, earthly prospect of poor loveable humanity which opens out for one in Montaigne's "Essays," becomes for Pascal a scene of harsh precipices, of threatening heights and depths--the depths of his own nothingness. Vanity: nothingness: these [87] are his catchwords: Nous sommes incapables et du vrai et du bien; nous sommes tous condamnés. Ce qui y paraît (i.e., what we see in the world) ne marque ni une exclusion totale ni une présence manifeste de divinité, mais la présence d'un Dieu qui se cache: (Deus absconditus, that is a recurrent favourite thought of his) tout porte ce caractère. In this world of abysmal dilemmas, he is ready to push all things to their extremes. All or nothing; for him real morality will be nothing short of sanctity. En Jésus Christ toutes les contradictions sont accordées. Yet what difficulties again in the religion of Christ! Nulle autre religion n'a proposé de se haïr. La seule religion contraire à la nature, contraire au sens commun, est la seule qui ait toujours été.