Pascal had the art—which is most important in this matter—of leaving his readers under the impression that they had heard the whole case. It can be done honestly by actually stating the opposite case before giving the counter arguments. But it is more often done dishonestly (as Pascal did it) by making your reader think that he has heard all there is to hear, although he has, as a fact, heard hardly anything, or nothing, of the other side. Pascal was, of course, working on very favourable ground. He attacked what was at once powerful and unpopular, and what was not only powerful and unpopular, but sincere and therefore incapable of using poisoned weapons against himself. There is nothing more interesting in literature than to see how the honest men he attacked blundered in trying to refute him. They blundered because they were too honest for controversy. They saw that he was lying, and they took it for granted he was telling simple lies of a childish sort. They accused him of mechanical inaccuracy and misquotation, which was not the way to set to work at all.
Pascal's method was in part what may be called the suppressed alternative. It is a method which you often see used by demagogues also, and by any one of those who ridicule a superior to an inferior. Thus, on one occasion Pascal finds an author saying: "The obligation of a Christian to give alms out of his superfluity rarely arises." The man who wrote this used the technical theological word "obligation," but Pascal quotes him as though he used it in the loosest conversational sense. The man who wrote it decided (with obvious common-sense) that those cases were rare in which you could say that a Christian had done grievous wrong by not giving alms on a particular occasion. Pascal presented the matter so that his reader thought that the writer he was attacking discountenanced giving alms at all.
You very often see the same sort of thing done by people who ridicule the definitions of law. There is nothing easier. The law says, for instance, that a minor, a young giant of twenty years, can avoid payment by pleading "infancy."
It is quite easy to make that appear nonsense. It is not nonsense, but it is made to appear nonsense by using the word "infancy" in two senses. In the same way one could say by strict definition that the law does not forbid you to murder your grandmother. What the law does is to hang you if you murder your grandmother, which is, in strict definition, quite another proposition. Great play one could make before some one who had never heard of courts of justice, by saying: "Just think! The law in this country actually allows one to murder one's grandmother!" leaving discreetly aside the legal consequences of the act, and using the word "allow" positively and negatively in the same breath. The "Provincial letters" are crammed with this trick of presenting a word in two senses: as who should play on the word "take" and denounce the injunction "take your neighbour's money quietly" as meaning "steal it on the sly," when all the author meant was "don't play the fussy and generous refuser over small payments due to you."
There are those who tell you that not only Pascal and a hundred others, but every one who has ever convinced has used dishonest methods, and that no one ever convinced by solid proof alone. There are those who will tell you that the admission of opposing arguments and their honest analysis would be either so dull or so damaging, or both, that those who adopt this, the only sincere method, will necessarily fail.
I do not agree. Thus only is it achieved once and for all. People who are too weak to follow out a close chain of reasoning are at first not affected by strict deduction and probity of evidence. But there is always a minority with brains enough and energy enough to follow an argument, and then at last lead the rest. The quality of such achievement is that it is final: it is never reversed. It is done once and for all. The few who have mastered the proof are fixed and have, henceforward, authority. To produce such final conviction is a very great action indeed. It is the making of the public mind. It is the ultimate direction of the State.
But its first victory is exceedingly restricted. In matters where men have interest against truth, conviction is so rare as to work at first almost imperceptibly. An insignificant body receive a truth. Often they are dispersed. In a century there is a multitude. Soon, the world.