[51] Pensées, ed. Faugère, ii, 168–69. The “abêtira” comes from Montaigne. [↑]
[52] Thus Mr. Owen treats Pascal as a skeptic, which philosophically he was, insofar as he really philosophized and did not merely catch at pleas for his emotional beliefs. “Les Pensées de Pascal,” writes Prof. Le Dantec, “sont à mon avis le livre le plus capable de renforcer l’athéisme chez un athée” (L’Athéisme, 1906, pp. 24–25). They have in fact always had that effect. [↑]
[53] De la Delicatesse, 1671, dial. v, p. 329, etc. [↑]
[54] Vinet, Études sur Blaise Pascal, 3e édit. p. 267 sq. [↑]
[55] Cp. the Éloge de Pascal by Bordas Demoulin in Didot ed. of the Lettres, 1854, pp. xxii–xxiii, and cit. from Saint-Beuve. Mark Pattison, it seems, held that the Jesuits had the best of the argument. See the Letters of Lord Acton to Mary Gladstone, 1904, p. 207. As regards the effect of Jansenism on belief, we find De Tocqueville pronouncing that “Le Jansenisme ouvrit ... la brêche par laquelle la philosophie du 18e siècle devait faire irruption” (Hist. philos. du règne de Louis XV, 1849, i, 2). This could truly be said of Pascal. [↑]
[56] Cp. Voltaire’s letter of 1768, cited by Morley, Voltaire, 4th ed. p. 159. [↑]
[57] Cp. Owen, French Skeptics, pp. 762–63, 767. [↑]
[58] This was expressly urged against Huet by Arnauld. See the Notice in Jourdain’s ed. of the Logique de Port Royal, 1854, p. xi; Perrens, Les Libertins, p. 301; and Bouillier Hist. de la philos. cartésienne, 1854, i, 595–96, where are cited the letters of Arnauld (Nos. 830, 834, and 837 in Œuvres Compl. iii, 396, 404, 424) denouncing Huet’s Pyrrhonism as “impious” and perfectly adapted to the purposes of the freethinkers. [↑]
[59] Cp. Alexandre Westphal, Les Sources du Pentateuque, i (1888), pp. 64–68. [↑]
[60] Huet himself incurred a charge of temerity in his handling of textual questions. Id. p. 66. [↑]