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    Critical Miscellanies (Vol 2 of 3) Essay 1: Vauvenargues
    Critical Miscellanies (Vol 2 of 3) Essay 1: Vauvenargues
    Critical Miscellanies (Vol 2 of 3) Essay 1: Vauvenargues
    Ebook61 pages48 minutes

    Critical Miscellanies (Vol 2 of 3) Essay 1: Vauvenargues

    By John Morley

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    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateNov 25, 2013
    Critical Miscellanies (Vol 2 of 3) Essay 1: Vauvenargues

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      Critical Miscellanies (Vol 2 of 3) Essay 1 - John Morley

      Project Gutenberg's Critical Miscellanies (Vol 2 of 3), by John Morley

      This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with

      almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or

      re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included

      with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

      Title: Critical Miscellanies (Vol 2 of 3)

      Essay 1: Vauvenargues

      Author: John Morley

      Release Date: October 25, 2005 [EBook #16937]

      Language: English

      *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CRITICAL MISCELLANIES (VOL 2 OF 3) ***

      Produced by Paul Murray, Luis Amador and the Online

      Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

      CRITICAL MISCELLANIES

      BY

      JOHN MORLEY

      VOL. II.

      Essay 1: Vauvenargues

      London

      MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited

      NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

      1905

      CONTENTS OF VOL. II.

      [Transcriber's Note: Footnotes have been moved to end of book.]

      VAUVENARGUES.

      One of the most important phases of French thought in the great century of its illumination is only thoroughly intelligible, on condition that in studying it we keep constantly in mind the eloquence, force, and genius of Pascal. He was the greatest and most influential representative of that way of viewing human nature and its circumstances, which it was one of the characteristic glories of the eighteenth century to have rebelled against and rejected. More than a hundred years after the publication of the Pensées, Condorcet thought it worth while to prepare a new edition of them, with annotations, protesting, not without a certain unwonted deference of tone, against Pascal's doctrine of the base and desperate estate of man. Voltaire also had them reprinted with notes of his own, written in the same spirit of vivacious deprecation, which we may be sure would have been even more vivacious, if Voltaire had not remembered that he was speaking of the mightiest of all the enemies of the Jesuits. Apart from formal and specific dissents like these, all the writers who had drunk most deeply of the spirit of the eighteenth century, lived in a constant ferment of revolt against the clear-witted and vigorous thinker of the century before, who had clothed mere theological mysteries with the force and importance of strongly entrenched propositions in a consistent philosophy.

      The resplendent fervour of Bossuet's declamations upon the nothingness of kings, the pitifulness of mortal aims, the crushing ever-ready grip of the hand of God upon the purpose and faculty of man, rather filled the mind with exaltation than really depressed or humiliated it. From Bossuet to Pascal is to pass from the solemn splendour of the church to the chill of the crypt. Besides, Bossuet's attitude was professional, in the first place, and it was purely theological, in the second; so the main stream of thought flowed away and aside from him. To Pascal it was felt necessary that there should be reply and vindication, whether in the shape of deliberate and published formulas, or in the reasoned convictions of the individual intelligence working privately. A syllabus of the radical articles of the French creed of the eighteenth century would consist largely of the contradictions of the main propositions of Pascal. The old theological idea of the

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