Pascal's Pensees Part 19
We do not weary of eating and sleeping every day, for hunger and sleepiness recur. Without that we should weary of them. So, without the hunger for spiritual things, we weary of them. Hunger after righteousness, the eighth beat.i.tude.[102]
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Faith indeed tells what the senses do not tell, but not the contrary of what they see. It is above them and not contrary to them.
266
How many stars have telescopes revealed to us which did not exist for our philosophers of old! We freely attack Holy Scripture on the great number of stars, saying, "There are only one thousand and twenty-eight,[103] we know it." There is gra.s.s on the earth, we see it--from the moon we would not see it--and on the gra.s.s are leaves, and in these leaves are small animals; but after that no more.--O presumptuous man!--The compounds are composed of elements, and the elements not.--O presumptuous man! Here is a fine reflection.--We must not say that there is anything which we do not see.--We must then talk like others, but not think like them.
267
The last proceeding of reason is to recognise that there is an infinity of things which are beyond it. It is but feeble if it does not see so far as to know this. But if natural things are beyond it, what will be said of supernatural?
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_Submission._--We must know where to doubt, where to feel certain, where to submit. He who does not do so, understands not the force of reason.
There are some who offend against these three rules, either by affirming everything as demonstrative, from want of knowing what demonstration is; or by doubting everything, from want of knowing where to submit; or by submitting in everything, from want of knowing where they must judge.
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Submission is the use of reason in which consists true Christianity.
270
_St. Augustine._[104]--Reason would never submit, if it did not judge that there are some occasions on which it ought to submit. It is then right for it to submit, when it judges that it ought to submit.
271
Wisdom sends us to childhood. _Nisi efficiamini sicut parvuli._[105]
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There is nothing so conformable to reason as this disavowal of reason.
273
If we submit everything to reason, our religion will have no mysterious and supernatural element. If we offend the principles of reason, our religion will be absurd and ridiculous.
274
All our reasoning reduces itself to yielding to feeling.
But fancy is like, though contrary to feeling, so that we cannot distinguish between these contraries. One person says that my feeling is fancy, another that his fancy is feeling. We should have a rule. Reason offers itself; but it is pliable in every sense; and thus there is no rule.
275
Men often take their imagination for their heart; and they believe they are converted as soon as they think of being converted.
276
M. de Roannez said: "Reasons come to me afterwards, but at first a thing pleases or shocks me without my knowing the reason, and yet it shocks me for that reason which I only discover afterwards." But I believe, not that it shocked him for the reasons which were found afterwards, but that these reasons were only found because it shocks him.
277
The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know. We feel it in a thousand things. I say that the heart naturally loves the Universal Being, and also itself naturally, according as it gives itself to them; and it hardens itself against one or the other at its will. You have rejected the one, and kept the other. Is it by reason that you love yourself?
278
It is the heart which experiences G.o.d, and not the reason. This, then, is faith: G.o.d felt by the heart, not by the reason.
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Faith is a gift of G.o.d; do not believe that we said it was a gift of reasoning. Other religions do not say this of their faith. They only gave reasoning in order to arrive at it, and yet it does not bring them to it.
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The knowledge of G.o.d is very far from the love of Him.
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Heart, instinct, principles.
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We know truth, not only by the reason, but also by the heart, and it is in this last way that we know first principles; and reason, which has no part in it, tries in vain to impugn them. The sceptics, who have only this for their object, labour to no purpose. We know that we do not dream, and however impossible it is for us to prove it by reason, this inability demonstrates only the weakness of our reason, but not, as they affirm, the uncertainty of all our knowledge. For the knowledge of first principles, as s.p.a.ce, time, motion, number, is as sure as any of those which we get from reasoning. And reason must trust these intuitions of the heart, and must base them on every argument. (We have intuitive knowledge of the tri-dimensional nature of s.p.a.ce, and of the infinity of number, and reason then shows that there are no two square numbers one of which is double of the other. Principles are intuited, propositions are inferred, all with certainty, though in different ways.) And it is as useless and absurd for reason to demand from the heart proofs of her first principles, before admitting them, as it would be for the heart to demand from reason an intuition of all demonstrated propositions before accepting them.
This inability ought, then, to serve only to humble reason, which would judge all, but not to impugn our certainty, as if only reason were capable of instructing us. Would to G.o.d, on the contrary, that we had never need of it, and that we knew everything by instinct and intuition!
But nature has refused us this boon. On the contrary, she has given us but very little knowledge of this kind; and all the rest can be acquired only by reasoning.
Therefore, those to whom G.o.d has imparted religion by intuition are very fortunate, and justly convinced. But to those who do not have it, we can give it only by reasoning, waiting for G.o.d to give them spiritual insight, without which faith is only human, and useless for salvation.