[Footnote 1:  It is this uninterrupted progress which raises the reason above the operations of nature and the instincts of animals.  While the bees build their cells to-day just as they did a thousand years ago, science is continually developing.  This guarantees to us our immortal destiny.]

The leading principles of his ethics are as follows:  In sin the love to God created in us has left us and self-love has transgressed its limits; pride has delivered us over to selfishness and misery.  Our nature is corrupted, but not beyond redemption.  In his actions worthless and depraved, man is seen to be exalted and incomprehensible in his ends; in reality he is worthy of abhorrence, but great in his destination.  No philosophy or religion has so taught us at once to know the greatness and the misery of man as Christianity:  this bids him recognize his low condition, but at the same time to endeavor to become like God.  We must humbly despise the world and renounce ourselves; in order to love God, we must hate ourselves.  Moral reformation is an act of divine grace, and the merit of human volition consists only in not resisting this.  God transforms the heart by a heavenly sweetness, grants it to know that spiritual pleasure is greater than bodily pleasure, and infuses into it a disgust at the allurements of sin.  Virtue is finding one’s greatest happiness in God or in the eternal good.  As morality is a matter of feeling, not of thought, so God, so even the first principles on which the certitude of demonstration depends, are the object, not of reason, but of the heart.  That which certifies to the highest indemonstrable principles is a feeling, a belief, an instinct of nature:  les principes se sentent.  As a defender of the needs and rights of the heart, Pascal is a forerunner of the great Rousseau.  His depreciation of the reason to exalt faith establishes a certain relationship with the skeptics of his native land, among whom Cousin has unjustly classed him (Etudes sur Pascal, 5th ed., 1857).[1]

[Footnote 1:  Of the works on Pascal we may mention that of H. Reuchlin, 1840:  Havet’s edition of the Pensees, with notes, Paris, 1866; and the Etude by Ed. Droz, Paris, 1886.]

Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715), a member of the Oratory of Jesus, in Paris, which was opposed by the Jesuits, completed the development of Cartesianism in the religious direction adopted by Pascal.  His thought is controlled by the endeavor to combine Cartesian metaphysics and Augustinian Christianity, those two great forces which constituted the double citadel of his order.  His collected works appeared three years before his death; and a new edition in four volumes, prepared by J. Simon, in 1871.  His chief work, On the Search for Truth (new edition by F. Bouillier, 1880), appeared in 1675, and was followed by the Treatise on Ethics (new edition by H. Joly, 1882) and the Christian and Metaphysical Meditations in 1684,