He looks at man always as a spiritual being. It is his spiritual capacity which alone makes him great, and yet intensifies all the lower contradictions of his nature. It is “thought alone which makes man’s greatness.” A man can be conceived “without hands or feet or head, but not without thought.”
“The possession of the earth would not add to my greatness. As to space, the universe encloses and absorbs me as a mere point, but by thought I embrace it. . . . Man is but a reed, the feeblest of created things—but one possessing thought (*un roseau pensant*). It needs not that the universe should arm itself to crush him. A breath, a drop of water, suffices for his destruction. But were the whole universe to rise against him, man is yet greater than the universe, since man *knows* that he dies. He knows the universe prevails against him. The universe knows nothing of its power.” 13
It is hardly possible to speak more eloquently of the dignity of human nature. And if it is the same voice which speaks in such pathetic or it may be harsh tones of human weakness and misery, and the disproportions of our natural life, it is the very consciousness of greatness that inspires the consciousness of misery. Looking from such a height of human dignity, he sees all the depths of page 191human baseness. It is this higher spirit which consecrates Pascal as a moralist. Has he rebuked the presumptions of humanity? has he called upon proud reason to humble itself? has he gibed human philosophy, and even gloried for a moment in the contradictions of empiricism? It is never that he may laugh at man, or that he may rest in the mere contemplation of his follies or extravagances, but because he himself profoundly realised the height and the depth of his being—the grandeur to which he could rise, or to which God could raise him, and the baseness and miseries to which he could sink. Doubtless, as with all concentrated and meditative natures,