quite impossible to vindicate his consistency, and it is not in the least necessary to do this, as already explained; while we feel bound to maintain that his higher mood is his true mood, and that the Pascal of the ‘Pensées’—the veritable Pascal—is to be judged, not by his weakness but by his strength; by his moments of clear mental sanity and insight, and not by his moments of despair or of derisive mockery of all human philosophy.
This seems to us the true light in which to regard the famous wager-essay on the existence of God, which has been a scandal even to some of his greatest admirers. It page 193is impossible to defend this essay on any principle of sound philosophy. Either there is a God or there is not. Which side of the question shall we take? “Reason,” he says, “cannot decide.” The fact, he means, cannot be demonstrated according to his customary use of the word reason. But if it cannot, there must yet be a balance of reason, and proof on one side or the other. And the only fair and manly issue of such a question must be, On which side lies this balance? A valid theistic conclusion can be found in no other way, and least of all in any calculation of chances, or balance of self-interest. And yet it is this last which Pascal has put forward with such prominence in this famous essay. “Wager,” he says. “If you win, you win everything; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation, that God exists. . . . On one side is an eternity of life, of infinite blessedness to be gained, and what you stake is finite. . . . Our proposition is, that the finite is to be vested in a wager, in which there is an equal chance of gain and loss, and infinitude to gain.” The play was hardly worthy of Pascal, and the ‘mystery of the game’ could certainly never be unravelled in any such way. But not a few minds like Pascal’s—with deep spiritual intuitions and yet a craving for scientific certainty constantly mocking these intuitions—have felt in a similar manner the hazard of the great question, and may have said to themselves, “We must take our stand, and this is the side which weighs in the balance. We can lose nothing; we may gain everything.” The mood is not a lofty one, and it is no higher in Pascal