CHAPTER III. PASCAL IN THE WORLD.

Week.¹⁵ The truth would seem to be that all these men came across Pascal’s path at this time, and were more or less known to him. His allusions to both Miton and Desbarreaux in the Pensées imply this. There is a certain familiarity of knowledge indicated in the very page 67heartiness with which he assails them—speaking of Miton as “hateful,”¹⁶ and of Desbarreaux as having renounced reason and made himself a “brute.”¹⁷ But it is against all probability, no less than against all the facts known to us, to suppose that Pascal had more connection with such men than meeting them in the society in which he moved during these years, and becoming well acquainted with the intellectual and moral atmosphere which they breathed. It may be too much to say, with Faugère, that he was then consciously imbibing the experience to be afterwards utilised in his great work, or that it was the principles professed by these men which gave him the first idea of such a work; but we may certainly say that the knowledge of them, as well as all the knowledge he acquired at this time, served to deepen and extend his moral intuitions, and to give a finer point to many of his Thoughts. And no student of Pascal can doubt that “if his feet touched for a moment the dirt of this dissolute