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So far he is not only not with Montaigne, but he is clearly against him. The rights of nature, as he says, rise up against the Pyrrhonist. They make themselves good. And however strongly Pascal may draw the picture of human weakness, and all the contrarieties which our nature encloses, he does not mean by this to strike at the roots of all knowledge, and leave man a prey to helpless doubt.
They were taken by different persons; and some of the views on the Rhine, and particularly some along the southern shore of Spain, are unsurpassed by any I have seen. You may receive them some day, after I return." "Thank you; I shall copy them with great pleasure." "I see you are not as much of a pyrrhonist in art as in philosophy," said Mr.
Max Beerbohm. An Interrupted Conversation Ordinarily one does not learn things about oneself from Edmund Gosse, but my discovery that I am a Pyrrhonist is due to that literary man. A Pyrrhonist, says Mr. Gosse, is "one who doubts whether it is worth while to struggle against the trend of things.
If Pascal is Pyrrhonist, he is certainly not Pyrrhonist after the manner of Montaigne, deeply as he responds to many of the notes of the Essays, and at times seems to make them his own. The conversation with De Saci took place in 1654, when Pascal first went to Port Royal des Champs, and De Saci became his spiritual director.
A bitter smile hovered upon the lips of the third doctor, Maugredie, a man of acknowledged ability, but a Pyrrhonist and a scoffer, with the scalpel for his one article of faith. He would consider, as a concession to Brisset, that a man who, as a matter of fact, was perfectly well was dead, and recognize with Cameristus that a man might be living on after his apparent demise.
Montaigne is Pyrrhonist par excellence; and undoubtedly the famous Essays had greatly fascinated Pascal, like many others in his generation. He was constantly drawn to them as embodying one, and that a deep, phase of his own experience.
The man who continues to cross the road leisurely, although the cyclists' bells are ringing, is a Pyrrhonist and in a very special sense, for the ancient philosopher who gives his name to the class made himself conspicuous by refusing to get out of the way of careering chariots."
We have an innate idea of truth invincible to all Pyrrhonism. . . . Nature confounds the Pyrrhonist, and reason the Dogmatist;”— or, as the passage was originally written,— “We cannot be Pyrrhonists without violating nature; we cannot be Dogmatists without renouncing nature.” These and other passages sufficiently show Pascal’s relation to philosophy, and to Pyrrhonism in particular.
He is no enemy of philosophy, but he certainly does not believe it capable of explaining the riddle of human nature. He is so far from being a Pyrrhonist in the sense of resting on Pyrrhonism, that he seeks to mount on its shoulders to a higher truth. Nay, he clearly recognises that man has an inborn faculty for truth which not all the contradictions of his experience can belie.
Galen, the physician, asserts that experience is the only source of knowledge; lays great stress on the culture of mathematics and logic, observing that he himself should have been a Pyrrhonist had it not been for geometry. In the teleological doctrine of physiology he considers that the foundations of a true theology must be laid.
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