would not be four friends in the world." And his desire for friendly fellowship, his feeling of his own loneliness, appear clearly enough from the following paragraph:"The little communication that we can have in the study of the abstract sciences disgusted me with them. But I expected to find many companions in the study of man. I was deceived. There are still fewer who study man than who study geometry." He had suffered two attacks of partial paralysis in his limbs, attacks which seemed, however, not to touch his mind. While in this weak condition driving across one of the bridges over the Seine, the horses took fright and leaped off, leaving the carriage poised on the edge. The shock affected him so severely that he from that time frequently had the hallucination of an abyss yawning at his side. In this state, his sister, a devoted nun, persuaded him forever to abandon the world. Disappointed, sick, excited, his capacious mind hungering for truth and peace in the infinite, he turned with a morbid eagerness to the seclusion and austerity of Port Royal. Here he gave the last eight years of his life-from his thirty-first to his thirty-ninth year almost exclusively to religious meditation, and to literary labors for the cause of Christianity. The hypochondriacal state of Pascal betrays itself through all his poetic sophistry and glorious declamation. Health, without denying the evil of the world, enjoys its good, and tries, by making the best of it, to rise into something better. It is disease that reacts against it in disgust and horror, and paints it a thousand times worse than it is, in order to lend a keener relish to some theoretic good. The incongruities of human nature are better explained by the doctrine of a tentative progress towards our destiny, an advance still incomplete, with complicated faculties not yet harmonized, than by the doctrine of the Fall, which simply adds a new problem more fearful than the one it professes to solve. If man stands midway between infinity and nothing,-which is an oratoric, not a philosophic, expression, his desires allying him to that, his attainments to this: if he clasps - hands on one side with the ape, on the other side with the angel, it is that he has risen thus high and his passions are not yet equilibrated with his conditions, rather than that he has fallen thus low, and in his plunge been caught there by grace, and is now torn by the contradictory attractions of salvation and perdition. The facts of the problem are far more satisfactorily solved by the idea that the exorbitant faculties and demands of man are the preparatory rudiments of the divine estate he is to inherit, than by the idea that they are the discordant fragments of a celestial state from which he has been expelled. Man is a child of nature sensuously chained to the earth, but ideally scaling the heights of immensity; not a lord of heaven tumbled in ruins, mourning over what he has lost while clutching at what is within his reach. But Pascal took the latter view. He fought down his doubts, or thrust them out of sight, and clung frantically to the traditional theology as a shipwrecked man to a spar. We see his face look out at us as he drifts, a white and piteous speck of humanity, in the black flood. He regarded the soul as the convulsed ground of a supernatural conflict between the fiends of nature and the ministry of grace. He called man a reed that thinks. His soul was alone, a geometric point of thought in the infinitude of space. Impelled by the grandeur of his soaring mind and the wretchedness of his tortured body, both aggravated by the theological scheme reciprocally ministering to them and ministered to by them, he was constantly darting to and fro between the two poles of imagination, All and Nothing, and constantly associating one of these monstrous extremes with everything human. Shocked and lacerated by such a tremendous vibration, no wonder his strength so early gave way, no wonder his veiw of life was so overwrought. The disease which the surgeons laid bare in his gangrened vitals and brain, is equally revealed by a psychological autopsy of his writings, gangrenous blotches interspersing the splendid and electric pages. Thus, in his self-depreciating unhappiness and solitude, he affirmed that it was sinful for any one to love a creature so unworthy as he, and so soon to perish. Perhaps the most pathetic passage from his pen, when we view it in the light of his pure character, transcendent talents, and sad biography, is the following: "Man has, springing from the sense of his continued misery, a secret instinct that leads him to seek diversion and employment from without. And he has, remaining from the original greatness of his nature, another secret instinct, which teaches him that happiness can exist only in repose. From these two contrary instincts there arises in him an obscure propensity which prompts him to seek repose through agitation, and even to fancy that the contentment he does not enjoy will be found, if, by struggling yet a little longer, he can open a door to rest." He had known long ages in thought and feeling, but not forty years in time, when death kindly opened for him the door to rest. ROUSSEAU. ROUSSEAU was so lonely a man that the ground of his life was one long soliloquy, interrupted only as its surface now and then broke into distasted dialogues. He had singularities which made sustained companionship extremely difficult; singularities for the understanding of which few of his critics have had the only available key, namely, sympathetic insight. The connection of heart and brain in him was wonderfully intimate, the quantity and obstinacy of emotion extraordinary. His states of consciousness had greater impulsive force in their origin, greater vascular diffusion in his system, greater persistency in his nerves, than those of other people. In his youth he sought to avoid the other boys who wanted him to join them in their sports. "But," he says, "once really in their games, I was more ardent and went further than any. Difficult to start, and difficult to restrain such was ever my disposition." Again he says: "If no better than others, I am at least different from them. I am made unlike any one I have ever seen." Tragedies lie latent in those simple, daring words. - A truer picture of the shaded glory and prominent wretchedness of the youth of genius has never been drawn than that painted in the "Confessions" of Rousseau. At sixteen, discontented with himself and everything about him, devoured by desires of whose object he could form no conception, weeping without any cause for tears, sighing for he knew not what, given up to caressing the creations of his own fancy, he was happy only when he could escape, alone, among the lonely charms of nature, and abandon himself to impassioned visions, ideas, and dreams. "My delight in the world of imagination and my disgust with the real world gave rise to that love of solitude which has never since left me. This disposition, apparently so misanthropic and so melancholy, in reality proceeds from a heart all too fond, too loving, too tender; a heart which, failing to find real beings with whom to sympathize, is fain to feed on fictions." In the case of Rousseau, the sensitive pride imbedded in his constitution, too deep and constant for his own recognition, his fiery and persistent consciousness of his own soul, of objects, ideas, and emotions, required a soothing, deferential sympathy more pronounced and sustained than men were willing to give. The failure to receive what he wanted cut him to the quick. He regarded the disappointment as a cruel injustice, and retreated for solace into his own fancy and into seclusion. "The beings of my imagination," he declares, “disgust me with all the society I have left." Yes; because the reactions towards him of the beings of his imagination were under the domination of his own will, while the persons he met in society exercised their own opinions and feelings towards him, however much they fell below his. It is plain that for many years he disliked society because he did not shine in it as he thought he ought. In his first letter to Malesherbes he repudiates this conclusion, even for the past, when it was true, because it was now no longer true. He claims as the real reason, "An indomitable spirit of liberty, arising less from pride than from my incredible dislike of effort. The slightest duty laid on me in social life is insupportable. Therefore is ordinary intercourse with men odious to me; but intimate friendship is dear, because it imposes no duty; one follows his heart, and all is done." A deeper analysis would have shown him that this "indomitable spirit of liberty" was itself based on a .perversity of pride. Friendship was dear because it reflected himself to himself; ordinary intercourse was odious because it asked him equally to reflect others to themselves. He would not have been unhappy in society if he had been either humble in himself or indifferent as to the opinions others entertained of him. To have a high idea of self and to need the sympathy of others to sustain it, is to be miserable in all society except the most congenial. The only cure is to be found either in self-sufficingness or in self-renunciation. The fervid quickness and strength of Rousseau's feelings keyed him on so high a pitch that he could hardly sink into contentful unison with others. Finding every response distressingly inadequate to his craving he almost ceased to ask a response. "The evening," he writes, "when I have spent the day alone, finds me happy and gay; when I have passed the time in company it finds me taciturn and depressed." Accordingly he took refuge in imagination and solitude. Once, when his friend Diderot had long been confined in the Bastile, he obtained permission to visit him. On being admitted he rushed forward in convulsive joy, fell on his neck, and covered his face with kisses and tears. Diderot, instead of returning the demonstration of affection, coolly said to his jailor: "You see, sir, how my friends love me." The ice that fell on his heart in that moment poor Rousseau never forgot. And when, at a later time, Diderot, with direct reference to him, said that no one but a bad man could love to live in solitude, it was no wonder that with a deep sense of injury he indignantly repelled the assertion. One of his most characteristic works, published after his death, was entitled "Reveries of a Lonely Walker." The first reverie begins with these words: "Behold me, then, alone on the earth, with no brother, neighbor, friend, society, save myself." And on a later page he writes: "I |