ABSTRACT
These long quotations are essential to show the unity of Pascal's ideas. Since men cannot, in this world, achieve either goodness or truth, then they are obviously unable to set up any wholly satisfactory form of social or political organisation. For Pascal, there are absolutely no exceptions to the statement that all activities connected with the world are infected with its vain and fallen nature. Moreover, there is no contradiction between his ideas on epistemology and ethics and his social and political opinions. When he demands complete truth and justice on the epistemological or ethical plane it is precisely because truth and justice have a transcendent quality that brings them inevitably into conflict with the things of this world. Law and politics do not have this transcendent quality, and Pascal would be going against his own tragic philosophy if he were to place any hope in them. A world ruled by the commandments of divine love would achieve perfect justice, and would not need either laws or institutions. It can therefore be considered as automatically in conflict with the inadequate social and political institutions of the imperfect world in which we now live. Here again, of course, Pascal is merely carrying on an old Christian tradition. It is an Augustinian one-but on this particular issue Augustinianism is linked with the eschatological
views of the early spiritual masters~and one which, after having been duly secularised and freed from any transcendental associations, will recur at a later period as a central concept of dialectical thought: the disappearance of the state.
