ABSTRACT
Lord St. Cyres treatment of the more mystical element in Pascal seems to reflect in some measure the reaction against intellectualism which is attaining such large proportions, and of which pragmatism is perhaps the best known, though by no means the only, manifestation. The treatment of Pascal's conversion especially is evidently colored by certain theories of James's as to the role of the subliminal in religious experience. The great scientific intellectualists of the last century, who were striving to establish strict causal sequences between phenomena, looked with less favor on the 'thunderclaps and visible upsets of grace,' and in general on the appeal to pure intuition that one finds in Pascal. Pascal's attack on Jesuitical morality was intended for immediate effect, and so is at times too implicated in the local and ephemeral. Religion, again, in the Provincial Letters often appears as a mere occasion for the sparrings of theologians.
