Capitolo 11
the subject that the most intelligent men have seen how small it had to be
earned subsequently undertaking those lines of thought. The twelfth one
century had already reached the point where the seventeenth century
it was standing when Descartes renewed the attempt to give a solid,
philosophical base for the deism from his famous '_Cogito, therefore the sum_.'
Even if that last done it seemed new to Europe when Descartes
revives him/it as the beginning-point of his/her demonstration, it was as
old man and relative as San Augustine to the twelfth century, and as
few conclusive as some other assumption of the ego or the Not-ego.
The schools disputed, according to their tastes, from unity to
multiplicity, or from the unity multiplicity; but what they wanted
it was to connect the two. They tried realism and they founded that it conducted
pantheism. They tried nominalism and they founded that it ended in
materialism. They tried a compromise in conceptualism that
implored the whole question. Then they placed down, exhausted. In the
seventeenth century--the same violent struggle broke out again, and
wrung from Pascal the famous cry of the desperation in that French
language of rose, perhaps for the last time, to the great style of the
twelfth century. To the twelfth century it belongs; to the century
of the faith and the simplicity; not to the mathematical certainties of
Descartes and Leibnitz and Newton, or to the mathematician
the extractions of Spinoza. Descartes had proclaimed his famous
conceptual test of God: 'I am aware of me, and it has to exist;
I am aware of God and Him it has to exist.' Pascal tiredly responded
what God was not him you/he/she doubted, but the logic. He was tortured by the
the impossibility to refuse the reason for reason man; unconsciously
sceptic, he was forced to doubt in him rather than
admits a doubt of God. Man had tried to try God, and you/he/she had failed:
'The metaphysical tests of God are so remote (_eloignees_) from the
reasoning of men, and so contradictory (_impliquees_, recovered far)