of Renan, so one can recognize in Pascal's life the force of his father's

discipline. Étienne Pascal was a magistrate. He was president of the cour des aides at Clermont; that is, he was a member of a tribunal before which came all cases, criminal as well as civil, where taxes were concerned. We may well fancy that his conversation was tinged by his profession, and that problems of responsibility had a great part in them.

At the same time that the boy's genius for geometry was developing, these conversations were waking a psychological sense within him. The practice of prayer, which was customary in Christian families of the seventeenth century, must have helped to make him feel the value of the inner life. It may be objected that at Saint-Sulpice Renan also underwent this régime. The tone of one of his most frequently quoted sentences hardly indicates that he practised it with much fervor. It is his joking remark to M. Clemenceau over not praying a jest innocent enough in itself, but one may imagine what horror it would have stirred in Pascal.

For Pascal the religious problem stands thus: How may we find an explanation for the world which will also explain man? Nobody has had a keener sense than he of the tragedy of our destiny caught in a universe which seems to ignore us, lost in this infinity of space whose silence terrifies. No one laments more bitterly the inner contradiction which causes our will to be constantly perverted and our noblest efforts to bear within themselves an element of corruption. Pascal's grandeur consists in having interpreted this anguish with incomparable passion and sincerity. The weakness of Renan consists in having evaded it. If these few notes of mine, which are necessarily hasty and incomplete, are

to be trusted, Pascal and Renan appear as the two most important representatives of the two possible solutions of the problem of human destiny. The ability of the author of the Histoire des origines du christianisme is of a high order. The fascination of his intricate thought is highly appealing. I do not believe his sincerity is to be called in question, any more than his science. On this latter point I ask no better proof than his influence on those very German exegetes whose pupil he had been in the beginning. Georges Sorel could say of him with perfect fairness, 'All the really able men who took up anew the question that he dealt with have owed something to his theories. As you read Harnack's lectures on the essence of Christianity, you have no difficulty in discerning that the most noted representative of German science to-day leans heavily upon the Frenchman whom the German universities formerly treated contemptuously as a man of letters and a mere popularizer.'

This is quite true, and it is enough to explain the great prestige that he enjoyed in the eyes of the men of my generation the generation which lived through twenty years after the war of 1870. I am told that the young people of to-day are rebellious against this influence, from which their elders also are more and more freeing themselves. It is because Renan's world vision necessitates an unpleasant distortion of reality. In the end, it assigns man the place of an epiphenomenon. Now to explain the universe without explaining man is as false as to pretend to explain the world in terms of man, which is what the old anthropomorphism attempted. The world exists, and so does man. When Pascal shows that they are incommensurable one with the other, he is quite right.

To appeal once more to the passage

I have already quoted, one cannot compare humanity to an unimportant moss or lichen without neglecting that evidence of humanity's greatness which consists ― an anomaly that Pascal was quick to mark - in understanding our own wretchedness. 'As men gain more light they discover the grandeur and wretchedness in man. Man, in a word, knows that he is wretched. He is wretched because he is wretched, but he is great because he recognizes his own wretchedness.'

The problem of fate can thus be seen in the clear light of day: we are a part of the universe and yet we are apart from it. It has its laws to which we are subject, which we endure or which slay us, but which are external to our souls. These are irreducible to pure mechanism. To reduce our soul to a chemical secretion is to deny it, but it is not to explain it. To make the soul an aspect of the group that precedes and survives it (and also ignores it) is but another way of denying both the soul and the feelings for justice and light and love which constitute its

us, of an energy that has created us, knows us, loves us. It has created us and it sustains us; it is conscious of us and of itself. How then can unintel ligence emerge from intelligence? How can love emerge from anything but love?

What does the blind man ask in that moving gospel which we read in the Mass of Quinquagesima Sunday: 'Domine, fac ut videam'-'Lord, make me to see'? And, like a response to that appeal interpreted in its spiritual sense, one of Saint Paul's Epistles says: 'For now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.'

This need for the human feeling in human life, this certainty that the darkness about us, in which we are struggling, will one day be illumined by the light of solution, and that even now we possess signs and traces of that light that is all of Pascal. What deep chords he stirs in us, which Renan, with all the magic of his style, can never reach! Truly in Pascal, to recall another of his sentences, we have not an author but a man. Let us hail in the Souvenirs d'enfance et de jeunesse, in the Réforme intellectuelle et morale, and in so many other of his writings, the work of a great artist and an observer who is frequently keen; but let us seek in the Pensées of Pascal the lessons of suffering and death that are the great teaching.

OUR twentieth century, the golden age of the motor, the airship, and electricity, proud of its recent inventions and their ingenious applications, is sometimes unfair to ages gone by. We moderns have too often a tendency to smile at our predecessors. The excuse, no doubt, is that we sin through ignorance like nouveaux riches who, carried away by pride in their new possessions, look with contempt on the teachings of the past. The little essay that I am writing here is designed to show those people who are wholly occupied with their own century that some rein is needed in their beatific admiration of modernity.

We hear a good deal of talk nowadays about the miracles of the 'electric fairy,' but we do not hear quite so much about those of the 'explosive-motor fairy' or the 'steam-engine fairy' - no doubt because these expressions do not sound quite so poetic or else because these particular fairies have all begun to show signs of age. However this may be, these fairies are really very old ladies.

They belong to a world of marvels, to a time when animals talked― a time too when men hardly cared to think, which saved them the trouble of inventing things. But we must find out whether Chinese civilization is not still older, for it is a civilization whose traces can be found nearly two thousand years before our era; and here no fairy is concerned at all. It is a question simply of some men whose works

are curiously like the inventions of our modern magicians.

As everybody knows it is a commonplace to mention it - the Chinese understood the art of the sea compass and of printing long before us Europeans. The Arabs, who were using the sea compass during the Middle Ages, attributed the discovery of its magnetic properties to Aristotle, but the Greeks themselves had been anticipated in this discovery by the Chinese. Perhaps the Greeks had made its acquaintance by way of India or Egypt. Indeed there are texts that show the Chinese twelve centuries before our era using a kind of wagon equipped with an instrument that pointed always toward the north; and according to Humboldt it was the compass that guided them across the immense steppes of Tatary.

So far as printing is concerned it has always been believed that stereotyped wooden plates were invented by the Chinese about the year 932 of our era; but the works of the sinologue Stanislas Julien have shown that this invention actually dates from the year 593. A text of this period remarks: 'It was decreed that drawings and unpublished texts should be collected and engraved on wood for publication.' If Europe had been in touch with China about the end of the sixth century it would have learned the art of printing eight hundred years sooner than it did. This invention was brought to its highest pitch of perfection in China in the eleventh century, thanks to the metal

worker, Pi Cheng, who devised movable characters in baked earth.

As for lithography, which came to Europe in the first years of the nineteenth century, it was employed by the Chinese in ancient times to reproduce the autographs of celebrities. Later on, in the year 993, an imperial decree directed that the manuscripts of ancient authors of the Wei and Tsin dynasties be carved on stone and reproduced by the press.

But I refer to these ancient discoveries merely to recall them. Let us pass on to other facts not so well known and to inventions which are more recent or which at least we Europeans think more recent. In 1823 there appeared in Europe for the first time a bridge suspended on steel cables- a daring and elegant method of contsruction that astounded the public. But it would have been a blunder to extol the merits of such an invention to a Chinese traveling among us. He would have smiled - and been more than ever convinced of his country's superiority in everything. He would have believed more than ever that China was the centre of the world, for as a matter of fact the Chinese have been acquainted with suspension bridges from time immemorial.

Their most ancient historians write of bridges hung on iron chains or on rattan. Such structures seemed strange to the missionaries who reached China. They called them 'flying bridges' and one recounts his horror as he felt the bridge swing beneath his steps as he crossed a deep chasm.

In Europe people ridiculed these travelers' tales and treated the accounts of the missionaries as mere stories. Later on, when they received verification, the attitude of distrust persisted and the old bridges, dangling on their rusty chains, were held in derision. Then came forgetfulness; and when in

1823 the suspension bridge was intro sur duced in Europe, not on rusty chains, hav but on new steel cables, people ap ten plauded the engineers' amazing in kno i genuity.

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After the bridges come roadways fer McAdam was accused of plagiarism bu when he brought into notice the system of stone surfaces for roadways which Ch bears his name. It is possible to prove T that under the administration of Monsieur Turgot in Limousin the roadways at of that province had been 'macadamized' long before. But is it certain that McAdam was copying the former process?

It is more probable that he drew his inspiration from a report made by the secretary of the Macartney Mission to China. This secretary, whose name was Staunton, had been struck in the course of his travels with the methods employed by the Chinese in building their roads. On his return he explained all this to his father's engineer, McAdam. The model roads that were afterward built near Bristol according to McAdam's plans are oddly reminiscent of the Chinese roadways reported upon by Macartney's secretary.

In agriculture the Chinese, who are farmers par excellence, have not waited for European chemical discoveries to increase the yield of their fields by fertilization. They have supplemented their ignorance of vegetable organisms, their nutrition and development, by exact observation and practical intelli

gence.

At a time when Europe had not the least notion of fertilizing principles, the Chinese were conducting various experiments with artificial fertilizers, the refuse of dried hemp, oil cakes, and oyster shells. These ancient farmers were particularly advanced in irrigation. They had invented a large machine to carry water from the river, which ran at a lower level, up to the

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urrounding fields. Two proverbs that have come down from ancient Chinese exts prove the antiquity of their <nowledge of fertilizers: 'Manure must ɔe saved like gold'; 'It is better to fertilize the fields you have than to buy new ones.'

The inventive spirit of the ancient Chinese excels in still another field. Though Europe has had some knowledge of developing mineral wealth for about two centuries, the Chinese were employing their knowledge in ancient = times. We must not draw a naïve comparison between our modern processes and the crude methods employed by y the Chinese. It is enough to show who first had the idea. The invention is the i main thing, all the rest is merely a I matter of perfecting; and so, when we boast of the use of iron and brass in certain constructions, let us remember the :brass pagoda constructed on a hill near Tsing Kiang fou that dates from about the twelfth century.

German silver, an alloy which we Europeans once valued, is merely an imitation of an invention long known in China under the name of pai t'ong, or white steel, which is obtained by fusing red steel with arsenic. The Chinese have long been past-masters in the art of making alloys, the best examples that we can mention being the manufacture of gongs and tom-toms.

These instruments, with their perfect tones, whose origin is mingled with the legendary origin of their inventors, have stirred experts to admiration, and in vain have they tried to imitate them. Chemical analysis has determined the composition of the tom-toms, but the details of their manufacture, the knack of the artisans, remain mysteries. It is the same with those vases of ancient bronze, so treasured by collectors, of which to-day we have only occasional samples.

Dye-making, an industry which has

been so prosperous in Germany during the last few years, long ago yielded its secrets to the Chinese, the first dyers in the world. The saffron flower, which gives a fine red color, was imported during the Han dynasty, 115 B.C. It was intensively cultivated and soon spread through the whole empire, for use in the manufacture of red dye. Indigo was extracted from five plants. Finally Chinese green, whose chemical composition was sought in vain, drew the attention of Europe. Thanks to the interest of the consul de Montigny it was learned that this green was derived by a complicated process from the bark of a thorn tree. A clever manufacturer at Lyon hit upon the idea of using a similar wood. He obtained the shade he desired and was able to sell fabrics of Chinese green.

Is it any use to recall here the wonderful varnishes that the Chinese have been extracting from a tree since ancient times and that similiar processes in our own industries have never been able to equal? With this varnish the Chinese have been able to produce exquisite lacquer work that is forever forbidden to modern quantity-producers.

We must not leave the subject of colors without giving a word about secrets de beauté. Ancient authors show that the custom of painting the face goes back to the Tcheou dynasty, 1116 B.C. Chinese rouge at this time was prepared by mingling a syrupy coloring extract with fat or white lead. It is easy to see that the fondness of improving on nature among Eve's daughters is at least as old as nature itself. You charming ladies of the twentieth century, who no doubt sometimes wield your lip-sticks and eyebrow pencils with perfect taste, join hands across the centuries with your sisters, those Chinese ladies who beautified themselves with colored fats. You are indeed daughters of the same mother!