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independent of reason, and often the masters of
reason, have led him into pursuit of pleasure. All creatures either torment
or tempt him, and domineer over him, either subduing him by their strength,
or fascinating him by their charms, a tyranny more awful and more imperious.
"Such is the state in which men now are. There remains to them some feeble
instinct of the happiness of their former state; and they are plunged in the
evils of their blindness and their lust, which have become their second
nature. "From this principle which I disclose to you, you can recognize the
cause of those contradictions which have astonished all men and have divided
them into parties holding so different views. Observe, now, all the feelings
of greatness and glory which the experience of so many woes cannot stifle,
and see if the cause of them must not be in another nature.
For Port-Royal to-morrow (Prosopopaea).--"It is in vain, O men, that you
seek within yourselves the remedy for your ills. All your light can only
reach the knowledge that not in yourselves will you find truth or good. The
philosophers have promised you that, and you have been unable to do it. They
neither know what is your true good, nor what is your true state. How could
they have given remedies for your ills, when they did not even know them?
Your chief maladies a
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