They tried realism and found that it led to pantheism.

They tried nominalism and found that it ended in materialism.

They attempted a compromise in conceptualism which begged the whole question.

Then they lay down, exhausted.

In the seventeenth century--the same violent struggle broke out again, and wrung from Pascal the famous outcry of despair in which the French language rose, perhaps for the last time, to the grand style of the twelfth century.