As Plato and Pascal’s dialectic arguments reach their climax, both philosophers turn their attentions to the immediate data that can be gleaned from language – data which no form of reasoning can fully quantify or describe. It is in this metaphysical arena, however (where the subtlest of differences have the most drastic consequences), that Pascal parts ways with Plato. He accuses Plato of still wanting to find truth in words that can offer nothing but mystery. Is there any benefit to asserting that man is ‘a two-legged featherless animal’? Do we learn any more from this statement than we would through simple personal observation? Pascal accepts that he must ‘humble this proud power of reasoning, which claims the right to be the judge of things chosen by the will’, but only because he is convinced that definitions, or ‘the arbitrary application of names to objects which are clearly designated in perfectly recognisable terms’, are created only ‘to designate what is being named, and not to reveal its nature’. This forces him to conclude that some ‘mots primitifs’ (or basic terms) ‘are indefinable’, such as space, time, movement, number, equality, or even being, ‘which cannot be defined without beginning it is, thus using the word to be defined within the definition’. Consequently, ‘humans are by nature perpetually unable to establish absolute and immutable order in any area of science’. Plato, on the other hand, is convinced that language holds an essential truth, and so refuses to set any limits on our dialectic power. His geometric principles are similar to Pascal’s equally hypothetical ‘mots primitifs’. However, they can still clarify aspects of an object’s basic nature – admittedly not aspects of its ‘sensible’ nature, as his contemporaries believed possible, but of its ‘intelligible’ reality. For this reason, Plato does not agree with Pascal’s statement that ‘what is beyond geometry is beyond us’. Instead, he maintains that dialectic has the right to aim higher,