Pascals Pensees

Pascal's Pensées, by Blaise Pascal

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Pascal's Pensées, by Blaise Pascal
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
Title: Pascal's Pensées
Author: Blaise Pascal
Release Date: April 27, 2006 [EBook #18269]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PASCAL'S
PENSÉES ***

Produced by John Hagerson, LN Yaddanapudi, Juliet Sutherland and
the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

PASCAL'S PENSÉES
INTRODUCTION BY T. S. ELIOT
A Dutton Paperback

New York E. P. DUTTON & CO., INC.

This paperback edition of "Pascal's Pensées" Published 1958 by E. P.
Dutton & Co., Inc. All rights reserved. Printed in the U.S.A.
SBN 0-525-47018-2

INTRODUCTION
It might seem that about Blaise Pascal, and about the two works on
which his fame is founded, everything that there is to say had been said.
The details of his life are as fully known as we can expect to know
them; his mathematical and physical discoveries have been treated
many times; his religious sentiment and his theological views have
been discussed again and again; and his prose style has been analysed
by French critics down to the finest particular. But Pascal is one of
those writers who will be and who must be studied afresh by men in
every generation. It is not he who changes, but we who change. It is not
our knowledge of him that increases, but our world that alters and our
attitudes towards it. The history of human opinions of Pascal and of
men of his stature is a part of the history of humanity. That indicates
his permanent importance.
The facts of Pascal's life, so far as they are necessary for this brief
introduction to the Pensées, are as follows. He was born at Clermont, in
Auvergne, in 1623. His family were people of substance of the upper
middle class. His father was a government official, who was able to
leave, when he died, a sufficient patrimony to his one son and his two
daughters. In 1631 the father moved to Paris, and a few years later took
up another government post at Rouen. Wherever he lived, the elder
Pascal seems to have mingled with some of the best society, and with
men of eminence in science and the arts. Blaise was educated entirely
by his father at home. He was exceedingly precocious, indeed
excessively precocious, for his application to studies in childhood and
adolescence impaired his health, and is held responsible for his death at

thirty-nine. Prodigious, though not incredible stories are preserved,
especially of his precocity in mathematics. His mind was active rather
than accumulative; he showed from his earliest years that disposition to
find things out for himself, which has characterised the infancy of
Clerk-Maxwell and other scientists. Of his later discoveries in physics
there is no need for mention here; it must only be remembered that he
counts as one of the greatest physicists and mathematicians of all time;
and that his discoveries were made during the years when most
scientists are still apprentices.
The elder Pascal, Étienne, was a sincere Christian. About 1646 he fell
in with some representatives of the religious revival within the Church
which has become known as Jansenism--after Jansenius, Bishop of
Ypres, whose theological work is taken as the origin of the movement.
This period is usually spoken of as the moment of Pascal's "first
conversion." The word "conversion," however, is too forcible to be
applied at this point to Blaise Pascal himself. The family had always
been devout, and the younger Pascal, though absorbed in his scientific
work, never seems to have been afflicted with infidelity. His attention
was then directed, certainly, to religious and theological matters; but
the term "conversion" can only be applied to his sisters--the elder,
already Madame Périer, and particularly the younger, Jacqueline, who
at that time conceived a vocation for the religious life. Pascal himself
was by no means disposed to renounce the world. After the death of the
father in 1650 Jacqueline, a young woman of remarkable strength and
beauty of character, wished to take her vows as a sister of Port-Royal,
and for some time her wish remained unfulfilled owing to the
opposition of her brother. His objection was on the purely worldly
ground that she wished to make over her patrimony to the Order;
whereas while she lived with him, their combined resources made it
possible for him to live more nearly on a scale of expense congenial to
his tastes. He liked, in fact, not only to mix with the best society, but