The Online Library of Liberty A Project Of Liberty Fund, Inc. Blaise Pascal, The Thoughts of Blaise Pascal [1669] The Online Library Of Liberty This E-Book (PDF format) is published by Liberty Fund, Inc., a private, non-profit, educational foundation established in 1960 to encourage study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals. 2010 was the 50th anniversary year of the founding of Liberty Fund. It is part of the Online Library of Liberty web site http://oll.libertyfund.org, which was established in 2004 in order to further the educational goals of Liberty Fund, Inc. To find out more about the author or title, to use the site's powerful search engine, to see other titles in other formats (HTML, facsimile PDF), or to make use of the hundreds of essays, educational aids, and study guides, please visit the OLL web site. 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Author: Blaise Pascal Translator: Charles Kegan Paul About This Title: The collection of writings known as “Thoughts” were not published in Pascal’s lifetime. The consist of his musings about life, religion, god, sin, miracles, and other matters. PLL v6.0 (generated September, 2011) 2 http://oll.libertyfund.org/title/2407 Online Library of Liberty: The Thoughts of Blaise Pascal About Liberty Fund: Liberty Fund, Inc. is a private, educational foundation established to encourage the study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals. Copyright Information: The text is in the public domain. Fair Use Statement: This material is put online to further the educational goals of Liberty Fund, Inc. Unless otherwise stated in the Copyright Information section above, this material may be used freely for educational and academic purposes. It may not be used in any way for profit. PLL v6.0 (generated September, 2011) 3 http://oll.libertyfund.org/title/2407 Online Library of Liberty: The Thoughts of Blaise Pascal Table Of Contents Preface. General Introduction. Pascal’s Profession of Faith. General Introduction. Notes For the General Introduction. The Misery of Man Without God Or That Nature Is Naturally Corrupt. Preface to the First Part. Man’s Disproportion. Diversion. The Greatness and Littleness of Man. Of the Deceptive Powers of the Imagination. Of Justice Customs and Prejudices. The Weakness Unrest and Defects of Man. The Happiness of Man With God; Or, That the Scripture Shows a Redeemer. Preface to the Second Part. Of the Need of Seeking Truth. The Philosophers. Thoughts On Mahomet and On China. Of the Jewish People. The Authenticity of the Sacred Books. The Prophecies. Of Types In General and of Their Lawfulness. That the Jewish Law Was Figurative. Of the True Religion and Its Characteristics. The Excellence of the Christian Religion. Of Original Sin. The Perpetuity of the Christian Religion. Proofs of the Christian Religion. Proofs of the Divinity of Jesus Christ. The Mission and Greatness of Jesus Christ. The Mystery of Jesus. Of the True Righteous Man and of the True Christian. The Arrangement. Of Miracles In General. the Miracle of the Holy Thorn. Jesuits and Jansenists. Thoughts On Style. Various Thoughts. PLL v6.0 (generated September, 2011) 4 http://oll.libertyfund.org/title/2407 Online Library of Liberty: The Thoughts of Blaise Pascal [Back to Table of Contents] PREFACE. Those to whom the Life of Pascal and the Story of Port Royal are unknown, must be referred to works treating fully of the subject, since it were impossible to deal with them adequately within the limits of a preface. Sainte-Beuve’s great work on Port Royal, especially the second and third volumes, and “Port Royal,” by Charles Beard, B.A., London, 1863, may best be consulted by any who require full, lucid, and singularly impartial information. But for such as, already acquainted with the time and the man, need a recapitulation of the more important facts, or for those who may find an outline map useful of the country they are to study in detail, a few words are here given. Blaise Pascal was born at Clermont-Ferrand in Auvergne, on June 19, 1623. He sprung from a well-known legal family, many members of which had held lucrative and responsible positions. His father, Etienne Pascal, held the post of intendant, or provincial administrator, in Normandy, where, and at Paris previously, Pascal lived from the age of sixteen to that of twenty-five; almost wholly educated by his father on account of his precarious health. His mother died when he was eight years old. Etienne Pascal was a pious but stern person, and by no means disposed to entertain or allow any undue exaltation in religion, refusing as long as he lived to allow his daughter Jaqueline to take the veil. But he had the usual faiths and superstitions of his time, and believing that his son’s ill-health arose from witchcraft, employed the old woman who was supposed to have caused the malady to remove it, by herbs culled before sunrise, and the expiatory death of a cat. This made a great impression on his son, who in the “Thoughts” employs an ingenious argument to prove that wonders wrought by the invocation of the devil are not, in the proper sense of the term, miracles. At any rate the the counter-charm was incomplete, as the child’s feeble health remained feeble to the end. Intellectually, Blaise Pascal grew rapidly to the stature and strength of a giant; his genius showing itself mainly in the direction of mathematics; at the age of fifteen his studies on conic sections were thought worthy to be read before the most scientific men of Paris, and in after years of agonizing pain mathematical research alone was able to calm him, and distract his mind from himself. His actual reading was at all times narrow, and his scholarship was not profound. In 1646, his father, having broken his thigh at Rouen, came under the influence of two members of the Jansenist school of thought at that place, who attended him in his illness, and from that time dated the more serious religious views of the family. Jaqueline was from the first deeply affected by the more rigorous opinions with which she came in contact. Forbidden to enter the cloister, she lived at home as austere a life as though she had been professed, but after her father’s death won her brother’s reluctant consent to take the veil at Port Royal, and became one of the strictest nuns of that rigid rule. Blaise Pascal went through a double process of conversion. When the family first fell under Jansenist influence he threw himself so earnestly into the study of theology that PLL v6.0 (generated September, 2011) 5 http://oll.libertyfund.org/title/2407 Online Library of Liberty: The Thoughts of Blaise Pascal he seriously injured his frail health, and being advised to refrain from all intellectual labour, he returned to the world of Paris, where his friends the Duc de Roannez, the Chevalier de Méré and M. Miton were among the best known and most fashionable persons. His father’s death put him in possession of a fair fortune, which he used freely, not at all viciously, but with no renunciation of the pleasures of society. There is some evidence of a proposal that he should marry the Duc de Roannez’ sister, and no doubt with such a scheme before him he wrote his celebrated “Discours sur les Passions de l’Amour.” This, however, resulted only in the conversion of the duke and his sister, the latter of whom for a time, the former for the whole of his life, remained subject to the religious feelings then excited. In the autumn of 1654, whether after deliverance in a dangerous accident, or from some hidden cause of which nothing can now be even surmised, there came a second sudden conversion from which there was no return. That hour wrought a complete change in Pascal’s life; austerity, self-denial, absolute obedience to his spiritual director, boundless alms-giving succeeded to what at most had been a moderate and restrained use of worldly pleasure, and he threw himself into the life, controversy and interests of Port Royal, with all the passion of one who was not only a new convert, but the champion of a society into which those dearest to him had entered even more fully than he. He became, for a time, one of the solitaries of Port Royal before the close of that same year. The Cistercian Abbey of Port Royal des Champs was situated about eighteen miles from Paris. It had been founded early in the thirteenth century, and would have faded away unremembered but for the grandeur of its closing years.