Page:The Harvard Classics Vol. 51; Lectures.djvu/472



HE name of Blaise Pascal not only belongs to the list of great French seventeenth-century writers, he is also to be included among the greatest authors of modern literature. He affected radically the thought of countless religious men of his own and later times; he was, even though in part unconsciously, one of the masters of style in the chief age of French literature. Men of science, also, consider him one of the most important of their number as a mathematician and a physicist.

Pascal's name is inseparably connected with the history of Jansenism, and though varying phases of his intellectual development have caused him to receive all kinds of descriptive epithets ranging from skeptic to fideist, yet his temperament and his bodily condition reflect the austere and gloomy theories of the Jansenist Augustinians.

Born of high-strung stock in a bleak part of the volcanic region of Auvergne, under the very shadow of the gloomy cathedral, built of Volvic lava, at Clermont-Ferrand, the child Pascal was from the beginning over-intellectualized. If we are to believe the accounts of a perhaps partial sister, this "terrifying genius" as Chateaubriand calls him, taught himself geometry and worked out problems in Euclid, while he still called lines and circles "bars" and "rounds." His intellect developed by leaps and bounds, and by the end of a life of recurring illnesses and of suffering, cut short at less than two score years, he had encompassed the field of knowledge, verified hypotheses of physics, descried unexplored realms of mathematics, and projected his thought into the vast chaos of conjecture concerning the relations of God and the world, of God and of created man.

Pascal's adherence to religion was not immediate, and he went through successive stages of hesitation and of partial retrogression.