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
It might seem that about Blaise Pascal, and about the twoworks on which his fame is founded, everything that there isto say had been said. The details of his life are as fully knownas we can expect to know them; his mathematical andphysical discoveries have been treated many times; hisreligious sentiment and his theological views have been discussedagain and again; and his prose style has been analysedby French critics down to the finest particular. But Pascalis one of those writers who will be and who must be studiedafresh by men in every generation. It is not he who changes,but we who change. It is not our knowledge of him thatincreases, but our world that alters and our attitudes towardsit. The history of human opinions of Pascal and of men ofhis stature is a part of the history of humanity. That indicateshis permanent importance.
The facts of Pascal's life, so far as they are necessary forthis brief introduction to the Pensées, are as follows. Hewas born at Clermont, in Auvergne, in 1623. His familywere people of substance of the upper middle class. Hisfather was a government official, who was able to leave, whenhe died, a sufficient patrimony to his one son and his twodaughters. In 1631 the father moved to Paris, and a fewyears later took up another government post at Rouen.Wherever he lived, the elder Pascal seems to have mingledwith some of the best society, and with men of eminence inscience and the arts. Blaise was educated entirely by hisfather at home. He was exceedingly precocious, indeedexcessively precocious, for his application to studies in childhoodand adolescence impaired his health, and is heldresponsible for his death at thirty-nine. Prodigious, thoughnot incredible stories are preserved, especially of his precocityin mathematics. His mind was active rather than accumulative;he showed from his earliest years that disposition tofind things out for himself, which has characterised the infancy[Pg viii]of Clerk-Maxwell and other scientists. Of his later discoveriesin physics there is no need for mention here; it must only beremembered that he counts as one of the greatest physicistsand mathematicians of all time; and that his discoveries weremade during the years when most scientists are still apprentices.
The elder Pascal, Étienne, was a sincere Christian. About1646 he fell in with some representatives of the religiousrevival within the Church which has become known asJansenism—after Jansenius, Bishop of Ypres, whose theologicalwork is taken as the origin of the movement. This period isusually spoken of as the moment of Pascal's "first conversion."The word "conversion," however, is too forcible to be appliedat this point to Blaise Pascal himself. The family had alwaysbeen devout, and the younger Pascal, though absorbed in hisscientific work, never seems to have been afflicted withinfidelity. His attention was then directed, certainly, toreligious and theological matters; but the term "conversion"can only be applied to his sisters—the elder, already MadamePérier, and particularly the younger, Jacqueline, who at thattime conceived a vocation for the religious life. Pascal himselfwas by no means disposed to renounce the world. After thedeath of the father in 1650 Jacque