Riassunto
Preface 5 Pascal’s Profession of Faith 12 General Introduction 13 Notes for the General Introduction 20 The Misery of Man Without God 22 Preface to the First Part 22 Man’s Disproportion 24 Diversion 38 The Greatness and Littleness of Man 47 Of the Deceptive Powers of the Imagination 53 Of Justice, Customs, and Prejudices 63 The Weakness, Unrest, and Defects of Man 75 The Happiness of Man with God 89 Preface to the Second Part 89 Of the Need of Seeking Truth 92 The Philosophers 102 Thoughts on Mahomet and on China 111 Of the Jewish People 114 The Authenticity of the Sacred Books 118 The Prophecies 123 Of Types in General and of their Lawfulness 151 That the Jewish Law was Figurative 161 Of the True Religion and its Characteristics 171 The Excellence of the Christian Religion 175 Of Original Sin 181 The Perpetuity of the Christian Religion 187 Proofs of the Christian Religion 193 Proofs of the Divinity of Jesus Christ 202 The Mission and Greatness of Jesus Christ 214 The Mystery of Jesus 220 Of the True Righteous Man and of the True Christian 226 The Arrangement 241 Of Miracles in General 244 Jesuits and Jansenists 260 Thoughts on Style 289 Various Thoughts 294 Excerpt: 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 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...
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