Blaise Pascal (1623–1662), who built a calculating machine at nineteen, settled the question of the vacuum against Descartes, and founded the theory of probability in a correspondence with Fermat about a gambling problem. On the night of 23 November 1654 he had the experience he recorded on a scrap of parchment sewn into his coat — FIRE. God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and scholars — and afterwards wrote in defence of Port-Royal and towards the apology for Christianity he did not live to finish.
Works (5)
- Letters — Pascal’s letters on religion: to his sister Jacqueline in the first months of the family’s conversion; two written with her to their elder sister Gilberte Périer, on the union grace makes between them; the long letter to the Périers on their father’s death, which the early editions printed as Thoughts upon Death; notes on Jacqueline’s profession at Port-Royal and on the proposed marriage of his niece; a fragment on controversy; and the nine letters to Charlotte de Roannez of 1656, on the hidden God and the miracle of the Holy Thorn. His letters on family business, on the vacuum and on the calculating machine are not given. (16 notes)
- Minor Works — The religious pieces among Pascal’s shorter writings: the Prayer to Ask of God the Proper Use of Sickness; On the Conversion of the Sinner, which some attribute to his sister; the comparison of the Christians of the early church with those of his own day; three discourses to a young nobleman on the condition of the great; the conversation with M. de Saci on Epictetus and Montaigne, as Saci’s secretary Fontaine recorded it; and the epitaph for his father. The rows of dots are the edition’s, and mark gaps in the manuscripts. The scientific and rhetorical pieces printed with them are not given. (6 notes)
- Pensées — The notes for an apology for the Christian religion that Pascal did not live to write, found after his death in 1662 in bundles pinned together and printed by Port-Royal eight years later. They are given here in Brunschvicg’s arrangement and W. F. Trotter’s translation, in the fourteen sections and under the numbering by which they are cited — the wager is 233, the thinking reed 347, and the heart with its reasons 277. (14 notes)
- The Memorial — The record of the night of 23 November 1654, written on a scrap of paper and copied on to parchment, which Pascal kept sewn into the lining of his coat for the rest of his life and which a servant found there after his death. (1 note)
- The Provincial Letters — Eighteen letters written anonymously and published one at a time during the Sorbonne’s proceedings against Antoine Arnauld: the first three defend the Jansenists of Port-Royal, and the rest turn on the moral theology of the Jesuits — probabilism, directing the intention, mental reservation — largely by the method of quoting it. Pascal’s own apology for them is the shortest: I have made this letter longer than usual because I have not had the time to make it shorter. (20 notes)