Pascal's Pensées
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Some scanning errors (automatic measure over the whole text, not checked by hand) · 5 illegible passages, excluded from answers
- Extent:
- ~110,000 words · 499 passages
Cite this work
- APAPascal. (n.d.). Pascal's Pensées. Digital reproduction: SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/blaise-pascal/pascal-s-pensees
- MLAPascal. Pascal's Pensées. Digital reproduction, SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/blaise-pascal/pascal-s-pensees.
- ChicagoPascal. Pascal's Pensées. Digital reproduction, SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/blaise-pascal/pascal-s-pensees.
Reference to the edition that SigPhi reproduces: SigPhi is its digital reproduction, not its publisher. The edition's year is not in the metadata (hence "n.d."), and the translator appears only when recorded.
What it is about
The fragments Pascal left for an apology for Christianity that his death left unwritten.
Context and history
Pascal died in 1662 at thirty-nine, leaving hundreds of fragments written towards an apology for Christianity he never composed. Some are finished paragraphs, others three words; he left them tied in bundles which give hints of the intended order. Everything we read, then, is an arrangement made by editors, and every edition arranges differently — which is why fragment numbers do not agree between them and one must always say which is being used. Here are the wager, the heart having its reasons which reason does not know, man as a thinking reed, and the eternal silence of the infinite spaces. WARNING: the catalogue contains TWO English translations of this same work, 'Pascal's Pensées' and 'The Thoughts of Blaise Pascal'. This is not an error — they are different editions — but it is worth knowing: the same fragment appears twice, in different words and with different numbering.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
And men of intuition who are only intuitive cannot have the patience to reach to first principles of things speculative and conceptual, which they have never seen in the world, and which are altogether out of the common. There are different kinds of right understanding;[2] some have right understanding in a certain order of things, and not in others, where they go astray. Some draw conclusions well from a few premises, and this displays an acute judgment. Others draw conclusions well where there are many premises. For example, the former easily learn hydrostatics, where the premises are few, but the conclusions are so fine that only the greatest acuteness can reach them. And in spite of that these persons would perhaps not be great mathematicians, because mathematics contain a great number of premises, and there is perhaps a kind of intellect that can search with ease a few premises to the bottom, and cannot in the least penetrate those matters in which there are many premises. There are then two kinds of intellect: the one able to penetrate acutely and deeply into the conclusions of given premises, and this is the precise intellect; the other able to comprehend a great number of premises without confusing them, and this is the mathematical intellect. The one has force and exactness, the other comprehension. Now the one quality can exist without the other; the intellect can be strong and narrow, and can also be comprehensive and weak. Those who are accustomed to judge by feeling do not understand the process of reasoning, for they would understand at first sight, and are not used to seek for principles.…