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Updated: May 16, 2025
Condorcet, however, consulted the original manuscripts themselves, without any thought of doing justice to Pascal’s text. So matters remained till 1842, when M. Cousin published his famous Report on the subject to the French Academy. The French public then found to their astonishment that, with so many editions of the ‘Pensées,’ they had not the ‘Pensées’ themselves.
Nay, at the first glance, not quite to know whether one is the destined reader, or whether even there is a destined reader at all; to be offered an entry out of a pocket-book, a page out of a diary, a selection of Pensées, were they Pascal's; a soliloquy, were it Hamlet's: surely lack of sympathy can go no further, nor incapacity of effort be more flagrant than with such writers, usually the very ones the reader most clings to, who put off, as it seems, until directing the envelope, the question of whom they are writing to.
Humility is made easy by the sense of excessive frailty, but it cuts away all ambition. "Quittez le long espoir et les vastes pensees." A long piece of work seems absurd one lives but from day to day.
He came to realise that Cartesianism, to which he was at first drawn, was profoundly opposed to the fundamental views of Christianity. His Pensees are the fragments of a work which he designed in defence of religion, and it is easy to see that this defence was to be specially directed against the ideas of Descartes.
Characteristically enough, Voltaire, at the last moment, did his best to reinforce his tentative metaphysical observations on 'M. Loke' by slipping into his book, as it were accidentally, an additional letter, quite disconnected from the rest of the work, containing reflexions upon some of the Pensées of Pascal. He no doubt hoped that these reflexions, into which he had distilled some of his most insidious venom, might, under cover of the rest, pass unobserved. But all his subterfuges were useless. It was in vain that he pulled wires and intrigued with high personages; in vain that he made his way to the aged Minister, Cardinal Fleury, and attempted, by reading him some choice extracts on the Quakers, to obtain permission for the publication of his book. The old Cardinal could not help smiling, though Voltaire had felt that it would be safer to skip the best parts 'the poor man! he said afterwards, 'he didn't realise what he had missed' but the permission never came. Voltaire was obliged to have recourse to an illicit publication; and then the authorities acted with full force. The Lettres Philosophiques were officially condemned; the book was declared to be scandalous and 'contraire
The two essays on Madame de Stael and Rousseau contain much fine critical remark, and might find a place perhaps as an appendix to some future edition of the Journal; and some of the "Pensees," published in the latter half of the volume containing the "Grains de Mils," are worthy of preservation.
The knowledge of Jesus is the means by which we at once find God and our misery.” “Without Jesus Christ man is sunk in vice and misery. . . . In Him is all our virtue and felicity.” Of the more directly apologetic ‘Pensées’ of Pascal there are many of great significance and interest, slight as may be the value of his general historical argument, so far as this can be traced.
It would be easy to compile a book of sayings from Balzac that would make all "Maximes" and "Pensées," even those of La Rochefoucauld or Joubert, seem trivial and shallow. Balzac was the great moral influence of my life, and my reading culminated in the "Comédie Humaine."
The fragment on the “Mathematical” or “Geometric Mind” was, with the exception of a brief passage given by Des Molets in 1728, originally published, although with numerous suppressions, in Condorcet’s edition of the ‘Pensées.’ It appeared for the first time in its complete form, and under its proper title, in Faugère’s edition, along with its natural pendant, the closely-allied fragment, entitled “L’Art de Persuader.” We give a few passages from the first fragment:—
It is impossible to defend the first editors of the ‘Pensées.’ But it should be remembered that their task was one not only of theological perplexity, but of great literary difficulty.
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