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Updated: May 16, 2025
'I was heartily disgusted, she says, 'with Mr. The following morning Johnson called on her. 'He reproved me, she writes, 'with pretended sharpness for reading Les Pensées de Pascal, alleging that as a good Protestant I ought to abstain from books written by Catholics.
Some of Pascal’s more religious admirers have even been scandalised by it, and have tried to show that it could not refer to the author of the ‘Pensées.’ M. Cousin and other parties have emphasised it too much. There seems no reason to doubt that the anecdote relates to the younger Pascal—it cannot reasonably be supposed to relate to his father.
It is really, as Havet says, of the nature of an introduction to the ‘Pensées.’ In this conversation Pascal signalises what he believes to be the two great opposing systems of human philosophy at all times; the rational, dogmatic, or Stoical, on the one hand—the sceptical, or Epicurean, on the other. He takes Epictetus as the representative of the one; Montaigne as the representative of the other.
Vinet, in his study of Cousin's book on the Pensées of Pascal, says: "The very knowledge of the mind as such has need of the heart. Without the desire to see there is no seeing; in a great materialization of life and of thought there is no believing in the things of the spirit." We shall see presently that to believe is, in the first instance, to wish to believe.
He sank on his knees, wrestling with himself and with the bitter longing for life, and the same words rang through him, deafening every cry but their own. 'Quittez quittez le long espoir et les vastes pensées! There is little more to tell. The man who had lived so fast was no long time dying. The eager soul was swift in this as in all else.
This is the real “apologetic” work of the ‘Pensées,’ and the only one for which Pascal’s mind pre-eminently fitted him. He sees in the Gospel a Divine Power which is capable of ministering to man’s higher wants—a power of infinite compassion towards human weakness and misery, of infinite help for the one and remedy for the other.
His aim was, in co-operation with England, to maintain by conciliatory and peaceful methods the balance of power. Lord Chesterfield, at that time the British envoy at the Hague, had the highest opinion of Slingelandt's powers; and the council-pensionary's writings, more especially his Pensées impartiales, published in 1729, show what a thorough grasp he had of the political situation.
It is not fair to read them in that way, of course, for there are more than five hundred pensees, and so much esprit becomes fatiguing. I doubt if people study them much. Five or six of them have become known even to writers in the newspapers, and we all copy them from each other. Rochefoucauld says that a man may be too dull to be duped by a very clever person.
Along with Miton and other boon companions, he is spoken of as betaking himself to St Cloud for carnival during the Holy Week. The truth would seem to be that all these men came across Pascal’s path at this time, and were more or less known to him. His allusions to both Miton and Desbarreaux in the Pensées imply this.
Many of the pensees of Pascal were preserved among the records of this salon, and Cousin finds reason for believing that they were first suggested and discussed here; he even thinks it possible, if not probable, that the "Discours sur les Passions de L'amour," which pertains to his mundane life, and presents the grave and ascetic recluse in a new light, had a like origin.
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