quiet, and wait the event with all its uncertainties, and we shall, at last, see what is to befall us: I cannot look into the results. (Erased.) Is it bravery in a man, to rush from life in his feebleness and sorrows, to confront a God omnipotent and eternal? (Erased.) + Happy should I be, were such a case mine, that my folly should excite pity, and benevolence be exerted to save me in spite of myself! + Fitting subject of joy, truly, to look forward to nothing but misery without remedy! O rich consolation, to despise every consoler! (Erased.) But those, even, who seem the most opposed to the glory of religion, will not altogether fail of doing her service on account of others. We shall draw from it our first argument, that it has something of a superhuman character; for blindness of this description is not a natural thing: and if their folly puts them so in opposition to their real welfare, it will seem to fortify others by the horror of so deplorable an example, and a madness so deserving of compassion. + Are they so firm and insensible in regard to all other things? Try them with the loss of property or honours. Why, it is a delusion + Good taste, then, consists in the absence of—true piety, in the possession of-benevolence towards others. + .... Not through mere devout zeal or religious abstraction, but on mere human principles, and through motives of interest and self-love. (Erased.) The Notes which follow are only found in the copy. In the margin of the first paragraph is the following memorandum :-"This is in the roll commencing with the words, 'Let them know.'" .... + Self-love; and because it is a thing which cannot but interest and affect us, to be assured that after all the ills of life, an inevitable death, which impends over us every instant, must in a few years dreadful necessity + The three conditions. (Erased.) in the + It must not be asserted that this is rational. + This is all that could be done by a man who was convinced of the falsehood of these statements; even then it should be a cause of dejection, rather than of joy. Nothing is of importance but this; and this is neglected. - Our imagination, by having present things incessantly before the mind, so magnifies their importance, and, in the same way, so diminishes the power of Eternity, by the want of reflection upon its realities, that we make Eternity a nothing, and nothings Eternity; and this propensity is so rooted in us, that all the force of reason avails not against it -+I would ask them whether they do not, themselves, establish the fundamental tenet of the faith they oppose, which is, the corruption of human nature. Imagine a number of men in chains, all under sentence of death, and a certain part of them each day executed before the eyes of the others. The survivors all see their own condition in that of their fellows, and look upon each other with sorrow and despair. Behold, herein, an image of the state of man! THE preceding title, which denotes one of the divisions which Pascal proposed to introduce into his work, is found in the autograph MS., page 23. See end of the volume, article "Order." (French Editor.) PREFACE TO THE FIRST PART.* + To enumerate the writers who have treated of selfknowledge; the minute and wearisome divisions of Charron; the confusedness of Montaigne,-that he was very sensible of his defect of method, † that he violated it by his habit of jauntily passing from one subject to another, that he aimed at an air of taste. How silly his propensity to portray himself! and this not merely incidentally, and contrary to his intention, as may sometimes happen to every one, but systematically, prominently, and by design. To say It *This is the title given to the following paper by Pascal himself. is plain, however, that the fragment is a mere note, indicating the manner in which he meant to fill up the sketch. ↑ "Droit de méthode." The word "droit" is written legibly in the MS. The paper, however, is one of those dictated by Pascal to an inexperienced writer, and it cannot be certain that the expression is his. By " Droit de méthode," does he mean that straight and regular line which method pursues, and which may thus produce monotony and weariness, like Charron? Or is it not, rather, defect of a "droite méthode" which Pascal intended? (French Editor.) If these and a few other notes of the indefatigable French Editor should appear to the reader somewhat more curious than important, they will be easily excused as instances of that enthusiasm for his Author, of which the original volumes afford such abundant proof, and which has led him to preserve and investigate with microscopic exactness every sentence and word that fell from Pascal's pen. (Transl.) B |