PASCAL 



PAS-DE-CALAIS 



791 



great controversy Pascal seems to have lived chiefly 

 at Port Royal tinder the spiritual guidance of M. 

 de Saci, but he never took up his abode as a regular 

 inHiate there. His Letters occupied him till the 

 spring of 1657, and during the following year he 

 busied himself in a scheme for a great Apology of 

 religion, his faith meanwhile being quickened by 

 his belief in the famous Miracle of the Holy Thorn, 

 according to which his niece, Marguerite Perier, 

 a pupil at Port Royal, had been miraculously 

 cured of an obstinate fistula lacrymalis by a touch 

 of a fragment of the crown of Christ. But bis 

 health gave way during 1658, and thenceforward to 

 the close he bore the burden of constant suffering 

 with more than saintly patience and resignation. 

 Indeed he laboured to deaden every sensation of 

 pleasure in life, in his food, bis studies, and even 

 the affections of his friends. Meanwhile his weak- 

 m-s grew upon him, study and composition became 

 possible only in brief intervals, and on 19th August 

 1662 he sank to rest under his sister's roof at Paris, 

 his own house having l>een given up to a poor 

 family one of whose children had been seized with 

 smallpox. 



Seven years later (1669) appeared his Pcmfe, with a 



Ereface by Madame Perier' s son the result of the editorial 

 ibours on his fragmentary papers of a committee of 

 influential Jansenists. Unhappily tlie^e perplexing frag- 

 ments were garbled to a great extent in the interests 

 of orthodoxy anil ecclesiastical policy by exaggerated 

 prudence and misdirected zeal, just as they were in 1776 

 by Condorcet in the interests of heterodoxy. The Abbe 

 Bossut's edition in 1779 was long accepted as authorita- 

 tive ; but in 1842 Cousin first showed the real state of 

 the case in his celebrated Report to the French Academy, 

 and startled the world by declaring that Pascal was a 

 complete sceptic in philosophy, and a Christian only 

 through external influences entirely unconnected with 

 lo^ic or reason. To M. Prosper Faugere belongs the honour 

 of first giving(1844; Eng. trans, by Pearce, 1850) a com- 

 plete and authentic text, although aU readers will not accept 

 Ins supposed discovery of the indications of an interior 

 arrangement. Havet, in his edition ( 1852 ; 2d ed. I860), 

 thinks it hiijieless to discover the true order, and there- 

 fore returns to Bossut's arbitrary but familiar arrange- 

 ment. Victor Rochet, again (1873), adopts an elaborate 

 arrangement, professedly founded on Pascal's original 

 1'lan, and maintains that everything fulls naturally into 

 it. The best edition is that of M. Molinier (2 vols. 

 1877-79), an independent arrangement mainly on the 

 lines of Kau,'eres. It is this last version which has been 

 admirably translated into English by C. Kegan Paul ( 1885 ). 



Pascal's Penstes are detached thoughts dashed 

 rapidly off, intended as materials to be shaped into 

 his projected Apology for the Christian faith. 

 They are thrilled through and through with 

 passionate emotion and ever-present personality, 

 and they contain some of the most profound, 

 suggestive, and startling thoughts that have ever 

 been expressed on the greatest mysteries within the 

 range of human speculation. FVom one point of 

 view it is easy to construct from them, as Cousin 

 did, a theory that their author was a pessimist and 

 sceptic of a far deeper dye than Montaigne, but 

 profounder study proves this view but a shallow 

 paradox at best. The conversation with I)e Saci 

 (first published in 1728 by Des Molets) offers the 

 best key to Pascal's philosophy of life. Here he 

 takes Montaigne and Epictetus as his representa- 

 tives, the first of the Pyrrhonist, Epicurean, 

 and sceptic, who mocks man's aspirations after 

 spiritual truth, and insists upon bis weakness, his 

 ignorance, and doubt ; the second, of the Stoic, 

 who looks at man only on his lofty side, insists on 

 hi." freedom and moral dignity, and points out in 

 his moral nature the image and likeness of God. 

 Pascal regards these two opposites as united in the 

 gos|iel of Christ, the overwhelming certainty of 

 which arises out of its alone affording a key to the 

 tormenting anomalies and contradictions of nature, 



at once to the moral law as revealed by conscience 

 within and to all the disorder of the world as dis- 

 covered by conscious experience to man's great- 

 ness and man's degradation, and the reason for 

 both the one and the other. Man's spiritual capacity 

 alone enables him to realise bis intrinsic greatness, 

 which was revealed to him once for all when for 

 his sake the Highest was joined to the lowest, in 

 the incarnate union of Divine Power and Love with 

 human degradation and pain. This is a mystery 

 beyond man's power of demonstration, and a deeper 

 ground for certainty must be sought in its essential 

 correspondence, not with the intellect alone, but 

 with the whole complex nature of man. Yet with 

 all this there exist in the Pensfes startling frag- 

 ments deeply tinged with scepticism, although 

 many of these may be interpreted with Sainte- 

 Ueuve as a kind of shorthand notes to fix ideas 

 that flashed across his mind of difficulties to be 

 afterwards considered. Of these none is more 

 famous than the wager essay, in which, as has 

 been said, and with truth, Pascal plays at pitch 

 and toss with the existence of God and tbe immor- 

 tality of tbe soul. Such a passage as this is a 

 product, says Tulloch, of one of those ' moments of 

 terrible doubt, when the soul is so borne away on 

 the surge of the sceptical wave that rises from the 

 depth of all human speculation that it can only 

 cling to the Divine by an effort of will, and with 

 something of the gamester's thought that this is 

 the winning side.' The Penstes owe much to 

 Montaigne and Charron, and, as Molinier has 

 shown, to the 13th-century Spanish writer Ray- 

 mond Martin. 



The only complete editions of Pascal's works that need 

 be mentioned are those of Bossut (1779), Labure (1858), 

 and Faugere (8 vols. 1886 tt seq.). Of the Provincial 

 Letters, besides the Abbe Maynard's edition ( 1851 ) already 

 mentioned, and M. Lesieur's reprint of the original quarto 

 (1867), there are editions by Villeinain (18211), De .Sacy 

 (1877), De Soyres (Lond. 1880), L. Derome (1885 et 

 seq.), and Molinier (2 vols. 1891). The famous Latin 

 translation by Wendrock [Nicole], for which he read his 

 Terence thrice over, appeared at Cologne as early as 

 1658 There are English translations by Royston 

 (1057), Pearce (1849), and Dr M'Crie (1846). Of the 

 Pensres there are editions by Frantin (1835), Faugere 

 ( 1844, containing what seems to be the most authentic 

 portrait ), Havet, with an admirable commentary (1852 ; 

 3d ed. 18811, Lahure .( 1858), Lonandre (1854), Rochet 

 ( 1873), and Molinier ( 1877-79 ). English translations are 

 those by Walker (1688), Craig (1825), Pearce (1850), and 

 Kegan Paul (1885). For Jacqueline Pascal's Life, see 

 the works by Cousin (1845) and Sophy Winthrop Wcizel, 

 Sister and Saint (New York, 1880). Her miscellaneous 

 writings, letters, and poems, together with those of 

 Madame Perier and Marguerite Perier, were edited by 

 Faugere (Paris, 1845). 



See vols. ii. and iii. of Sainte-Beuve's Port Royal (1842- 

 48 }, and Charles Beard's Port Royal ( 1861 ) ; the studies 



byReuchlin (Stutt. 1840), Vinet(1856), Cousin (1857), 

 H. Weingarten ( Leip. 1863 ), Dreydorff ( admirable, Leip. 

 1870), Tulloch, in 'Foreign Classics' (1878). and Joseph 



Bertrand ( 1891 ). Admirable articles on Pascal are those 

 in the Edinburgh- Revieiv for January 1847 (by Henry 

 Rogers), the Quarterly Reciew for October 1879, the 

 British Quarterly Review for October 1884 ( by C. Kegan 

 Paul), and Dean Church in Companions for the Devout 

 Life ( 1875). See also the articles ABNAULD, JANSEN, and 

 PORT ROYAL in this work. 



Paschal. See PASSOVER, EASTER, HOLY 

 WEEK. 



Pasco. See CERRO DE PASCO. 



Pas-de-Calais (Fr. for Strait of Dover), a 

 department in the north of France, formed out of 

 Artois and Picardy, and bounded on the W. by the 

 Strait of Dover and the English Channel. Area, 

 2f>50 sq. m. ; pop. ( 1861 ) 724,338 ; ( 1886 ) 853,526. 

 The surface is level, with the exception of a low 

 ridge running to the north-west, and ending in 



