
: 
June 16, eS 
NATURE 
815 

“‘Intendants ’’ were suppressed by Mazarin, and the 
Pascals returned to Paris. The following year they 
went back to their native Clermont, where Gilberte, - 
who had married her cousin, Florin Périer, was already — 
settled. In 1651 the father died. Blaise, devoted to 
his sister Jacqueline, had hoped that after the father’s 
death she would continue to make her home with him, — 
but she had already formed her resolution to enter the 
religious life, and would not be dissuaded from taking 
immediately the austere vow at the convent of Port 
Royal. 
The four following years are described by Blaise 
as his “mondaine” period. He sought distraction 
in travel and society, but in 1655, after a mental 
crisis which is described as his second conversion, 
he decided to retire and devote himself entirely to 
religion. From 1658 till his death in 1662, although 
not bedridden or incapacitated from attending to his 
ordinary wants, he was so weak and in such continual 
pain that he could do no consecutive work. Jacqueline 
died in 1661. Blaise in his last illness was nursed by 
Gilberte. He died in her house. When the end was 
approaching the doctors attending him were assuring 
him that there was no danger, and refused to call in the 
priest. Pascal was in anguish lest he should die with- 
out the sacrament, but Gilberte acted on her own 
initiative just in time. She lived to be sixty-seven, 
and had five children. She wrote the life of her brother, 
and also a life of her sister Jacqueline. 
Blaise Pascal was educated by his father, and had 
no other tutor. He never entered the university. All 
his acquaintance with the intellectual movements of 
his age, with its science, its philosophy, its religion, was 
derived directly from his father and conversation with 
his father’s friends. On the other hand, at his father’s 
house he met the most distinguished mathematicians 
and theologians of the time. Etienne Pascal did not. 
merely supervise his son’s education ; he undertook it 
alone and unaided in order to follow out a predeter- 
mined method, which reminds us, alike in its concep- 
tion and in its consequences, of the analogous case of 
the father of John Stuart Mill. One part of the scheme 
was to concentrate the boy’s mind during his earliest 
years on perfecting his knowledge of his own language.” 
His lessons were limited to the grammar and syntax. 
of his native French, and the teaching even of Latin 
was deferred until this was acquired, in the expectation 
that the new task would then be comparatively easy. 
The other part of the scheme was to defer mathe- 
matics, indeed to forbid the study of it, until the 
acquirement of languages was perfect. The reason of: 
this iscurious. The father was not only himself learned. 
in the mathematical sciences, but also had given his 
daughter Gilberte thorough instruction in them, yet 
he feared for his son that they would prove of such 
absorbing interest that he would be distracted from the 
study of languages. When the lad was twelve, how- 
ever, the father discovered that he had acquired, 
apparently surreptitiously, an acquaintance wi 
geometry which amounted to precocity. He w 
found one day demonstrating for himself with barres 
et ronds the thirty-second proposition of Euclid’s 
first book. We are told that after this he was 
ag to read Euclid, but only in his recreation 
ours. 
NO. 2798, VOL. 111] 
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Not less powerful than the parental influence was 
that of his sisters. For their education also the father 
had original ideas. He did not himself undertake it, 
but they were educated by aman as men. Their tutor 
was a Monsieur de Mondory, in favour with the Cardinal 
und the Court. Jacqueline was an extraordinarily 
precocious child. She was a very pretty girl before 
the small-pox destroyed her beauty. She wrote verses 
from the time of her early childhood, and when fourteen 
composed a comedy in five acts. She was deeply 
religious. One of her poems is a hymn of gratitude to 
God for her recovery, and she describes the scars left 
by the disease as the impressions of God’s seal. She 
no doubt regarded this illness as a sign of her call to 
the religious life. Soon after her entry to Port Royal 
she was appointed sub-prioress, and she consulted her 
superior as to whether she should cultivate her talent 
for poetry. The reply of Mére Agnes, Arnauld’s sister, 
is pathetic. ‘C’est un talent dont Dieu ne vous de- 
mandera point compte : il faut l’ensevelir.” She signed 
the formulary imposed on Port Royal condemning 
the Jansenist doctrine under extreme pressure, though 
she struggled against it and wished to resist. “ Je 
sais bien,” she wrote to Dr. Arnauld, “ que ce n’est pas 
a des filles A défendre la vérité, quoique l’on peut dire 
par une triste rencontre, que, puisque les évéques ont 
des courages de filles, les filles doivent avoir des courages 
d’évéques.” Arnauld insisted, however, and the grief 
hastened her death. 
To understand the religious fervour of the Pascal 
family we must also enter sympathetically into the 
spirit of the age. The seventeenth century shows in 
all its philosophy, and even we may say in its science, 
the influence of a deep personal interest in the problem 
of the relation of the individual mind to God. The 
reforming zeal of the sixteenth century had spent its 
force and been succeeded by the universal conviction 
of the reflecting believer that Christianity is much more 
than an institution based upon a verifiable historical 
revelation, that it is, in fact, a revelation in the philo- 
sophical meaning, an interpretation of human and 
divine nature. We only understand Pascal when we 
see that his religion is not ordinary piety or superstition, 
but profound philosophy. 
Let us now look at the man himself. He is a younger 
contemporary of Galileo and Descartes. He survived 
both, but died before Malebranche or Spinoza had begun 
to write. This is peculiarly significant in appreciating 
his attitude towards the Cartesian philosophy, for 
Malebranche developed that doctrine along Augustinian 
lines, which may have been actually suggested by 
Pascal’s writings. The illustration of le ciron to 
explain the relativity of magnitudes, expounded by 
Malebranche in the “ Recherche de la Vérité,”’ seems 
taken directly from a well-known passage in Pascal’s 
** Pensées.”’ 
Pascal agreed with Descartes in his doctrine of the 
soul, or thinking substance, with its corollary that 
the animals are automata, but he was revolted by 
the “ Principia’ and its claim to be able to explain 
the world by “ figure and movement.” “ Quand cela 
serait vrai,” he says, “ nous n’estimons pas que toute 
la philosophie vaille une heure de peine.” Notwith- 
standing his keen enjoyment of mathematical problems 
and his intense interest in physical experiments, the 
