The Thoughts of Blaise Pascal

I have long been fascinated with the seventeenth-century French “thinker” Blaise Pascal (1623-1662). A mathematics prodigy during the budding Scientific Revolution, Pascal added to the knowledge of projective geometry by the time he was 16, and at the age of 19 he developed one of the western world’s first mechanical calculators. The Pascal programming language is named after him.

Then, sometime in his early thirties, Pascal shocked the scientific community by turning his back on mathematics, declaring that it promised a precision that didn’t exist in the universe scientists were now observing with their new-fangled telescopes. Pascal’s rejection of math (or “maths” for you non-North Americans") makes Pascal a hero to high school students everywhere!

Pascal was overwhelmed by the idea of an infinite universe, a concept brought home to him by his observation of a comet. Clearly an intruder into our “known” universe, the comet disproved contemporary ideas of a stationary earth surrounded by celestial bodies embedded in concentric crystalline spheres that transported these bodies across the night sky. Where had the comet come from? How had it passed through the perfect crystalline spheres without disrupting the orbit of the celestial objects? Where do it do when it sailed out of sight? As the comet shattered the idea of a perfectly constructed and contained cosmos, it also shattered Pascal’s faith in the idea of natural order.

Pascal concluded that human reason had its limits, that is, it could take you far, but it couldn’t explain everything. In fact, he believed that an infinite universe was infinitely unknowable by us puny humans. “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me,” he declared, and it’s easy to understand why.

Pascal began to record his thoughts in a work called Pensees (Thoughts). I don’t necessarily agree with all of his conclusions, but I find them all to be intriguing and thought-provoking. If you’ve ever stared up at the night sky wondering what lies beyond the stars and just how far space reaches (and who hasn’t), then you’ll appreciated Pascal’s uneasy perspective.

Here’s a sampling of his thoughts:

Two extremes: to exclude reason, to admit reason only.

The last proceeding of reason is to recognize that there is an infinity of things which are beyond it. It is but feeble if it does not see so far as to know this.

We must know where to doubt, where to feel certain, where to submit.

All our reasoning reduces itself to yielding to feeling…. The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know. We feel it in a thousand things.

For in fact what is man in nature? A Nothing in comparison with the Infinite, an All in comparison with the Nothing, a mean between nothing and everything. Since he is infinitely removed from comprehending the extremes, the end of things and their beginning are hopelessly hidden from him in an impenetrable secret, he is equally incapable of seeing the Nothing from which he was made, and the Infinite in which he is swallowed up.

This is our true state; this is what makes us incapable of certain knowledge and of absolute ignorance. We sail within a vast sphere, ever drifting in uncertainty, driven from end to end. When we think to attach ourselves to any point and to fasten to it, it wavers and leaves us; and if we follow it, it eludes our grasp, slips past us, and vanishes for ever. Nothing stays for us. This is our natural condition, and yet most contrary to our inclination; we burn with desire to find solid ground and an ultimate sure foundation whereon to build a tower reaching to the Infinite. But our whole groundwork cracks, and the earth opens to abysses.

Let us therefore not look for certainty and stability. Our reason is always deceived by fickle shadows; nothing can fix the finite between the two Infinites, which both enclose and fly from it.

What astonishes me most is to see that all the world is not astonished at its own weakness. Men act seriously, and each follows his own mode of life, not because it is in fact good to follow since it is the custom, but as if each man knew certainly where reason and justice are. They find themselves continually deceived.

When I see the blindness and the wretchedness of man, when I regard the whole silent universe and man without light, left to himself and, as it were, lost in this corner of the universe, without knowing who has put him there, what he has come to do, what will become of him at death, and incapable of all knowledge, I become terrified, like a man who should be carried in his sleep to a dreadful desert island and should awake without knowing where he is and without means of escape. And thereupon I wonder how people in a condition so wretched do not fall into despair.

Thought constitutes the greatness of man.

Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapour, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But, if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this.

All our dignity consists, then, in thought. By it we must elevate ourselves, and not by space and time which we cannot fill. Let us endeavour, then, to think well; this is the principle of morality.