capitalists will make to get out, as it were, of their natural position, and share in the advantages of large ones. There is no class of experiments for which we are inclined to form such hearty wishes of success; or from which, could they be realized, we should prognosticate so much of good to society.

But we must conclude,-leaving untouched some remedial topics, at present, much in discussion; but which the reader will find, for the most part, well disposed of by Mr Thornton. His book forms a useful addition to the means of information regarding the philosophy of social life, and we therefore recommend it to public notice and favour.

ART. VII.-1. Des Pensées de Pascal. Rapport à L'Académie Française sur la nécessité d'une nouvelle édition de cet ouvrage. Par M. V. COUSIN. 8vo. Paris: 1843.

2. Pensées, Fragments, et Lettres de Blaise Pascal: publiés pour la première fois conformément aux manuscrits originaux, en grande partie inédits. Par M. PROSPER FAUGÈRE. 2 vols. 8vo. Paris: 1844.

S

o much has been written of late years respecting Pascal, and so much that is worth reading, that we do not know that we should have been induced to make him the subject of present criticism, had it not been for the appearance of the above remarkable volumes of M. Faugère.

It seems strange to say, that the most popular work of an author who has been dead two hundred years, and who has obtained a world-wide reputation—a work which has passed through numberless editions, and been translated into most European languages-has never been published in an authentic form till now. Yet this is strictly true of the Pensées de Pascal.

It is not possible to convey to the reader a just idea of the merits of this improved edition, or the circumstances which led to it, without relating some of the more important incidents of Pascal's life. A formal biography, however, it cannot be necessary to give; for who has not read some account of the life of Blaise Pascal? It will be sufficient briefly to advert to the principal facts of this great man's history, and the dates of their

Occurrence.

He was born at Clermont, in Auvergne, in the year 1623, and died in the year 1662, at the early age of thirty-nine.

When we think of the achievements which he crowded into that brief space, and which have made his name famous to all generations, we may well exclaim with Corneille, A peine a-t-il ' vécu, quel nom il a laissé!'

It is well known that Pascal exhibited from the earliest childhood the most precocious proofs of inventive genius, especially in the department of mathematics. Having, if we may believe the universally received tradition, been willingly kept in ignorance of Geometry, lest his propensity in that direction should interfere with the prosecution of other branches of knowledge, his self-prompted genius discovered for itself the elementary truths of the forbidden science. At twelve years of age, he was surprised by his father in the act of demonstrating, on the pavement of an old hall, where he used to play, and by means of a rude diagram, traced by a piece of coal, a proposition which corresponded to the thirty-second of the First Book of Euclid. At the age of sixteen, he composed a little tractate on the Conic Sections, which provoked the mingled incredulity and admiration of Descartes. At nineteen, he invented his celebrated Arithmetical Machine; and at the age of six-andtwenty, he had composed the greater part of his mathematical works, and made those brilliant experiments in Hydrostatics and Pneumatics which have associated his name with those of Torricelli and Boyle, and ranked him amongst the first philosophers of his age. Yet, strange to say, he now suddenly renounced the splendid career to which his genius so unequivocally invited him, and gave himself up to totally different studies. This was principally attributable to that strong religious impulse which was imparted to his mind at this period-rendered deeper by early experience in the school of affliction. From the age of eighteen, he was a perpetual sufferer. In 1647, when only in his twentyfourth year, he was attacked by paralysis. His ill health was mainly, if not wholly, occasioned by his devotion to study; and of him it is literally true, that his mind consumed his body.

So complete was his abandonment of science, that he never returned to it but on one memorable occasion, and then only for a short interval. We allude, of course, to the remarkable problems which he solved respecting the curve called the Cycloid. The accounts which have been transmitted to us by his sister, of the manner in which these investigations were suggested and completed-accounts which are authenticated by a letter of his

His sister, Madame Perier, has left an interesting and circumstantial account of this matter, in the life of her brother.

own to Fermat-strongly impress us with the vigour and brilliancy of his genius. We are assured that, after long abandonment of mathematics, his attention was directed to this subject by a casual train of thought suggested in one of the many nights which pain made sleepless. The thoughts thus suddenly originated, his inventive mind rapidly pursued to all the brilliant results in which they terminated; and in the brief space of eight days the investigations were completed. Partly in compliance with the fashion of the age, and partly from the solicitation of his friend the Duke de Roannes, he concealed for a time the discoveries at which he had arrived, and offered the problems for solution to all the mathematicians of Europe, with a first and second prize to successful candidates. If no solution were offered in three months, Pascal promised to furnish his own. Several were forwarded, but as none, in the estimation of the judges, completely fulfilled the conditions of the challenge, Pascal redeemed his pledge by publishing his own, under the name of Amos Dettonville,-an anagram of Louis de Montalte, the name under which the Provincial Letters' had appeared. This was in 1658-9, when he was thirty-six years of age.

With this brief exception, Pascal may be said to have practically abandoned science from the age of twenty-six. Yet he did not at once become a religious recluse. For some years he lived a cheerful, and even gay, though never a dissipated life, in Paris, in the centre of literary and polite society, loved and admired by a wide circle of friends, and especially by his patron, the Duke de Roannes. To the accomplished sister of this nobleman, M. Faugère conjectures (as we think plausibly) that Pascal was secretly attached, but, from timidity and humility, never told his love. Perhaps, in part, from the melancholy which this hopeless attachment inspired, but certainly much more in consequence of the deeper religious convictions, produced by a memorable escape from an appalling death, in 1654, his indifferonce to the world increased; and he at length sought for solitude at Port Royal, already endeared to him by the residence there of his sister Jacqueline.

Here it is well known he produced his immortal Provincial Letters; and, when death cut short his brief career, was meditating an extensive work on the fundamental truths of religion, especially on the existence of God and the evidences of Christianity, for the completion of which he would have required ten years of health and leisure.' An outline of the work had been sometimes (and on one occasion somewhat fully) imparted in conversation to his friends, but no part of it was ever completed. Nothing was found after

his death but detached Thoughts' (interspersed with some on other subjects) on the principal topics appropriated to such a work. They were the stones of which the building was to have consisted, many of them unhewn, and some few such as the builder, had he lived, would no doubt have laid aside. The form in which the Thoughts were put together comported but too well with their fragmentary character. It appears that he did not even use a Commonplace Book; but when, after profound meditation, any thought struck him as worth recording, he hastily noted it on any scrap of paper that came to hand, often on the backs of old letters; these he strung together on a file, or tied up in bundles, and left them till better health and untroubled leisure should permit him to evoke a new creation cut of this chaos. It is a wonder, therefore, that the Pensées of Pascal have come down to us at all. Never, surely, was so precious a freight committed to so crazy a bark. The Sybil herself was not more careless about those leaves on which she inscribed her prophetic truths, than was Pascal about those which contained the results of his meditations. Of these results, however, we are in part defrauded, by something far worse than either the fragility of the materials on which they are inscribed, or their utter want of arrangement. Many of the 'Thoughts' are themselves only half developed; others, as given us in the literal copy of M. Faugère, break off in the middle of a sentence, even of a word. Some casual interruption-frequently, no doubt, some paroxysm of pain, to which the great author, in his latter years, was incessantly subject—broke the thread of thought, and left the web imperfect for ever.

It is humiliating to think of the casualties which, possibly in many cases, have robbed posterity of some of the most precious fruits of the meditations of the wise; perhaps arrested trains of thought which would have expanded into brilliant theories or grand discoveries ;-trains which, when the genial moment of inspiration has passed, it has been found impossible to recall; or which, if recalled up to the point at which they were broken off, terminate only in a wall of rock, in which the mountain path, which had been before so clearly seen, exists no longer. It is humiliating to think that a fit of the toothache, or a twinge of the gout, might have thus arrested-no more to return-the opening germ of conjecture, which led on to the discovery of the Differential Calculus, or the Theory of Gravitation. The condition of man, in this respect, affords, indeed, one striking proof of that combined greatness and misery' of his nature, on which Pascal so profoundly meditated. It is wonderful that a being, such as he, should achieve so much; it is humiliating that he

On the precarious

must depend on such casualties for success. control which even the greatest men have over their own minds, Pascal himself strikingly says, "The mind of this sovereign of the world is not so independent as not to be discomposed by the 'first tintamarre that may be made around him. It does not 'need the roar of artillery to hinder him from thinking; the ' creaking of a vane or a pulley will answer the purpose. Be not surprised that he reasons ill just now; a fly is buzzing in his ears-it is amply sufficient to render him incapable of sound 'deliberation. If you wish him to discover truth, be pleased to 'chase away that insect who holds his reason in check, and troubles that mighty intellect which governs cities and king'doms! Le plaisant dieu que voila! O ridicolosissimo eroe!'

On the imperfect sentences and half-written words, which are now printed in the volumes of M. Faugère, we look with something like the feelings with which we pore on some half-defaced inscription on an ancient monument-with a strange commixture of curiosity and veneration; and, whilst we wonder what the unfinished sentences may mean, we mourn over the malicious accident which has, perhaps, converted what might have been an aphorism of profoundest importance into a series of unmeaning cyphers. One of the last things, assuredly, which we should think of doing with such fragments, would be to attempt to alter them in any way; least of all, to supplement them, and to divine and publish Pascal's meaning. There have been learned men, who have given us supplements to the lost pieces of some ancient historians;-erudite Freinsheimiuses, who hand us a huge bale of indifferent Latin, and beg us only to think it Livy's lost Decades. But what man would venture to supplement Pascal? Only such, it may be supposed, as would feel no scruple in scouring an antique medal, or a worthy successor of those Monks who obliterated manuscript pieces of Cicero, that they might inscribe them with some edifying legend.

Alas! more noted people than these were scarcely more scrupulous in the case of Pascal. His friends decided that the fragments which he had left behind him, imperfect as they were, were far too valuable to be consigned to oblivion; and so far all the world will agree with them. If, further, they had selected whatever appeared in any degree coherent, and printed these verbatim et literatim, in the best order they could de

*Faugère, tom. ii. p. 54. It may be proper to observe, that all our citations from the Pensées are from this new and solely authentic edition.