Thoughts, Letters and Minor Works

by Charles William Eliot (Editor), Blaise Pascal

Contents: Thoughts on Mind and Style; The Misery of Man Without God; Of the Necessity of the Wager; Of the Means of Belief; Justice and the Reason of Effects; The Philosophers; Morality and Doctrine; Fundamentals of the Christian Religion; Perpetuity; Typology; Prophecies; Proofs of Jesus Christ; The Miracles. Various Letters. Minor Works: Epitaph of M. Pascal; Prayer; Comparison Between Christians of Early Times and Those of Today; Discourses on the Condition of the Great; On the Conversion of the Sinner; Conversation on Epictetus and Montaigne; Art of Persuasion; Discourse on the Passion of Love; Of the Geometrical Sprit; Preface to the Treatise on Vacuum; New Fragment of the Treatise on Vacuum.

Genres: Philosophy, Classics, Nonfiction

444 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1909

About the author

Charles William Eliot was an American academic who was selected as Harvard's president in 1869. He transformed the provincial college into the preeminent American research university. Eliot served the longest term as president in the university's history.

Reviews

[JP · Rating 5 out of 5]

As far as I'm concerned, Pascal's "shorts" are far more clever, succinct, surprising, and woven together than those of Rouchefoucauld and others. There are many threaded thoughts woven amongst more than 900 maxims and mini-essays each of which stand on their own. The profundity and diversity of topics makes the Pensees something to read slowly and ponder -- it takes much more time than reading the same amount of text in typical prose. Here Pascal masterfully forces us to contemplate just about every philosophical aspect of nature, religion, culture, and government, and the human condition in general. Starting with a discussion of the mathematical versus the intuitive mind (there are advantages in both but true genius lies in the mathematically trained also being able to see the big picture and beyond the concrete), he then portrays theology in nature, argues against atheism, supports Catholic doctrine, and finds the source of all unhappiness.

[Joel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book by a heroic thinker.

[Averill · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was a good book, unfortunately I read it too close to Francis Bacon's "essays". The similar writing styles made for boredom

[E. · Rating 1 out of 5]

I had looked forward to the Pensees, though as I began to read it I was struck by how awful it is and my recurring thought was, "Why is this in the canon?"

Of course the answer is Pascal's wager, so I eventually quickly skimmed/skipped ahead to that portion and read it. But even it is only okay. I then skimmed/skipped through the rest of the book.

Pascal is a bad thinker, overwhelmed with a religious fundamentalism and what seems either an inability or a refusal to see the wide variety of possibilities.

He is also overwhelming pessimistic, such as this line, "Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness." I was surprised that he isn't more popular with the nihilists. There's this:

"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."

Egads.

I was surprised that this paragraph isn't famous:

"What a chimera then is man! What a novelty! What a monster, what a chaos, what a contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, imbecile worm of the earth; depositary of truth, a sink of uncertainty and error; the pride and refuse of the universe! Who will unravel this tangle?"