The Thoughts of Blaise Pascal (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: NOTES FOR THE GENERAL INTRODUCTION. To doubt is then a misfortune, but to seek when in doubt is an indispensable duty. So he who doubts and seeks not is at once unfortunate and unfair. If at the same time he is gay and presumptuous, I have no terms in which to describe a creature so extravagant. A fine subject of rejoicing and boasting, with the head uplifted in such a fashion . . . Therefore let us rejoice; I see not the conclusion, since it is uncertain, and we shall then see what will become of us. Is it courage in a dying man that he dare, in his weakness and agony, face an almighty and eternal God ? Were I in that state I should be glad if any one would pity my folly, and would have the goodness to deliver me in despite of myself! Yet it is certain that man has so fallen from nature that there is in his heart a seed of joy in that very fact. A man in a dungeon, who knows not whether his doom is fixed, who has but one hour to learn it, and this hour enough, should he know that it is fixed, to obtain its repeal, would act against nature did he employ that hour, not in learning his sentence, but in playing piquet. So it is against nature that man, etc. It is to weight the hand of God. Thus not the zeal alone of those who seek him proves God, but the blindness of those who seek him not. We run carelessly to the precipice after having veiled our eyes to hinder us from seeing it. Between us and hell or heaven, there is nought but life, the frailest thing in all the world. If it be a supernatural blindness to live without seeking to know what we are, it is a terrible blindness to live ill while believing in God. The sensibility of man to trifles, and his insensibility to great things, is the mark of a strange inversion. This shows that there i...