Blaise 1623-1662 Pascal

PASCAL, BLAISE (1623-1662), French religious philos opher and mathematician, was born at Clermont Ferrand, in Auvergne, on June 19, 1623, son of Etienne Pascal, president of the Court of Aids at Clermont; his mother's name was Antoinette Begon. His mother died when he was about four years old, and left him with two sisters—Gilberte, who after wards married M. Perier, and Jacqueline. When Pascal was about seven years old his father gave up his post at Clermont, and settled in Paris. It does not appear that Blaise, who went to no school, but was taught by his father, was at all forced, but rather the contrary. But he was a precocious child, whose precocity was followed by great performance at maturity.

Etienne Pascal incurred the displeasure of Richelieu by pro testing against the reduction of the rate of interest on some Paris municipal bonds, and to escape the Bastille had to go into hiding. He is said to have been restored to favour owing to the success of Jacqueline in a representation of Scudery's Amour tyrannique before the cardinal. In any case Richelieu gave Etienne Pascal (in 1639) the important intendancy of Rouen, which he held for nine years. At Rouen they became acquainted with Corneille. The year 1646 is a landmark in Pascal's life. His father was confined to the house in consequence of an accident, and was visited by persons who had come under the influence of Saint Cyran and the Jansenists. The Pascal family had hitherto paid due respect to religious matters, but they had not regarded religion as all-absorbing; but they now became converts to Jan senism.

But though his family, and especially his sister Gilberte, now Madame Perier, became strict devotees, it does not appear that Pascal had yet accepted the full consequences of the new doc trine. He continued to be indefatigable in his mathematical work in spite of nearly continuous illness. In 1647 he published his Nouvelles experiences sur le vide, and in the next year the famous experiment with the barometer on the Puy de Dome was carried out for him by his brother-in-law Perier, and repeated on a smaller scale by himself at Paris, to which place by the end of 1647 he and his sister Jacqueline had removed, to be followed shortly by their father. In a letter of Jacqueline's, dated

Sept. 27, an account of a visit paid by Descartes to Pascal is given. Descartes and Torricelli had suggested the principle of the barometer, but Pascal's experiments were the first complete demonstration.

Port Royal.

As early as May 1648 Jacqueline Pascal was strongly drawn to Port Royal, and her brother frequently accom panied her to its church. She desired indeed to join the convent, but her father, who returned to Paris with the dignity of coun sellor of state, disapproved of the plan, and took both brother and sister to Clermont, where Pascal remained for the greater part of two years. He, his sister and their father returned to Paris in the late autumn of 165o, and in September of the next year Etienne Pascal died. Almost immediately afterwards Jac queline joined Port Royal—a proceeding which led to some sore ness, finally healed, between herself and her brother and sister as to the disposal of her property. It has sometimes been sup posed that Pascal, from 1651 or earlier to the famous accident of 1654, lived a dissipated, extravagant, worldly, luxurious (though admittedly not vicious) life with his friend the duc de Roannez and others. His Discours sur les passions de l'amour, assigned to this period, has been supposed, on quite insufficient grounds, to indicate a hopeless passion for Charlotte de Roannez, the duke's sister. What is certain is that the winter of was one of hard scientific work and saw the production of some of his most important treatises. At the same time he sought some other than the Christian solution to the problem of existence, and made a close study of Epictetus and of Montaigne. He found satisfaction in neither. He began to visit his sister at Port Royal.