PASCAL, BrsusE, one of the most distinguished philosophers and scholars of the 17th e., was li. at Clermont, in Auvergne, France, June 10, 1623. His father, Etienne Pas cal. was president of the corn- des aides at Clermont. His mother, Antoinette Bezon, died while he was little beyond infancy. He had two sisters—the elder, Gilberte, Madame Perier, afterwards his biographer; the younger, Jacqueline, who became it nun of Port Royal. under the celebrated Mire Angelique, sister of Antoine Armuild. From childhood, Blaise gave evidence of extraordinary abilities; and when lie reached his eighth year, his father resigned his office at Clermont, and came to Paris, in order personally to direct the boy's education. For the purpose of concentrating all the boy's efforts upon languages, his father kept out of his reach all books treating the subject of mathematics. for which he had early evinced a decided taste; and it is recorded that by his cn unaided speculations, drawing the diagrams with charcoal upon the floor, he made some progress in geometry. One account represents him as having thus mastered the first thirty-two propositions of the first book of Euclid's 1,7ements,a statement which carries iis owu refutation with it. Thenceforward he was allowed freely to follow the bent of his ennuis. In his sixteenth year, he produced a treatise on conic sections, which extorted the almost incredulous admiration of Descartes. In his nineteenth year, he invented a calculating-machine; and turning his attention to the novel questions as to the nature of fluids, whiff 11 Torricelli's theories had raised, he produced two essays, which, although not published till after his death, have established his reputation as an experimental physicist. This father having accepted an office at Rouen, Pascal was there brought• much into intercourse with a distinguished preacher, Abbe Guillehert, a mem ber of the Jansenists, but a man of great eloquence, a great master of ascetic theology, from whom and other members of the same rigid sect, as well as from the writings of Arnauld, St. Cyran, and Nicole, Pascal's mind received a deeply religious turn; and his health having suffered mulch from excessive study. he gave himself up in great measure to retirement and theological reading. and to the practice of asceticism. The death of his father, and his sister Jacqueline's withdrawal to Port Royal, confirmed these habits; and it is to this period that we owe his magnificent though unfinished Pewees, which have extorted the admiration even of his unbelieving, and therefore unsympathizing, critics. Having fully identified himself with the Jansenist party, he was induced (1635) to take up his residence at Port Royal, although not as a member of body, where he resided till his death, entirely given up to prayer and practices of mortification, among which practices may be mentioned that of wearing an iron girdle, studded with sharp points, which be forced into his flesh whenever he felt himself assailed by sinful thoughts. In the controversy to which the condemnation of Arntudd by the Sorbonne (1653) gave rise, Pascal took a lively interest; and it was to this controversy that he contributed the memorable Lettres Protinciales, published under the pseudonym of Louis de Montalt.
These famous letters (eighteen in number, not reckoning the nineteenth, which is a frag meat, and the twentieth, which is by Lamaistre), are written, as if to a provincial friend, on the absorbing controversial topic of the day. The first three are devitted to the vin dication of Arnauld, and the demonstration of the identity of his doctrine with that of St. Augustine. But it was to the later letters that the collection owed both its contem porary popularity and its abiding fame. In these Pascal addresses himself to the casu istry and to the directmial system of Arnauld's great antagonists, the Jesuits; and, in a strain of humorous irony which has seldom been surpassed, he holds up to ridicule their imputed laxity of principle on the obligation of restitution, on simony, on probable opinions, on directing the intention, on equivocation and mental reservation, etc. In all this, he professes to produce the authorities of their own authors. Of the extraordi nary ability displayed in these celebrated letters, no question can be entertained; but the Jesuits and their friends loudly complain of their unfairness, and represent them as in great part the work of a special pleader. The quotations with the exception of those from Escobar, were confessedly supplied by Pascal's friends. It is complained that many of the authors cited are not Jesuits at all; that many of the opinions ridiculed and reprobated as opinions of the Jesuit order, had been in reality formally repudiated and condemned in the society; that many of the extracts are garbled and distorted; that it treats as though they had been designed for the pulpit and as manuals for teaching, works which in reality'were bent meant as private directions of the judgment of the con fessor; and that, in almost all cases, statements, facts, and circumstances are withheld, which would modify, if not entirely remove. their objectionable tendency. See JESUITS. To all which the enemies of the Jesuits reply•by arguments intended thoroughly to vin dicate Pascal. Pascal himself entertained no compunctious feeling for the production of these letters, but even at the approach of death declared his full satisfaction with the work, such as it was. His later years were made very wretched by continued, or at least frequently recurring hypochondria, under the influence of which he suffered from very painful fantasies, which he was unable to controls His strength was completely worn out by these and other infirmities, and, prematurely old, he died at the early age of 89, in Paris, in the year 1662. His Pensees sur la Religion, et sur quelques mares &jets, being unfinished, were,published with suppressions and modifications in 1669; but their full value was only learned from the complete edition which was published at the instance of M. Cousin (Paris, 1844). Ofall his works, the Lettres Provinciales have been the most frequently reprinted. They were translated into LatiiQn the lifetime of Pas cal by Nicole, under the pseudonym of a German professor, ° Stirlhelm Wendroc;" and an edition in four languages appeared at Cologne in 1684.