Pascal's Wager Read Online Free PDF

Twenty-five years later, in 1623, the year Blaise entered hungry into the world, the second phase of the Thirty Years’ War ended. The Dutch once again fought the Spanish for their independence, and lost. That same year Pope Urban VIII, the pope who would command the inquisition of Galileo, would be elected to the throne of St. Peter; the Safavid Turks would conquer Baghdad; and “erotomania”—the delusion that a person, usually of a higher social station, is secretly in love with the delusional person—would officially be defined as a mental illness in Jacques Ferrand’s Maladie d’amour ou mélancolie érotique . Wilhelm Schickard would build the first calculating clock that year, and the Plymouth Colony would celebrate its second Thanksgiving.
    Two years later, in 1625, the year of Blaise’s childhood malnutrition, the third phase, the Danish phase, of the Thirty Years’ War would begin. Nations opposed to the Hapsburgs—the French, under the command of Cardinal Richelieu, because he feared Hapsburg power and the power of Spain; the English; and the Dutch—formed a league and handed over control of their armies to the Danish king, Christian IV, who held vast sections of northern Germany. The Danes invaded, but the Catholic League, under the command of the ambitious, and ruthless, General Albrecht Wallenstein, the patron of Johannes Kepler, crushed them irrevocably. 4
    In such a world, average French citizens lived as if by the roll of the dice every day. Would some king or his general fall on them that day and slaughter them all in the name of God? Would the crop be adequate in that harvest, the weather indulgent? Would God let them and their children live one more day? How could anyone understand, let alone live with, such uncertainty?

[1631–1635]
A Thinking Reed
    Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living,
    and your belief will help create the fact.
    —W ILLIAM J AMES
    To conquer without risk is to triumph without glory.
    —P IERRE C ORNEILLE
    M an is but a reed,” wrote Blaise Pascal in his last work, the Pensées , “the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapor, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But, if the universe were to crush him, man would still be nobler than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him, the universe knows nothing of this. All our dignity then, consists in thought. By it we must elevate ourselves, and not by space and time which we cannot fill. Let us endeavor then, to think well; this is the principle of morality.” 5
    Certainly it was a risk, an act of belief, perhaps even faith, for Étienne Pascal to cart his children all the way to Paris, so far from their family and friends. Likely, his main reason for doing so was to introduce them to the more cultured life of Paris, to the circle of great intellectuals, and possibly to a new life at court, where the intellectual world of a provincialtax judge could expand beyond expectations. There is some evidence that Étienne, seeing some intellectual promise in his son, Blaise, had developed a master plan to turn the boy into one of the great minds of the day. He succeeded in this, even though Blaise himself later rejected that life and embraced the rigors of Jansenism. Blaise was by Gilberte’s account a precocious little boy who asked questions far beyond his years and held conversations that would seem appropriate to an adult. This, of course, may be more mythology than fact, for it was common in seventeenth-century France to describe saints in their youth in biblical terms, like Jesus sitting among the doctors of the law in the Temple of Jerusalem, astounding them by the acuity of his questions. Thus, sanctity and genius were intertwined. In Gilberte’s way of thinking, if Blaise had already become a great man by the time of the writing of her biography of him, then, like the