Pascal's Wager Read Online Free PDF Page B

saints who as toddlers wanted to listen only to the wisdom of old men, he would certainly have shown that same kind of supernatural promise, that divine gift, early in his life.
    Étienne set about the task of educating his children, and along the way created an innovative regimen of homeschooling. He proved to be quite a capable teacher, a man who was ahead of his time in understanding the psychology of education. It was his maxim, according to Gilberte, that he would always keep his lessons at a level just above the level of the work his students were capable of. Thus his children had to strive to understand that which was in sight but which was just beyond their grasp. In this way, Étienne built up the confidence of his children by giving them problems that they could solve, but only with sweat. Each solution then became another triumph and allowed their minds to grow, leaving them secure in the knowledge that they could solve whatever puzzles were laid before them.
    Homeschooling, however, had its drawbacks, for Blaise was never allowed to attend school and thus never learned the art of fine negotiation that most children learn on the playground. Thus he remained ignorant, at least experientially, of many of the subtleties of human life. He never attended school or matriculated at a university. He never married or even seriously courted. Although Étienne introduced his children to the intellectual life in a profound way, he failed to give them the kind of emotional training one needs to live a fully human life. Had Antoinette been alive, that might have been different.
    One source of Étienne’s pedagogical method was his own experience of mathematics—how it could become an all-consuming fascination that could distract the mathematician from other kinds of study. He was also concerned that, given Blaise’s fragility, he not tax his son’s strength. He therefore refused to allow Blaise to study mathematics until he was sixteen. He did not want him to be caught by this great passion too early, until he had been firmly grounded in grammar and in languages, especially the classics and classical literature. Instead, he presented his children with little problems in natural science. At the dinner table one evening someone struck a porcelain plate with a fork, and Blaise asked why the plate hummed. What was the cause of the sound? Why did the sound stop when you put your hand to the plate? After dinner, Blaise went about the house striking dishes with various kinds of silverware and found that different plates made different sounds, each with its individual pitch and timbre. In this one moment, Étienne introduced his son to experimental science, and encouraged him at each step. The problem, however, was that Blaise was in fact as precocious a child as Gilberte indicated. He was curious and, when given a boundary by his father, could not help but try to jump over it.
    When Blaise was about eight years old, he spent much of his free time lying in front of the fire in his room, drawing diagrams in charcoal and working out calculations on the stones in front of the fireplace. He knew that he was breaking his father’s rules against studying mathematics, and he tried to keep his work secret. At first, he tried to draw a perfect triangle, and then a perfect circle. As he came closer and closer to this, he began to develop his own language for his new geometry. He called a line a “bar,” and a circle a “round,” and, using his new vocabulary, he set about re-creating Euclid’s ideas. He actually managed to reconstruct several of Euclid’s theorems before his father walked in on him and found him drawing on the stones. Unseen, Étienne watched from a distance for a long time and then approached. Gilberte does not say who was moredisconcerted at the discovery. Blaise had been caught disobeying his father’s orders, but for Étienne it was a happy capture, for he found his son busy working on a project much beyond his