Faith and Unfaith Author:Charles Kegan Paul 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: PASCAL'S "PENSEES." MONG the books which have moved, and con' tinue to move the world, is one which, considered in itself and in its history, is unique. For... more », properly speaking, it is not a book at all, but rather an undigested heap of detached thoughts and fragments for a book which was only partially written, if even fully planned. Pascal took in hand his great work against atheists and unbelievers in the thirty-fifth year of his age, after finishing the " Provincial Letters" in the spring of 1657. A certain languor had succeeded to that vast intellectual effort, and, always in feeble health, he was able during that year only to sketch in part the course his work would take, to write fully, and with great elaboration, certain paragraphs and portions of definite chapters, and to make notes, afterwards to be expanded viva iwce for lectures at Port Royal. But in the following spring he was attacked by neuralgia in the face, which proved to be the beginning of other nervous affections, taking from him all power of sustained labour, racking his body with pain, and obliging him either to depend not E not a little on the aid of an illiterate servant as amanuensis, or to jot down his own thoughts on separate slips of paper, which he was never able to work out nor to fit into their place. These have lain strewn, so to speak, on the world like the feathers scattered by the fairy Disorder; it has been the task of many editors to try and restore them according to the plan in Pascal's mind, not fully known to them, and only in part described by him to his most intimate friends. Then, when the pen fell from the dead hand, and his family determined that the thoughts so left should be given to the world, the MS. was entrusted to a committee, who conceived themselves at liberty t...« less