Thoughts on religion and other subjects Author:Blaise Pascal 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: CHAPTER V. THE WONDERFUL CONTRARIETIES WHICH ARE TOUND IN MAN WITH RESPECT TO TRUTH, HAPPINESS, AND MANY OTHER SUBJECTS. THERE is nothing more extraordinar... more »y in the nature of man, than the contrarieties, which are discovered in it on almost every subject. Man is formed for the knowledge of truth; he ardently desires it; he seeks it; and yet, when he strives to grasp it, he so completely dazzles and confounds himself, that he gives occasion to doubt whether he has attained it or not. This has given rise to the two sects of the Pyrrhonists and the Dogmatists, of whom the one would deny that men knew any thing of truth; the other professed to shew them that they knew it accurately; but each advanced reasons so improbable, that they only increased that confusion and perplexity in which man must continue, so long as he obtains no other light than that of his own understanding. The chief reasons of the Pyrrhonists are these, that we have no assurance of the truth of our principles (setting aside faith and revelation) except that we find them intuitively within us. But this intuitive impression is not a convincing proof of their truth; because, as without the aid of faith, we have no certainty whether man was made by a benevolent Deity, or a wicked demon, whether man is from eternity, or the offspring of chance, it must remain doubtful whether these principles are given to us,— are true or false; or like our origin, uncertain. Further, that excepting by faith, a man has no assurance whetherhe sleeps or wakes; seeing that in his sleep he does not the less firmly believe that he is awake, than when he really is Go. He sees spaces, figures, movements; he is sensible of the lapse of time; he measures it; he acts, in short, as if he were awake. So that as one half of life is admitt...« less