What will you wager? According to reason, you can do neither the one thing nor the other; according to reason, you can defend neither of the propositions.
Do not then reprove for error those who have made a choice; for you know nothing about it. The true course is not to wager at all. Yes; but you must wager. It is not optional. You are embarked. Which will you choose then? Let us see. Since you must choose, let us see which interests you least. You have two things to lose, the true and the good; and two things to stake, your reason and your will, your knowledge and your happiness; and your nature has two things to shun, error and misery.
Your reason is no more shocked in choosing one rather than the other, since you must of necessity choose. This is one point settled.
But your happiness? Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is. Yes, I must wager; but I may perhaps wager too much. Since there is an equal risk of gain and of loss, if you had only to gain two lives, instead of one, you might still wager.
But if there were three lives to gain, you would have to play since you are under the necessity of playing , and you would be imprudent, when you are forced to play, not to chance your life to gain three at a game where there is an equal risk of loss and gain.
But there is an eternity of life and happiness. And this being so, if there were an infinity of chances, of which one only would be for you, you would still be right in wagering one to win two, and you would act stupidly, being obliged to play, by refusing to stake one life against three at a game in which out of an infinity of chances there is one for you, if there were an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain.
But there is here an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain, a chance of gain against a finite number of chances of loss, and what you stake is finite. It is all divided; wherever the infinite is and there is not an infinity of chances of loss against that of gain, there is no time to hesitate, you must give all. And thus, when one is forced to play, he must renounce reason to preserve his life, rather than risk it for infinite gain, as likely to happen as the loss of nothingness.
For it is no use to say it is uncertain if we will gain , and it is certain that we risk, and that the infinite distance between the certainty of what is staked and the uncertainty of what will be gained, equals the finite good which is certainly staked against the uncertain infinite. It is not so, as every player stakes a certainty to gain an uncertainty, and yet he stakes a finite certainty to gain a finite uncertainty, without transgressing against reason.
Around this time, he also became interested in the teachings of a Catholic splinter group known as Jansenism , which was becoming popular in France at the time, and he began to write on theological subjects for the first time in the course of , although this initial religious engagement soon faded. His father died in , leaving his inheritance to Pascal and Jacqueline, who then left to become a postulant in the Jansenist convent of Port-Royal. In November , he had a brush with death after a carriage accident, from which he emerged unscathed but the shock of which apparently led to an intense religious vision which revitalized his belief and religious commitment.
He started regularly visiting the convents at Port-Royal for retreats and began writing his first major literary work on religion, the "Lettres provinciales" "Provincial Letters". In his latter years in Paris, he followed an ascetic lifestyle and, in , Pascal, whose health had never been good, fell seriously ill , rejecting the ministrations of his doctors in the belief that "sickness is the natural state of Christians".
King Louis XIV suppressed the Jansenist movement in , and his sister Jacqueline died the same year, leading Pascal to relax his religious fervor somewhat. In , Pascal's illness became more violent , and he eventually died after suffering convulsions on 19 August , just 39 years old. Pascals's philosophical and theological writing began only late in life , after his mystical religious vision of His first major literary work on religion, the "Lettres provinciales" "Provincial Letters" , was published between and under a pseudonym.
It attacked the casuistry case-based, as opposed to principle-based, reasoning of many Catholic thinkers in the early modern period especially the Jesuits as the mere use of complex reasoning to justify moral laxity and all sorts of sins. However, the "Provincial Letters" were extremely popular as a literary work, and influenced the prose of later French writers like Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. On its first publication in albeit expurgated for the times it instantly became a classic , and is widely considered Pascals' masterpiece as well as a landmark in French prose.
It was to have been a sustained and coherent examination and defense of the Christian faith , although it never quite lived up to that. One of its high risk main strategies was to use the contradictory philosophies of Skepticism and Stoicism exemplified by Michel de Montaigne and Epictetus respectively in order to bring the unbeliever to such despair and confusion that he would embrace God.
It confirmed Pascal's position as a Fideist the view that religious belief depends on faith or revelation , rather than reason , intellect or natural theology. It is based not on an appeal to evidence that God exists, but rather that it is in our interests to believe in God and it is therefore rational for us to do so. He argued as follows: If we believe in God, then if he exists we will receive an infinite reward in heaven, while if he does not then we have lost little or nothing.
His last work was on the cycloid, the curve traced by a point on the circumference of a rolling circle. In Pascal started to think about mathematical problems again as he lay awake at night unable to sleep for pain. He applied Cavalieri 's calculus of indivisibles to the problem of the area of any segment of the cycloid and the centre of gravity of any segment.
He also solved the problems of the volume and surface area of the solid of revolution formed by rotating the cycloid about the x-axis. Sluze , Ricci , Huygens , Wren and Fermat all communicated their discoveries to Pascal without entering the competition. Wren had been working on Pascal's challenge and he in turn challenged Pascal, Fermat and Roberval to find the arc length, the length of the arch, of the cycloid.
Pascal published his own solutions to his challenge problems in the Letters to Carcavi. After that time on he took little interest in science and spent his last years giving to the poor and going from church to church in Paris attending one religious service after another. Pascal died at the age of 39 in intense pain after a malignant growth in his stomach spread to the brain. He is described in [ 3 ] as He had always been in delicate health, suffering even in his youth from migraine His character is described as In [ 1 ] the following assessment is given:- At once a physicist, a mathematician, an eloquent publicist in the Provinciales Pascal was embarrassed by the very abundance of his talents.
It has been suggested that it was his too concrete turn of mind that prevented his discovering the infinitesimal calculus, and in some of the Provinciales the mysterious relations of human beings with God are treated as if they were a geometrical problem. But these considerations are far outweighed by the profit that he drew from the multiplicity of his gifts, his religious writings are rigorous because of his scientific training References show.
Biography in Encyclopaedia Britannica. Blaise Pascal, l'homme et l'oeuvre, Proc. Pascal at Royaumont, France P Humbert, L'oeuvre scientific de Pascal Paris, Schickard , Pascal , Leibniz Paris, A J Krailsheimer, Pascal E Mortimer, Blaise Pascal : the life and work of a realist London, S Chapman, Blaise Pascal - : Tercentenary of the calculating machine, Nature , - F A Chimenti, Pascal's wager : a decision-theoretic approach, Math.
Histoire Sci. Torino Cl. II, Historia Sci. K Hara, Pascal et Wallis au sujet de la cycloide, Ann. Japan Assoc. D L Hilliker, A study in the history of analysis up to the time of Leibniz and Newton in regard to Newton's discovery of the binomial theorem.
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