Lecture notes on Montaigne, Descartes and Pascal.

Lecture notes on Montaigne, Descartes and Pascal.

There will be a written test in class on Friday 18 and on Tuesday 22 (for groups 1 and 6). The examination would be about 30 minutes. The mark will be included in your grade for the course. Please review your lecture and seminar notes as well as readings on Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke and Hume. Pay attention to readings in Magee, selections from Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding. Russell’s discussion of Locke is strongly recommended as well as his discussion of Philosophical Liberalism.

Michel Montaigne is discussed in some books on the history of philosophy largely because of his insights into human character. He is most famous for his essays in which he doubted whether human beings were capable of finding the truth or recognizing it even if they found it. Montaigne belonged to the tradition of ancient skepticism. He was dubious of both the senses and reason. What interested him was the differences among peoples and cultures, differences in customs and ideas. In this regard, he can be contrasted with Descartes who sought only absolute, unchanging truth; truths which did not and could not differ from place to place or time to time. Descartes was in pursuit of necessity and eternity; Montaigne wanted to understand human character and was both fascinated and appalled by the differences which he noted. He has been described as “a pessimist living in a philosophical world desperately trying to be optimistic, high on the promise of science and mathematics and the unveiling of absolute knowledge.” Montaigne was far more interested in developing a philosophy of life rather than pursuing the problems of metaphysics. He chose to write essays on human character rather than epistemological treatises. He starts out, like a good humanist, believing that “to philosophize is to learn how to die.” The stoics, Seneca, Epictetus and even many of the Renaissance thinkers had said the same thing. But gradually, in the course of writing his essays, Montaigne changed his mind. He came to see that to philosophize is to learn how to live. According to Barzun, the importance of Montaigne in Western Intellectual history is that he discovered character. When Montaigne called man “wavelike and varying, he replaced one conception of the individual by another, a deeper and richer one.”

Before Montaigne, Barzun, says, the accepted idea of personality was that it was ruled by one of the humors. In other words, a person was choleric (irritable), sanguine (cheerful), phlegmatic (lacking in emotion, not easily excited), or melancholic (prone to gentle sadness). Our character is governed by one basic disposition. And if we depart from this, if we act contrary to this basic character, people say that you are not being your self. (In the 17^th century the playwright Ben Jonson based two of his plays on this view of character: “Every Man has His Humor,” and “Every Man out of his Humor”. Montaigne tried to change this view of personality. In his essay on The Inconsistency of Our Actions, he shows the elements which make the difference between a type and a character. The type may display all kinds of tricks, tastes and gestures that make him different but in fact, his “stance” or basic outlook is unchanging and typical. Not so in the character. The character is many-sided. This contrast between type and character is why so many biographers call the subject of their book a bundle of contradictions. For example, the author finds in her subject the variation that belongs to character. He or she was generous to strangers and public charities but stingy and tight-fisted with the family. But Montaigne says these are not contradictions in personality. This is character; this is the way we are in a changing and variable world. In a fifty-page essay on the education of children, he anticipates Rousseau by insisting that nature is our best guide for education. Teaching must be the development of natural inclinations, for which purpose a tutor must watch his pupil and listen. He makes a wise and useful observation about good teaching. Good teaching will come from a mind well made rather than a mind well filled. Remember this. Real education involves making a mind, forming the mind, rather than filling the mind with lots of facts and distracting details. Oh yes, and one bit of fact. Montaigne served two terms as mayor of Bordeaux and helped his King, Henry 111, with advice in negotiations.

DESCARTES

Descartes and the New Science.

He was born in La Haye on March 31, 1596. His father was a lawyer and magistrate. Descartes’ mother died in May of the year following his birth. He was raised by his grandmother (with a brother and half sister). At age ten, in 1606, he was sent to the Jesuit (an order of Roman Catholic priests) college where he studied until 1614. In 1615, he entered the university where he studied Canon & civil law.

In 1618, at the age of twenty-two, he enlisted in the army of Prince Maurice of Nassau. After Descartes left the army, in 1619, his whereabouts for the next few years are unknown. He appears in 1625 in Paris. His notes confirm that he was in close contact with Father Mersenne (1588-1648), who belonged to a Roman Catholic religious order. Because of this relationship, Descartes publicly expressed his views on natural philosophy (science). Through the efforts of Father Mersenne, Descartes’ work came into the hands of some of the best minds living in Paris, for instance, Antoine Arnauld (1612-1694), Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655), and Thomas Hobbes in England (1588-1679).

In 1630, Descartes moved to Amsterdam. There he worked on drafts of the Optics and the Meteors (the Meteorology), which were originally intended to be a part of a major work entitled The World.

When The World had become ready for publication in 1633, upon hearing of the Church’s condemnation of Galileo (1564-1642) in the same year, Descartes decided against its publication. In a letter to Mersenne, dated November 1633, Descartes expresses his fear that were he to publish The World, the same fate that befell Galileo would befall him. Although much of The World has been lost, some of it seems to have survived in the form of essays attached to the Discourse which he published in 1637. And, some of it was published posthumously (after his death). His most influential piece of philosophical writings is The Meditations, published in 1641. Descartes died in 1650. Although he never married, he had a daughter with a woman by the name of Helene. The death of this daughter when she was five, Descartes said, was the saddest event his life.

Princess Christina became Queen of Sweden when she was eighteen. Brought up as a Lutheran and humanist, by age 20 she was famous as a patron of the arts and sciences. She spoke Latin and four modern languages. Her intellectual curiosity was boundless. Not surprisingly, she invited Descartes to come to Sweden and teach her philosophy. She insisted that Descartes teach her his method and logic at 5AM. (In a long letter to her, Pascal dedicated the calculating machine which he had invented). The cold weather of Sweden took its told on Descartes who died of pneumonia in Sweden in 1650.

Descartes is recognized as the father of modern Western philosophy. The main themes of his philosophy have come to define the central concerns of philosophy over the past few centuries. Bernard Williams (in a BBC interview) said that it was Descartes who almost singled handedly brought it about that the center of philosophy became the theory of knowledge. For Descartes, philosophy begins with the question: What can I know rather than the question: What is there? What is the world? We should note that Descartes begins not with the question: What can be known or what can we know but WHAT CAN I KNOW? Descartes launched modern philosophy by making questions about the validation of knowledge the first task of philosophical inquiry. This Cartesian approach to philosophy dominated the field of philosophical inquiry until the first half of the 20^th century.

Descartes’ philosophy begins with the demand that each of us establish for oneself the truth of what he or she believes. To carry out his inquiry, D invents a method of doubt. He would suspend all his beliefs, that is, imagine that he does not know anything for certain, until he can prove their truth. He says that since people have lied to him, he will not take anything based on authority. He realizes that sometimes he has been deceived by his senses. For example, a stick looks bent when seen through water. He would remain suspicious of all knowledge acquired through his senses. Sometimes he is having what seems to be a real experience but it turns out that he is actually dreaming. Could he be dreaming all the time, lost in the inner recesses of his own mind, and completely wrong about the fact that there is a world outside him? He recognizes that there are no certain marks to distinguish being awake from being asleep. Hence, his belief that he is sitting by the fire could be false. Descartes then goes on to consider the possibility that he could be mistaken about all his experience and the existence of whole classes of objects. (You will find Descartes’ reflections on these issues in his Meditations on First Philosophy.) Descartes invites his readers to share his doubts. His method is to push his doubts to its furthest extreme, to the point of absurdity. In this way, he expects to arrive at absolute certainty.

Descartes asks us to consider the possibility that there is some supremely powerful, intelligent and evil demon/genius who is constantly deceiving him. This evil being enjoys placing all sorts of false beliefs in his mind. Perhaps Descartes is mistaken in his belief that he has a body, and that the sky, the earth, colours, shapes, sounds and all external things are merely delusions of dreams the evil genius has conjured up to deceive him.

The first truth that emerges from doubting everything is Descartes’ certainty of his own existence. “Let the demon deceive me as much as he may… I AM, I exist is certain, so long as it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind” (Second Meditation). This is the famous Cogito argument. Cogito ergo sum (I am thinking, therefore I exist). This is not so much an argument as it is a revelation, the realization that I cannot be fooled about the fact of my own existence. If I am fooled by the evil demon, I must nevertheless exist in order to be fooled. If I doubt my own existence, I must exist in order to doubt. Descartes is certain that he exists. However, he can be certain of his existence only as long as he is he is thinking. For this insight that he exists, Descartes tries to build a system of reliable knowledge. The road from subjective certainty to objective science depends on Descartes’ ability to prove the existence of a perfect God who is the source of all truth.

Once Descartes has his axiom in place (I think, therefore I am), he goes on to prove God’s existence.

Descartes must find some object which cannot possibly originate with him, which cannot be a mode of his own consciousness, and which must exist apart from him. What idea can that be? He searches himself for some clear and distinct idea which could not have come from his own ideas of himself. After searching, he finds it. It is the idea of God. Why cannot this idea originate with him? Because the attributes of omniscience, eternity, immutability, omnipotence and perfection which make up the idea of God could not be derived from “my idea of myself.” From this Descartes concludes: “And thus it is absolutely necessary to conclude, from all that I have said before, that God exists.”

Descartes presses his argument for God’s existence a bit further. My perception of God’s existence is presupposed in my perception of myself, for how could I know myself as a limited, imperfect, doubting being unless I had previously had the idea of a being more perfect than myself? Descartes convinces himself that “the idea of a being more perfect than myself must of necessity have proceeded from a being in reality more perfect.”

Here is another attempt at making the Argument for God:

All clear and distinct ideas have the attribute of “truth”. They contain reality. The idea of God which I have is clearer and more distinct than any other. Clearer even than my idea of substance. Therefore, it contains more reality than any other idea; therefore, God exists.. Descartes later (in the Fifth Meditation) adds another proof, his version of the ontological argument. It goes like this: since God is, by definition, the sum of all perfections, and since existence is itself a perfection, it follows that “existence can no more be separated from the essence of God than the fact that its angles equal two right angles can be separated from the essence of a triangle.

Having satisfied himself that God exists, Descartes thinks that he can now derive from God’s existence the reality and existence of the things in the world. And here is the crux of his argument: If God exists and possesses as he must all the perfections which I attribute to him, he cannot be a deceiver; so my belief that there is a world of objects distinct, apart from myself, cannot be a delusion. Descartes is now assured that there is something extended and moveable which underlies all the sensible qualities which he perceives, and which is the cause of all his ideas.

He is certain that there is a world out there. The mathematical properties of the objects which he perceives are true. Other properties may be confused and will have to be distinguished from the true and real.

My certainty of my own existence, and my certainty of God’s existence, are the two first certainties; from these we can also derive certainty that the objects of mathematical thought are real.

What is the role of God in Descartes’ philosophy? God functions as the one who secures or guarantees the reliability of human knowledge, of human cognition. One might ask, why is it we often draw false conclusions in our cognition? Descartes would say it is because we jump to wrong conclusions because we assent to propositions whose truth is not clear. If we use the power of reason given to us by God in a proper way, assenting only to what we can clearly and distinctly perceive, then we can avoid error.

Let me emphasize this point again. Descartes uses the arguments for God’s existence to establish the existence of the external world. If he can be sure of the existence of God, who is no deceiver, then he can be confident that whatever he is able to think of clearly and distinctly must be true. The evil genius is defeated.

Philosophers have raised many objections against these arguments, against the notion of clear and distinct ideas, against the notion that thinking requires a thinker, against the arguments for God’s existence. Descartes never doubted his confidence in the meaning of the words which he used or the rules of inference he used for carrying out his logical deduction. An objection could be raised that he assumed the reliability of reason to prove the reliability of reason. This is known as the Cartesian Circle. Ultimately, Descartes appeals to God for it is God who validates our beliefs in general about the external world. God also plays an important role in validating our belief in argument, in logic, in reason. Only because he knows that God exists and is no deceiver can Descartes have any assurance that what he clearly and distinctly perceives is true. (A possible objection: Again, we are faced with the Cartesian circle for it is by argument that he arrives at belief in God. But does Descartes ultimately depend on argument for establishing God’s existence? Some Descartes’ scholars think that Descartes holds to the view that God is one of those ideas of which we are immediately aware and certain.)

These questions aside, Descartes established the basic rule for philosophical investigation. Philosophical reasoning must lead to certainty. Descartes’ notion of clear and distinct ideas is essential to the task of philosophy. A clear and distinct idea is one that cannot be thought without believing it to be true. Where do we find such clear and distinct ideas? Descartes believes that they are to be found in the simple propositions of mathematics and geometry. A triangle has three sides. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line.

Whatever we may think about his argument for God’s existence, Descartes clearly believed that if he could establish the existence of God, he could go on to establish a foundation for the physical sciences, all of nature, and the matter of nature which is the subject matter of pure mathematics. (Descartes proposed a quantitative approach to physics which was a major advance in science.)

For Descartes the idea of one’s existence is a clear and distinct idea. And so is the idea of God. The question remains: Could an evil genius deceive us into having a clear and distinct idea? In other words, could we be sure of ourselves and still be wrong? Could we be wrong about our tendency to assume that the evidence of our senses demands a world out there?

Is this method of doubt a reliable road to knowledge? What about the notion that we need a set of indubitable (unquestionable) premises, some foundation for knowledge? Perhaps there are no foundations, only a series of interconnections, just a web and no structure at all. Montaigne and other French skeptics at the end of the 16^th century argued that our knowledge is never certain except in trivial or special circumstances. What are the dangers of taking mathematics as a paradigm of knowledge? Does not this limit the scope of what we would want to call knowledge?

Descartes’ importance for Western intellectual history and philosophy in particular has to do with a concept known as subjectivity. This idea is used in so many different ways that it is difficult to give the word a clear meaning. For Descartes, however, it includes several features. First in importance is the emphasis on interiority, that is, the idea that the mind is an inner realm containing thoughts—anything mental—emotions, sensations, desires, and various ideas.

We come to know the world outside by looking inside. The road to objectivity is inescapably through subjectivity. This new emphasis upon subjectivity paved the road to egalitarianism (democratic equality). Any one can legitimately have a say in establishing the truth. Establishing the truth is now up to each one of us. At the same time, what we establish through the proper methods of reason and experience is true, objectively true, not just for ourselves but also for the world.

So modern philosophy is born of this paradox of objectivity out of subjectivity. The subjectivity which modern philosophy celebrated was a distinctly European subjectivity. But the objectivity which it claimed was global. Descartes’ subjectivism is a form of individualism and a defense of individual autonomy and individual authority. After Descartes, the authority of philosophy will be found not in wise men and women or sacred Scriptures but in the individual mind of the philosopher.

Another important question which emerges in Descartes’ philosophy has to do with the meaning of the I in “I think, therefore I am.” What is this I? As far as he can tell, it is only a “thinking thing,” a thinking substance whose attachment to his body is a matter of possible doubt. The question which surfaces here is whether the individual human being is a substance, a complete being, or a combination of substances.

His answer is that a person is a combination of two different substances, mind and body. In traditional philosophy from Aristotle on, a substance was taken to be that which is completely self-contained. Descartes leaves us wondering how could these two substances, mind and body, interact. This is considered by many philosophers to be the most perplexing problem which Cartesian philosophy presents. According to Descartes, one has a clear and distinct idea of his or her mind as a thinking thing and a clear and distinct idea of one’s body as an extended or physical thing. But, he wants to say that one does not simply inhabit one’s body like a captain on a ship. What then is the connection between mind and body? There is no doubt that a thought is different sort of thing from a physical object. But if one assumes that thoughts have something to do with the brain, as D did, then the connection between them, [the notion that the brain somehow causes or is the basis of thoughts,] become increasingly mysterious. This idea that the body and mind are separate substances is known in Western thought as Cartesian dualism. And many books have been written in order to understand or overcome this dualism. What are some of the responses, solutions, to Cartesian mind body dualism, also known as psychophysical dualism? Idealism is one response, the idea that reality is essentially mind or spiritual, that the material is just a mode of the mental, matter a function of mind. Another answer is materialism, the view that reality is matter in motion, and than mind is just a function of matter.

This dualism of mind and body is not the exclusive product of Descartes’ philosophy. It was in the making for several centuries of philosophical thinking. What Descartes did in his separation of mind and body was to make possible the progress of science as well as a new respect for individual freedom. The separation of mind from body provided science with its own realm, the extended realm of matter, which is the realm of bodies, of matter in motion. In this world of extension, science could be carried out without any obstruction from religion or moral concerns arising from the nature of the human mind and human freedom. The Cartesian dualism provided a separate realm for religion, for human freedom and responsibility that would be safe from scientific investigation which interprets the material world. Science would be concerned just with the world of facts and religion with the world of values.

If the world from Aristotle to Aquinas provided a single set of natural laws, whether provided by God or nature, the world with which Descartes left us is altogether different. It is world which is split apart, with two distinct sets of concerns, one for bodies, one for the mind, one for facts, one for values. One immediate consequence of Descartes’ philosophy was the removal of faith from the sphere of knowledge. Faith came to be viewed as that which falls short of knowledge

Descartes’ Rationalism.

Why does Descartes give priority to reason, to abstract reason over the experience of the senses? Why is he a rationalist rather than an empiricist? To answer this, one must look at his argument about what a piece of beeswax really is and how it is known. (See Descartes’ account in the selection in Wolff.) Descartes says, look at its attributes, its size, color, shape; it is hard and cold; when struck it gives out a sound. But put it near the fire and see what happens. Its taste and smell vanish, its color changes, its figure is destroyed, its size increases, it becomes liquid and hot. All the attributes by which we recognized it to be a piece of wax have been changed into its opposite. Yet we still say it is a piece of wax. What then did I know with so much distinctness in the piece of wax? Surely none of the things which I observed by the senses; and none of the attributes either, but only a body which appeared first under one set of attributes and then under another set. After all of these attributes are removed, what then remains? Nothing except something extended and moveable. I cannot imagine what the wax is in itself. I can only perceive it by an intuition of the mind. Bodies themselves then are not perceived by the senses, but by the intellect. When the wax is stripped of all its attributes, and considered in its nakedness, it is the mind that apprehends it, not the senses. This is proof enough for Descartes that there is nothing that we can apprehend more clearly than our own mind.

Conclusion: Descartes labored hard to make God the foundation of his theory of knowledge. But did he in the end undermine the role of faith? He makes his criterion of truth the principle that only what can be clearly and distinctly conceived or thought should count as truth. The structure of things must therefore conform to the laws of the human mind. Conversely, whatever cannot be clearly and distinctly (mathematically) conceived is not true. It seems to be the case that Cartesian thought reinforced the growing tendency to accept the scientific world picture as the only true one. All other kinds of knowing are relegated to a lower rank. What becomes of the claims of aesthetic, moral and religious beliefs in a Cartesian theory of knowledge? After Descartes, Western though begins to suffer from a tragic split between facts and values, between what a person felt as a human being and what she thought as a person of sense, judgment and enlightenment. Instead of being able to think and feel at the same time, like the poet john Donne, either in verse or in prose, one was expected to think prosaically and to feel poetically.

If Descartes is seen as the father of modern philosophy, it is because he defined the issues and developed the arguments on all the major issues which later philosophers would take up. Descartes’ arguments in metaphysics and epistemology (the theory of knowledge) concerning the nature and existence of God, the notion of substance, and the justification of knowledge would define the issues for two of the great philosophers of Seventeenth Century Europe, Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646-1716) and Baruch Spinoza (1633-1677). It is possible to interpret the philosophy of both Leibniz and Spinoza as a response to Descartes’ Aristotelian notion of substance. Descartes, you will recall, argued that the created world contains two kinds of substances, bodies and minds. For Descartes, God is the absolute substance who brings into being two other kinds of substances, minds and matter. The main task of the Seventeenth Century philosophers, Leibniz and Spinoza, would be to show how these are all related—God, mind and matter (the world). All the great philosophers until Hegel have been concerned with the nature of the relationship between Infinite Mind (or God), finite mind, and matter. In much of contemporary philosophy, the real debate is between the relationship between mind and matter. Should the mind be understood using the model of a machine and in purely material terms? (Patricia Churchland, Daniel Dennet, John Searle, are major voices in this debate). As you study the history of philosophy, it would be helpful for you to try and determine how the 17^th Century philosophers view this dialectic of God, Self and World/ or God, mind and matter.

Let me emphasize this point: To understand anything at all about Descartes, Leibniz and Spinoza, you need to know why the philosophical concept of substance is so central to their view of the task of philosophy. When they talk about substance or monads, bear in mind that these philosophers are really trying to understand what is the world in the light of the new science of Galileo and Newton. What is the world really like? How do I know what it is? Should reality be understood dualistically, or monistically? (Is everything a variation or manifestation of one substance or are does reality take different forms, mental and physical?) Should reality be understood as some kind of psychophysical unity? In the case of Leibniz, he would even consider the arguments of those who want to see the world in purely materialistic terms where consciousness, mind, and perception are identical with physical states. So these are the big questions with which the rationalist philosophers of the 17^th century are concerned. And not surprisingly, they are still the big questions today in areas like the philosophy of artificial intelligence. I want to note here that Spinoza and Leibniz were not the only great philosophers in Continental Europe in the 17^th century. There were others who did not care for the technical language of metaphysics but who, nevertheless were concerned with larger issues of the meaning of life. Take the great French writer, Pascal (1623-1662) a contemporary of Spinoza.

Pascal

Pascal (1623-1662) was a contemporary of Spinoza. Pascal did not think that technical and scholastic reason could make sense of the meaning and mystery of human existence. He is well known for these words: “The heart has reasons, which reason cannot know.” Because he had no metaphysics, he is often ignored as a philosopher. A book on Western cultural history of the last 500 years which has become a best seller is from Dawn to Decadence by Jacques Barzun. From Dawn to Decadence won the national book award in the USA After it was published. This book gives more attention to Pascal than to Leibniz and Spinoza. Intellectual and Cultural history has never been made more interesting.

If you can find it, read the section on Pascal who was a child prodigy. While still a teenager published astonishingly brilliant mathematical studies and invented a calculating machine, the forerunner of today’s computers. He wrote some of the most remarkable treatises on the foundations of mathematics. The computer world has honored him with programs named after him. He was an eminent scientist and a philosophically minded religious writer of the highest rank. Pascal’s still widely read Pensees (Thoughts) published after his death shows the depth of his religious thinking; it also shows how decisively he rejected the philosophical rationalism of his age.

What is not so well known is that he wrote an essay on Love. His essay on love examines the role of the mind and feelings, head and heart in the shaping of character. This work is considered a piece of brilliant psychology.

In his Pensees (Thoughts) he makes a distinction between two types. The one, rigid, inflexible, the other supple and born with an impulse to love, especially what is beautiful. When both minds are combined into one, what great pleasure arises from love!

Pascal is often called a mystic. But Jacques Barzun says that the word mystic does not apply to Pascal for a mystic is one who seeks union with God. Mystics usually seek union with God and quite often, they ignore the relation of creator and creature. Barzun says that Pascal, on the contrary, sees God’s majesty as so far removed from earth, and his designs as so incomprehensible that ordinary mortals have no connection with him, except through Christ, who was both man and God. What Pascal sought in Christ was love. Voltaire attacked Pascal’s religion and he called Pascal sick. Barzun says that Pascal’s religion is so rationally tied to his science that it is best to judge it as if he had been in robust health. The truth is, Pascal was kin (close to) the modern existentialists—to Kierkegaard or Gabriel Marcel. Here is a famous sentence from Pascal. (Pascal is thinking of the new understanding of space given by science): “ the eternal silence of this infinite space frightens me.” Pascal was thinking was seeing the cosmos like the existentialists—empty and meaningless. Why this entire void? How absurd man seems to be in this infinite empty space, this void. God’s design could not be fathomed (figured out). God’s design was inscrutable. Christ was the sole link with Meaning in this kind of universe. Christ’s message was forgiveness and love. The divine being was no abstract essence in which to merge for ecstasy of forgetting self. The divine being was the living God. Quoting Barzun again: “God’s miracles were humane in purpose, and the miracle and mystery of His existence mediated for man the mystery of the infinite space and silence of creation.

One theme which Pascal develops in the Pensees is that of the two minds, one geometrical which works with exact definitions and abstractions in science or mathematics. And the other mind is intuitive. It works with ideas and perceptions not capable of exact definitions. “A right angle triangle or gravitation is a perfectly definite idea; poetry or love or good government is not definable. For Pascal this lack of definition is not due to lack of correct information; it comes from the very nature of the subject.” (Barzun, 216). Pascal was the first to attack the geometrical spirit and the method of Descartes. For Pascal, man as a scientist has come to know a great deal, but as a human being knows and feels intuitively love and ambition, poetry and music. The heart and mind reaches deeper than the power of reason alone.

What is the significance of Pascal for modern thought? He warns against the error of what is known as scientism (different from scientific): Scientism is the fallacy of believing that the method of science must be used in all forms of experience and, given enough time, will solve every issue. Pascal appeals to reasons which science can never know. His most famous words are: The heart has its reasons that Reason does not know. (Here heart means not merely the seat of the affections but desire and the impulse to action. Reason is the discriminating servant that implements some of them. Pascal uses reason in two senses: the reasons of the heart---its needs and motives—are not products of reasoning. If it were, there would be no spontaneous action, no sympathy or friendship or love in the world.

Before I leave Pascal, I want to remind you of Pascal’s wager. In Paris of the middle 17^th century, Father Mersenne thought that there were 2,000 free thinkers, some of whom were atheists. Pascal says to them: If you disbelieve in God, you have no eternal life—you yourselves say there is none. But if you believe, you have at least one chance out of two; for if there is no God, you are where you were before; and if there is God, you have won salvation. “ So why not believe and take your chance on winning salvation. This is Pascal’s wager. His critics say the wager is cold-blooded and casts shame on Pascal’s religion. Other critics charge that if there is no God, the believer loses not little but much. His mathematics of probability went with his Augustinian outlook. He was profoundly influenced by Augustine.

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