,
among his friends perfectly well understood that Pascal for years had
meditated a work on religion designed to demonstrate the truth of
Christianity. For this he had been thinking arduously. Fortunately he
had even, in a memorable conversation, sketched his project at some
length to his Port Royal friends. With so much, scarcely more, in the
way of clew, to guide their editorial work, these friends prepared and
issued a volume of Pascal's "Thoughts." With the most loyal intentions,
the Port-Royalists unwisely edited too much. They pieced out
incompletenesses, they provided clauses or sentences of connection, they
toned down expressions deemed too bold, they improved Pascal's style!
After having suffered such things from his friends, the posthumous
Pascal, later, fell into the hands of an enemy. The infidel Condorcet
published an edition of the "Thoughts." Whereas the Port-Royalists had
suppressed to placate the Jesuits, Condorcet suppressed to please the
"philosophers." Between those on the one side, and these on the other,
Pascal's "Thoughts" had experienced what might well have killed any
production of the human mind that could die. It was not till near the
middle of the present century that Cousin called the attention of the
world to the fact that we had not yet, but that we still might have, a
true edition of Pascal's "Thoughts." M. Faugere took the hint, and
consulting the original manuscripts, preserved in the national library
at Paris, produced, with infinite editorial labor, almost two hundred
years after the thinker's death, the first satisfactory edition of
Pascal's "Thoughts." Since Faugere, M. Havet has also published an
edition of Pascal's works entire, by him now first adequately annotated
and explained. The arrangement of the "Thoughts" varies in order,
according to the varying judgment of editors.

We use, for our extracts, a current translation, which we modify at our
discretion, by comparison of the original text as given in M. Havet's
elaborate work.

Our first extract is a passage in which the writer supposes a sceptic of
the more shallow, trifling sort, to speak. This sceptic represents his
own state of mind in the following strain as of soliloquy:--

'I do not know who put me into the world, nor what the world is,
nor what I am myself. I am in a frightful ignorance of all things.
I do not know what my body is, what my senses are, what my soul is,
and that very part of me wh