Compiled after his death in 1662, Pascal's "pensées" (thoughts) are his ideas for a book in defense of faith in a rational world. These fragments give evidence of a profoundly original thinker who had resolved the conflict between his scientific mind and heart-felt faith.
The book begins with an analysis of the difference between mathematical and intuitive thinking and goes on to consider the value of skepticism, contradictions, feeling, memory and imagination. Much of the value of Pensées results from the clarity with which Pascal was able to present his intuitive thoughts.
Pascal spent much of his life composing this magnum opus, which offers some of the most powerful aphorisms about human experience and behavior ever written.
After the death of French scientist/polemicist Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), his friends discovered among his papers a variety of jottings on religion. These they arranged and published as PENSEƒS ("Thoughts"), which has come down to us as the liveliest, most eloquent apology of Christianity ever written. You wouldn't know it by the indifferent reading of William Sutherland. He reads with comprehension of individual lines and phrases, but with no sense of how they relate to one another. Y.R. (c) AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine
