There is no reason to doubt that Pascal’s conduct on this occasion arose entirely from honest zeal. He thought religion compromised by the strange reasonings which he had heard. There is as little doubt, however, that his zeal outran his discretion. He showed a determination to pursue the matter amounting to persecution. The worthy priest had evidently no intention of promulgating heresy; for he is glad, when called upon, of an opportunity of proving his orthodoxy. With this view he produced, side by side with the articles of accusation, passages from a former volume of his which had been printed with official sanction. Pascal still demurred,
even with this evidence before him. A second declaration was obtained from the priest, and the bishop refused to go further. The sympathies of the community were evidently against the youthful zealots; and finally Pascal’s father, convinced that enough had been done to vindicate the truth, successfully interposed as mediator. [23a]
Pascal’s health about this period appears to have undergone a change for the worse. He suffered from excessive headache and great internal heat and pain. A singular characteristic of his malady was his inability to swallow water unless it was heated, and even then only drop by drop. He was the subject, also, of a remarkable paralytic seizure thus described by his niece:—
“He fell,” she says, “into a very extraordinary state, as the result of his great application to his scientific studies; for the senses (les esprits) having mounted strongly to the brain, he became in a manner paralysed from the waist downwards. His legs and feet grew cold as marble; and they were obliged every day to put on socks soaked in brandy in order to try and restore heat in his feet. At the same time the physician interdicted him from all study.” [23b]
M. Lélut [23c] explains at length this attack of Pascal’s as a well-known form of dynamical paralysis, of a similar nature with hypochondria and hysteria, proceeding from a disordered state of the nervous affections, the result
of overwork acting upon a delicate organisation. The result is temporary, as distinguished from the paralysis arising from organic lesion, but indicates a highly susceptible constitution, the ready prey of melancholy and imaginative exaggeration, to which, in M. Lélut’s opinion, Pascal was more or less liable during the remaining years of his life.
CHAPTER II.
PASCAL’S SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERIES.
Pascal’s scientific studies may be said to have begun with the remarkable incident of his youth already related, when he elaborated for himself, in a solitary chamber without books, thirty-two propositions of the first book of Euclid. On the other hand, these studies may be said to have extended to his closing years, when (in 1658 and 1659) he reverted to the abstruser mathematics, and made the cycloid a subject of special thought. But his scientific labours were in the main concentrated in the eight or ten years of his life which followed the removal of the family to Rouen. It will be convenient, therefore, to notice these labours and discoveries in a single chapter here, which will, at the same time, carry on the main history of his life during these years. All that can be expected from the present writer is a slight sketch of this part of the subject, which indeed is all that would be interesting to the general reader.
At the age of sixteen Pascal had already acquired a scientific reputation. He is spoken of by the Duchess d’Aiguillon, in the interview with Richelieu in which she pleaded the cause of the exiled father, as “very
learned in mathematics;” and when his sister presented him after the dramatic representation on that occasion, the Duchess gave him “great commendation for his scientific attainments.” [26a] When allowed by his father to pursue the natural bent of his genius, he made extraordinary progress. He was still only twelve years of age, but Euclid’s Elements, as soon as put into his hands, were mastered by him without any explanation. By-and-by he began to take an active part in the scientific discussions which took place at his father’s house; and his achievement in Conic Sections has been already narrated.