作者：B.帕斯卡尔
出版社：辽宁人民出版社
格式: AZW3, DOCX, EPUB, MOBI, PDF, TXT
思想录试读：
More classics to be soon published are:
Dracula by Bram Stoker
Dubliners by James Joyce
Gulliver's Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World by Jonathan Swift
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling
The Prince and the Pauper by Mark Twain
The Vision of Hell by Dante Alighieri
The King James Version of the Bible
Essays of Michel de Montaigne Complete by Michel de Montaigne
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education by Dewey
The Secret Adversary by Agatha Christie
Paradise Lost by John Milton
The Bedside Classics of World Literature, Philosophy and Psychology
Designed to make all English classic works available to all readers, The Bedside Classics bring you the world’s greatest literature, philosophy, psychology books that have stood the test of time – at specially low prices. These beautifully designed books will be proud addictions to your bookshelf,. You’ll want all these time-tested classics for your own reading pleasure. The titles of the fourth set of The Bedside Classics are:
Best Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson by R. W. Emerson ￥15.50
Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin by Benjamin Franklin ￥13.50
A Discourse on Method by Rene Descartes ￥9.50
Phaedo by Plato ￥36.00
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Kim by Rudyard Kipling ￥18.00
The Story of Mankind by Hendrik van Loon ￥30.00
The Time Machine by H. G. Wells ￥13.00
The Essays on the Wisdom of Life by Arthur Schopenhauer ￥12.00
Pascal’s Pensées by Blaise Pascal ￥23.00
The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan ￥14.00
Totem and Taboo by Sigmund Freud ￥11.00
The Story of My Life by Helen Keller ￥22.00
Jean-Christophe by Romain Rolland (Volume I) ￥33.00
War and Peace (I + II) by Leo Tolstoy ￥68.00
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Is This Book for You?思想的巨人，哲学的巨著——“最经典英语文库”第四辑之《思想录》导读
唐润新一部断简残篇，一读发人深省，再读洗涤灵魂。
一部深沉之作，汇聚了他记录于羊皮纸上的思想碎片，留与世人。
他，人已去，思想却永远屹立于时空的卷轴之上，一次又一次地撞击着一代代人的心灵。正如谢瓦利埃曾评说：“他之于法兰西，犹如柏拉图之于希腊，但丁之于意大利，塞万提斯之于西班牙，莎士比亚之于英格兰。”他就是帕斯卡尔，这部伟大的作品，就是他的《思想录》。
帕斯卡尔（1623-1662）法国17世纪最具天才的数学家、物理学家、哲学家、思想家，他出生于科学天才和哲学巨匠辈出的理性时代，从未上过大学，从未据有过学术职位或政府公职，一生绝大部分时间健康状况恶劣，但帕斯卡尔仍于生命恩赐于他的短短39个年头里，为世人做出了诸多的历史贡献，在这一伟大的世纪中留下了不可磨灭的影响。几何学上的六边形定理、帕斯卡尔三角形、物理学上的帕斯卡尔定理等都是他为世人留下的财富。他发明了世界上第一台计算机，创作了水银气压计，是一位成果卓著的科学家，还是一位宗教主徒。他的一系列科学著作，历经三个世纪，已成为思想史上与科学史上的丰碑。
帕斯卡尔的思想论述时常被人引述，却鲜有人理解。帕斯卡尔的名字享誉世界，而他却神秘而陌生。多数人只片面地强调他著名的打赌论证，以至遮蔽了他最强有力、最能引起深意的思想。然而，时间是最公正的评判者，伟大的思想从来不会永告终结。帕斯卡尔的神学及哲学思想，以及集中体现他的思想理论的《思想录》一书，经过整整三个世纪的淘洗，仍于时空卷轴之上赫然屹立，给世世代代以启迪。《思想录》是帕斯卡尔生前尚未完成的手稿，部分寥寥数语，竟不成行；部分已然成章，明净流畅。这部法国最优秀的历史散文，以其深邃的思想、优美的语言成为西方思想史上最为闪耀的光辉典籍。有人于此获得灵感，有人为此迥然困惑，有人从此茅塞顿开。这一于帕斯卡尔逝世后才发表的厚重的历史著作，奠定了他在哲学史上的崇高地位。
在《思想录》一书中，帕斯卡尔在继承和发扬以理性来批判一切的理性主义的同时，又指出理性本身的内在矛盾及其局限性。从矛盾的方面，用辩证的方法讨论人的本性，揭示了人因思想而伟大这一主题。他提出人于无限大与无限小这两个极端之中悖立而存，并以此入手，对人的本性、社会、历史、宗教、哲学等多方面进行了深入的探讨。在他看来，人是灵魂与肉体的不可思议的结合体，是一根脆弱的、可悲的却以思想而伟大的芦苇，是一个为了逃避自我的虚无本性而在消遣中慢慢走向死亡的无聊的存在体。人承受着本能与理智的冲突，是真理的贮藏所，又是不确定与错误的渊源。帕斯卡尔于矛盾之中寻求着，也因其矛盾的气质一次次陷入痛苦。他虔诚地将自己交与上帝的手中，于宗教之中寻求解脱，因为在他看来，人只有拥有了虔敬的信仰，才能真正地认识自己。他说：“我们祈求上帝的仁慈，并非为了要他可以让我们在我们的邪恶之中得到平静，而是为了他可以把我们从其中解救出来。”“人必须认识自己，如果这不能有助于发现真理，至少这将有助于规范自己的生活，没有别的比这更为重要了。”
从本质上来说，帕斯卡尔的哲学是为其宗教思想服务的，然而从更高的视角来看，他的思想并不局限于宗教一隅。他的诸多论述，对社会、哲学、历史等多方面的发展都有着深远的影响。
正如雨果曾评说：“如果整个法国文学让我选择一部书留下，我还是会毫不犹豫地选择留下《思想录》，它是一个崇高的纯粹的法国天才的标本。”《思想录》一书文笔简练、寓意深刻，就如哲学史上一曲永不停息的古典芭蕾，于所到之处镌刻下不可磨灭的痕迹，荡涤着一代代人的灵魂。
Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal (19 June 1623-19 August 1662) was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and Christian philosopher. In 1642, while still a teenager, he started some pioneering work on calculating machines. After three years of effort and fifty prototypes, he built 20 finished machines (called Pascal’s calculators and later Pascalines) over the following ten years, establishing him as one of the first two inventors of the mechanical calculator.
In 1646, he and his sister Jacqueline identified with the religious movement within Catholicism known by its detractors as Jansenism. His father died in 1651. Following a religious experience in late 1654, he began writing influential works on philosophy and theology. His two most famous works date from this period: the Lettres provinciales and the Pensées, the former set in the conflict between Jansenists and Jesuits. In that year, he also wrote an important treatise on the arithmetical triangle. Between 1658 and 1659 he wrote on the cycloid and its use in calculating the volume of solids.
General Preface
Millions of Chinese are learning English to acquire knowledge and skills for communication in a world where English has become the primary language for international discourse. Yet not many learners have come to realize that the command of the English language also enables them to have an easy access to the world literary classics such as Shakespeare’s plays, Shelley’s poems, mark Twain’s novels and Nietzsche’s works which are an important part of liberal-arts education. The most important goals of universities are not vocational, that is, not merely the giving of knowledge and the training of skills.
In a broad sense, education aims at broadening young people’s mental horizon, cultivating virtues and shaping their character. Lincoln, Mao Zedong and many other great leaders and personages of distinction declared how they drew immense inspiration and strength from literary works. As a matter of fact, many of them had aspired to become writers in their young age. Alexander the Great (356-323 B.C.) is said to take along with him two things, waking or sleeping: a book and a dagger, and the book is Iliad, a literary classic, by Homer. He would put these two much treasured things under his pillow when he went to bed.
Today, we face an unprecedented complex and changing world. To cope with this rapid changing world requires not only communication skills, but also adequate knowledge of cultures other than our own home culture. Among the most important developments in present-day global culture is the ever increasing cultural exchanges and understanding between different nations and peoples. And one of the best ways to know foreign cultures is to read their literary works, particularly their literary classics, the soul of a country’s culture. They also give you the best language and the feeling of sublimity.
Liaoning People’s Publishing House is to be congratulated for its foresight and courage in making a new series of world literary classics available to the reading public. It is hoped that people with an adequate command of the English language will read them, like them and keep them as their lifetime companions.
I am convinced that the series will make an important contribution to the literary education of the young people in china. At a time when the whole country is emphasizing “spiritual civilization”, it is certainly a very timely venture to put out the series of literary classics for literary and cultural education.Zhang ZhongzaiProfessorBeijing Foreign Studies UniversityJuly, 2013 Beijing
总序
经典名著的语言无疑是最凝练、最优美、最有审美价值的。雪莱的那句“如冬已来临，春天还会远吗？”让多少陷于绝望的人重新燃起希望之火，鼓起勇气，迎接严冬过后的春天。徐志摩一句“悄悄的我走了，正如我悄悄的来；我挥一挥衣袖，不带走一片云彩”又让多少人陶醉。尼采的那句“上帝死了”，又给多少人以振聋发聩的启迪作用。
读经典名著，尤其阅读原汁原味作品，可以怡情养性，增长知识，加添才干，丰富情感，开阔视野。所谓“经典”，其实就是作者所属的那个民族的文化积淀，是那个民族的灵魂缩影。英国戏剧泰斗莎士比亚的《哈姆雷特》和《麦克白》等、“意大利语言之父”的但丁的《神曲》之《地狱篇》《炼狱篇》及《天堂篇》、爱尔兰世界一流作家詹姆斯·乔伊斯的《尤利西斯》及《一个艺术家的肖像》等、美国风趣而笔法超一流的著名小说家马克·吐温的《哈克历险记》以及《汤姆索亚历险记》等，德国著名哲学家尼采的《查拉图斯特拉如是说》及《快乐的科学》等等，都为塑造自己民族的文化积淀，做出了永恒的贡献，也同时向世界展示了他们所属的民族的优美剪影。
很多著名领袖如林肯、毛泽东等伟大人物，也都曾从经典名著中汲取力量，甚至获得治国理念。耶鲁大学教授查尔斯·希尔曾在题为《经典与治国理念》的文章，阐述了读书与治国之间的绝妙关系。他这样写道：“在几乎所有经典名著中，都可以找到让人叹为观止、深藏其中的治国艺术原则。”
经典名著，不仅仅有治国理念，更具提升读者审美情趣的功能。世界上不同时代、不同地域的优秀经典作品，都存在一个共同属性：歌颂赞美人间的真善美，揭露抨击世间的假恶丑。
读欧美自但丁以来的经典名著，你会看到，西方无论是在漫长的黑暗时期，抑或进入现代进程时期，总有经典作品问世，对世间的负面，进行冷峻的批判。与此同时，也有更多的大家作品问世，热情讴歌人间的真诚与善良，使读者不由自主地沉浸于经典作品的审美情感之中。
英语经典名著，显然是除了汉语经典名著以外，人类整个进程中至关重要的文化遗产的一部分。从历史上看，英语是全世界经典阅读作品中，使用得最广泛的国际性语言。这一事实，没有产生根本性变化。本世纪相当长一段时间，这一事实也似乎不会发生任何变化。而要更深入地了解并切身感受英语经典名著的风采，阅读原汁原味的英语经典作品的过程，显然是必不可少的。
辽宁人民出版社及时并隆重推出“最经典英语文库”系列丛书，是具有远见与卓识的出版行为。我相信，这套既可供阅读，同时也具收藏价值的英语原版经典作品系列丛书，在帮助人们了解什么才是经典作品的同时，也一定会成为广大英语爱好者、大中学生以及学生家长们挚爱的“最经典英语文库”。北京外国语大学英语学院北外公共外交研究中心欧美文学研究中心主任全国英国文学学会名誉会长张中载 教授2013年7月于北京
INTRODUCTION
It might seem that about Blaise Pascal, and about the two works on which his fame is founded, everything that there is to say had been said. The details of his life are as fully known as we can expect to know them; his mathematical and physical discoveries have been treated many times; his religious sentiment and his theological views have been discussed again and again; and his prose style has been analysed by French critics down to the finest particular. But Pascal is one of those writers who will be and who must be studied afresh by men in every generation. It is not he who changes, but we who change. It is not our knowledge of him that increases, but our world that alters and our attitudes towards it. The history of human opinions of Pascal and of men of his stature is a part of the history of humanity. That indicates his permanent importance.
The facts of Pascal’s life, so far as they are necessary for this brief introduction to the Pensées, are as follows. He was born at Clermont, in Auvergne, in 1623. His family were people of substance of the upper middle class. His father was a government official, who was able to leave, when he died, a sufficient patrimony to his one son and his two daughters. In 1631 the father moved to Paris, and a few years later took up another government post at Rouen. Wherever he lived, the elder Pascal seems to have mingled with some of the best society, and with men of eminence in science and the arts. Blaise was educated entirely by his father at home. He was exceedingly precocious, indeed excessively precocious, for his application to studies in childhood and adolescence impaired his health, and is held responsible for his death at thirty-nine. Prodigious, though not incredible stories are preserved, especially of his precocity in mathematics. His mind was active rather than accumulative; he showed from his earliest years that disposition to find things out for himself, which has characterised the infancy of Clerk-Maxwell and other scientists. Of his later discoveries in physics there is no need for mention here; it must only be remembered that he counts as one of the greatest physicists and mathematicians of all time; and that his discoveries were made during the years when most scientists are still apprentices.
The elder Pascal, Étienne, was a sincere Christian. About 1646 he fell in with some representatives of the religious revival within the Church which has become known as Jansenism—after Jansenius, Bishop of Ypres, whose theological work is taken as the origin of the movement. This period is usually spoken of as the moment of Pascal’s “first conversion.” The word “conversion,” however, is too forcible to be applied at this point to Blaise Pascal himself. The family had always been devout, and the younger Pascal, though absorbed in his scientific work, never seems to have been afflicted with infidelity. His attention was then directed, certainly, to religious and theological matters; but the term “conversion” can only be applied to his sisters—the elder, already Madame Périer, and particularly the younger, Jacqueline, who at that time conceived a vocation for the religious life. Pascal himself was by no means disposed to renounce the world. After the death of the father in 1650 Jacqueline, a young woman of remarkable strength and beauty of character, wished to take her vows as a sister of Port-Royal, and for some time her wish remained unfulfilled owing to the opposition of her brother. His objection was on the purely worldly ground that she wished to make over her patrimony to the Order; whereas while she lived with him, their combined resources made it possible for him to live more nearly on a scale of expense congenial to his tastes. He liked, in fact, not only to mix with the best society, but to keep a coach and horses—six horses is the number at one time attributed to his carriage. Though he had no legal power to prevent his sister from disposing of her property as she elected, the amiable Jacqueline shrank from doing so without her brother’s willing approval. The Mother Superior, Mère Angélique—herself an eminent personage in the history of this religious movement—finally persuaded the young novice to enter the order without the satisfaction of bringing her patrimony with her; but Jacqueline remained so distressed by this situation that her brother finally relented.
So far as is known, the worldly life enjoyed by Pascal during this period can hardly be qualified as “dissipation,” and certainly not as “debauchery.”Even gambling may have appealed to him chiefly as affording a study of mathematical probabilities. He appears to have led such a life as any cultivated intellectual man of good position and independent means might lead and consider himself a model of probity and virtue. Not even a love-affair is laid at his door, though he is said to have contemplated marriage. But Jansenism, as represented by the religious society of Port-Royal, was morally a Puritan movement within the Church, and its standards of conduct were at least as severe as those of any Puritanism in England or America. The period of fashionable society, in Pascal’s life, is however, of great importance in his development. It enlarged his knowledge of men and refined his tastes; he became a man of the world and never lost what he had learnt; and when he turned his thoughts wholly towards religion, his worldly knowledge was a part of his composition which is essential to the value of his work.
Pascal’s interest in society did not distract him from scientific research; nor did this period occupy much space in what is a very short and crowded life. Partly his natural dissatisfaction with such a life, once he had learned all it had to teach him, partly the influence of his saintly sister Jacqueline, partly increasing suffering as his health declined, directed him more and more out of the world and to thoughts of eternity. And in 1654 occurs what is called his “second conversion,” but which might be called his conversion simply.
He made a note of his mystical experience, which he kept always about him, and which was found, after his death, sewn into the coat which he was wearing. The experience occurred on 23 November, 1654, and there is no reason to doubt its genuineness unless we choose to deny all mystical experience. Now, Pascal was not a mystic, and his works are not to be classified amongst mystical writings; but what can only be called mystical experience happens to many men who do not become mystics. The work which he undertook soon after, the Lettres écrites à un provincial, is a masterpiece of religious controversy at the opposite pole from mysticism. We know quite well that he was at the time when he received his illumination from God in extremely poor health; but it is a commonplace that some forms of illness are extremely favourable, not only to religious illumination, but to artistic and literary composition. A piece of writing meditated, apparently without progress, for months or years, may suddenly take shape and word; and in this state long passages may be produced which require little or no retouch. I have no good word to say for the cultivation of automatic writing as the model of literary composition; I doubt whether these moments can be cultivated by the writer; but he to whom this happens assuredly has the sensation of being a vehicle rather than a maker. No masterpiece can be produced whole by such means; but neither does even the higher form of religious inspiration suffice for the religious life; even the most exalted mystic must return to the world, and use his reason to employ the results of his experience in daily life. You may call it communion with the Divine, or you may call it a temporary crystallisation of the mind. Until science can teach us to reproduce such phenomena at will, science cannot claim to have explained them; and they can be judged only by their fruits.
From that time until his death, Pascal was closely associated with the society of Port-Royal which his sister Jacqueline, who predeceased him, had joined as a religieuse; the society was then fighting for its life against the Jesuits. Five propositions, judged by a committee of cardinals and theologians at Rome to be heretical, were found to be put forward in the work of Jansenius; and the society of Port-Royal, the representative of Jansenism among devotional communities, suffered a blow from which it never revived. It is not the place here to review the bitter controversy and conflict; the best account, from the point of view of a critic of genius who took no side, who was neither Jansenist nor Jesuit, Christian nor infidel, is that in the great book of Sainte-Beuve, Port-Royal. And in this book the parts devoted to Pascal himself are among the most brilliant pages of criticism that Sainte-Beuve ever wrote. It is sufficient to notice that the next occupation of Pascal, after his conversion, was to write these eighteen “Letters,” which as prose are of capital importance in the foundation of French classical style, and which as polemic are surpassed by none, not by Demosthenes, or Cicero, or Swift. They have the limitation of all polemic and forensic: they persuade, they seduce, they are unfair. But it is also unfair to assert that, in these Letters to a Provincial, Pascal was attacking the Society of Jesus in itself. He was attacking rather a particular school of casuistry which relaxed the requirements of the Confessional; a school which certainly flourished amongst the Society of Jesus at that time, and of which the Spaniards Escobar and Molina are the most eminent authorities. He undoubtedly abused the art of quotation, as a polemical writer can hardly help but do; but there were abuses for him to abuse; and he did the job thoroughly. His Letters must not be called theology. Academic theology was not a department in which Pascal was versed; when necessary, the fathers of Port-Royal came to his aid. The Letters are the work of one of the finest mathematical minds of any time, and of a man of the world who addressed, not theologians, but the world in general—all of the cultivated and many of the less cultivated of the French laity; and with this public they made an astonishing success.
During this time Pascal never wholly abandoned his scientific interests. Though in his religious writings he composed slowly and painfully, and revised often, in matters of mathematics his mind seemed to move with consummate natural ease and grace. Discoveries and inventions sprang from his brain without effort; among the minor devices of this later period, the first omnibus service in Paris is said to owe its origin to his inventiveness. But rapidly failing health, and absorption in the great work he had in mind, left him little time and energy during the last two years of his life.
The plan of what we call the Pensées formed itself about 1660. The completed book was to have been a carefully constructed defence of Christianity, a true Apology and a kind of Grammar of Assent, setting forth the reasons which will convince the intellect. As I have indicated before, Pascal was not a theologian, and on dogmatic theology had recourse to his spiritual advisers. Nor was he indeed a systematic philosopher. He was a man with an immense genius for science, and at the same time a natural psychologist and moralist. As he was a great literary artist, his book would have been also his own spiritual autobiography; his style, free from all diminishing idiosyncrasies, was yet very personal. Above all, he was a man of strong passions; and his intellectual passion for truth was reinforced by his passionate dissatisfaction with human life unless a spiritual explanation could be found.
We must regard the Pensées as merely the first notes for a work which he left far from completion; we have, in Sainte-Beuve’s words, a tower of which the stones have been laid on each other, but not cemented, and the structure unfinished. In early years his memory had been amazingly retentive of anything that he wished to remember; and
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