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