- Pascal did not publish any philosophical works during his relatively brief lifetime. His status in French literature today is based primarily on the posthumous publication of a notebook in which he drafted or recorded ideas for a planned defence of Christianity, the Pensées de M. Pascal sur la religion et sur quelques autres sujets (1670). Nonetheless, his philosophical commitments can be gleaned from his contributions to scientific and theological debates in France in the mid-seventeenth century.
- Three years have now elapsed since I finished the Treatise containing all these matters; and I was beginning to revise it, with the view to put it into the hands of a printer, when I learned that persons to whom I greatly defer, and whose authority over my actions is hardly less influential than is my own Reason over my thoughts, had condemned a certain doctrine in Physics, published a short time previously by another individual,[^1] to which I will not say that I adhered, but only that, previously to their censure, I had observed in it nothing which I could imagine to be prejudicial either to religion or to the state, and nothing therefore which would have prevented me from giving expression to it in writing, if Reason had persuaded me of its truth; and this led me to fear lest among my own doctrines likewise some one might be found in which I had departed from the truth, notwithstanding the great care I have always taken not to accord belief to new opinions of which I had not the most certain demonstrations, and not to give expression to aught that might tend to the hurt of any one.
stanford encyclopedia of philosophy of