Pascal's philosophy of science did not result from a detached philosophical reflection on the scientific achievements of others. It was honed, instead, in his intense, personal involvement in the religious and philosophical controversies that convulsed the kingdom of Louis XIV in the middle of the seventeenth century, and in which this notoriously combative defender of Jansenism played a leading role. The scope of Pascal's own scientific work was modest, and was primarily concerned with pneumatics. However, the experimental character of his research was such that it provoked discussion of a number of important issues that were implicit in the new mechanical philosophy, including its relationship to traditional metaphysics. In fact, Pascal's appeal to experimental evidence in support of his scientific theories against critics provided an ideal vantage point from which to address critically the epistemology of science, and to compare the certainty or otherwise of its theoretical claims with dogmatic religious teaching and with the traditional philosophy of the schools. This focus on the relative certainty of competing types of belief - scientific, religious or philosophical - and on alternative strategies for resolving apparent conflicts between them, was not unique in the scientific revolution. Many scientists, from Galileo to Newton, addressed similar questions. In the case of Pascal, however, the intensity of his personal faith and his public commitment to the rigorous piety of Jansenism made it impossible for him not to reflect on the status of scientific results that were confirmed by what appeared to be incontrovertible experimental evidence. It is easy to understand, in retrospect, how the focus of Pascal's philosophy of science was the role of experimental evidence in the confirmation and disconfirmation of scientific theories.

In some real sense, the Bible we read today is not at all the same Bible that Blaise Pascal used to document his apology. The mental universe of the cultivated French person between 1650 and 1700, Philippe Sellier reminds us, is replete with what for us are amazing lacunae. The reader must play ethnologist in order to engage in dialogue with writers or thinkers who date the creation from the year 4004 BC or think they know the exact date of the Flood. Indeed, it is truly impossible to understand fully a Pascal or a Bossuet without knowing their vision of the world and history, a vision in which the Bible not only stands at the centre, but also limits the scope of the inquiry.

Sellier estimates that of the approximately 800 fragments we read as the Pensées, about 80 per cent belong to Pascal's unfinished notes for his Apology for the Christian Religion. Of those fragments, at least 200 relate directly or indirectly to Pascal's project of scriptural exegesis. Why, then, has this considerable body of material suffered such neglect at the hands of readers and scholars alike?

Pascal states that faith is a gift of God, not the result of a process of reasoning (Pensées, L 7, 588/S 41, 487). In which case, we might ask, what is the point of an apology for the Christian religion? Suppose I am persuaded to adopt Christianity by arguments for the existence of God, and then for the unique status of Christianity as a divine revelation: in that case, my belief will be based on the human faculty of reasoning, and faith is not necessarily a gift of God. Or if faith is a gift of God, why should I trouble to study the proofs of Christianity? If God intends me to have faith, He will give it; if I do not have it, is that my fault? God could have given it to me, and has not. In either case, where is the place for argument?

Another problem. Pascal elsewhere says that the would-be but not-yet believer should fulfil the external rituals of religion: taking holy water and so forth. That will bring about belief: ‘Cela vous fera croire’ (L 418/S 680). In other words, the way to belief is through forsaking one’s human faculty of reasoning (refraining from asking what possible good holy water can do me) and adopting a purely mechanical mode of behaviour that puts one on a level with the animals (‘cela vous abêtira’).1 In this case also, where is the gift of God?

Although Pascal's social and political thought may seem at first glance to be of rather marginal interest, it is my aim in this chapter to show that elements of the sociopolitical form a fully coherent doctrine within a system where anthropology and theology meet. Pascal holds that if men are as they are and act as they do, it is because they have been both created by God and abandoned by God as a consequence of original sin. The establishment of a social and political order is necessary to curb the disorder catalysed by original sin, even if such a measure can only attenuate the effects of the Fall without addressing their root cause. I intend here to take such comments further and to suggest that Pascal's reflections on social and political order are to be related to his theory of the different orders of existence, and thus that they have consequences far beyond a limited sociopolitical sphere. If original sin deprived humankind of God, of the true and the good, nonetheless it did not destroy our capacity to attain these. From the moment that human beings judge things in relation to themselves instead of in relation to God, so Pascal argues, they embrace the false and the evil, disguising these as the truth and goodness of which they are capable and which remain in them as traces. Thus Christians are, for Pascal, faced with the need for a dual awareness. They are obliged to confess that men are abandoned to their own limited vision, unable to discern what is true and good. But they are obliged also to apply the insights of Christianity to human discourse as it confuses and blurs true and false, good and evil. In this way they can arrive at an understanding of the ultimate order and truth of this discourse.

The discernible traces of Montaigne's and Descartes' works in Pascal's writings, whether explicit or implicit, result from deliberate choices of reading, determined ultimately by Pascal's eventual vocation as an apologist for the Christian religion. Pascal's interest in Descartes was, in its early stages, associated with Pascal's own purely scientific and mathematical pursuits. However, his engagement with the Discourse on Method, the Meditations and the Principles of Philosophy, as more directly with his discovery of Montaigne, must be situated among other sorts of reading deriving from more purely religious preoccupations. Before embarking on the inheritance of Montaigne and Descartes in Pascal's writing, it is essential to explore briefly some of what we know more generally of Pascal's reading habits at crucial times of his life.

Pascal’s scientific culture was first developed through his father’s contact with the circle of Father Marin Mersenne, who acted as one of the major disseminators of new scientific thinking and who was, in particular, responsible for obtaining critical views on Descartes’ Meditations, including those of Antoine Arnauld, the major polemicist among the Port-Royal Solitaires.

The Lettres provinciales are the single polemical work of the French seventeenth century to have survived into posterity, and it is not difficult to see the reasons for their enduring appeal, by comparison both with the publications that were produced by the Society of Jesus in reply to the later pieces in the series, and with the whole unwieldy corpus of writing that was soon to bear witness to the quietist dispute. There is, of course, an equivalent mass of technical theological material underpinning the Provinciales, but, at least in the first ten letters, it is sufficiently concealed to allow the fictional exchanges the highest possible degree of autonomy and thus accessibility. Only when we reach the later pieces do we become aware of the intertextual and contextual dimensions of the writing; and it could indeed be argued that the letters that follow the shift of perspective effected by the eleventh move progressively towards the kind of more detailed internecine dispute which in fact more typically reflects religious disagreement in the period.

Pascal's contributions to physics might appear limited: his research was confined to the investigation of the vacuum and the statics of fluids, and only a few relatively brief publications resulted. These include the Expériences nouvelles touchant le vide (1647), Récit de la grande expérience de l'équilibre des liqueurs (1648), and Traités de l'équilibre des liqueurs et de la pesanteur de la masse de l'air, which were published posthumously in 1664. However, these works are still admired for their rigour and held up as models of empirical investigation. Pascal's experiments were carefully designed to converge on the causes of phenomena. In his posthumous works especially, equally important to the design of his experiments was the manner in which he presented them to his readers, placing them in an order which, with his accompanying analysis, extended a few simple principles to a wide variety of phenomena and produced an illuminating synthesis of existing knowledge.

Pascal is a name familiar to students and scholars in an astonishingly wide range of disciplines. Mathematicians recognise him through Pascal's Triangle or Pascal's calculating machine (which itself gave its name to a computer language). Physicists and historians of science (as well as those in technological fields) acknowledge his pioneering work on the vacuum. The word jesuitical owes its pejorative sense exclusively to Pascal's blistering satirical attack on the Society of Jesus in his Provincial Letters. Students of philosophy and theology know him through Pascal's famous Wager, which itself forms part of one of the most renowned pieces of religious apologetics, the Pensées. Even early forms of train-spotter (or, rather, coach-spotter) have cause to be grateful to him for helping to set up the first public transport system in Paris. It is a sobering thought that he achieved all this, having suffered from years of ill health, before the age of 39, when he died.

The idea of a philosophical method is more commonly associated with Descartes than it is with Pascal. In his Discourse on the Method for Conducting One's Reason Well and for Seeking Truth in the Sciences, first published in 1637, Descartes asserts that, in order to be successful, the search for philosophical and scientific truths has to obey a fixed set of guidelines. In contrast, Pascal generally uses the term method ironically and pejoratively. In the Provincial Letters the various techniques used by the Jesuits to twist the precepts of conventional morality are often referred to as a method. In the Pensées, the word method is almost entirely absent. There exists one work, however, where Pascal uses the term in a non-pejorative way: a small, unfinished treatise written around 1655 and entitled Mathematical Mind (De l'esprit géométrique). In a bold claim reminiscent of Descartes' Discourse on Method, Pascal presents the treatise as 'the method for mathematical [i.e., methodical and perfect] demonstrations' (OC i i , 155). More generally, he presents mathematical reasoning as the model that one should emulate in every intellectual activity. A study of Pascal's philosophical method must thus begin with an analysis of Mathematical Mind.

The first commentary on the Pensées, before the Port-Royal edition was even published, is to be found in the Logique de Port-Royal (1662), the manual of logic edited by the theologians of Port-Royal, Arnauld and Nicole, who sought to establish a synthesis between Augustine, Descartes and Pascal. This attempt was significant because of the very nature of Pascal's thought and of the philosophy he attributes to his unbelieving interlocutor in the Pensées: that philosophy is inspired by Gassendi, particularly by Gassendi's Objections to Descartes' Meditations (French translation by Clerselier, 1647). Not that Gassendi was himself an unbeliever: despite R. Pintard's efforts to read irony and hypocrisy between the lines, most modern interpreters accept that Gassendi was an orthodox believer, but his philosophy inspired a number of notorious unbelievers, among whom Cyrano de Bergerac is the most prominent. Not that Pascal could have read Cyrano: the chronology of their writing and publication made that impossible. But Pascal did perceive, in the alliance between the philosophy of sociability - honnêteté - theorised by Méré and the sceptical philosophy inherited from Montaigne and modernised by Gassendi, a major threat to Christian doctrine, and he deliberately elaborated his apologetic arguments in order to resist that threat. The very structure of the apologetic argument in the Pensées requires that the unbeliever be led from principles he recognises and adopts to acceptance of the Christina doctrine which he initially refuses. Pascal thus attributes Gassendist principles to his unbeliever and builds his apology on those foundations.

The term 'art of persuasion' is one used by Pascal himself in a section of his De l'esprit géométrique. Although he is careful to stress that it is not within his remit to speak of divine truths (OC II , 171), many of the questions he poses in De l'esprit géométrique about how people are most effectively convinced by particular arguments form a fundamental part of the persuasive design of his Pensées. At every juncture Pascal seems to refuse oversimplification, constantly attempting to view issues from many different angles. Therein lies the great originality of the Pensées. Far from being a traditional apologia of the Christian religion, it not only confronts but also assumes many of the ideas held by those sceptics and non-believers at whom the work is generally thought to be targeted.

Much critical attention has been paid to Pascal’s use of persuasive language. Indeed, the way in which he both has recourse to rhetorical techniques and reacts against traditional rhetoric exemplifies the difficulties of his persuasive task. Arnauld and Nicole write in their Logique of ‘the late M. Pascal who knew as much about true rhetoric as anybody has ever known’, and this is indicative of their belief that much of the rhetoric which was taught at the (primarily Jesuit) schools in France was false. Far from being anti-rhetoric per se, those at Port-Royal were opposed to what they deemed to be the abuse of rhetoric. It is this abuse that Pascal himself contrasts with the notion of true eloquence in his statement in the Pensées that ‘la vraie ´eloquence se moque de l’éloquence [true eloquence has no time for eloquence]’ (L 513/ S 671).

There is no single context for the Scottish Enlightenment but there are several which were important. Let us start with the most basic, Scotland's geography, which made Scots poor but which also endowed them with the means of improvement and posed questions which the enlightened studied and sought to answer.

Of Scotland's 30,000 square miles less than 10 per cent was arable land in the eighteenth century. Somewhat more was comprised of grazing land of varying quality (more or less 13 per cent) and perhaps 3 per cent made up forest which was cuttable; perhaps a bit more was usable in some fashion. The possible uses of this land were determined by altitude, by the kinds of soils, and by the micro-climates, of which Scotland has many. Scotland was and would remain a poor country. Agricultural improvement, to produce both more food and the materials for industries (such as wool), was a concern which was recognised in the seventeenth century and grew in importance throughout the eighteenth century.

Physical geography informed the country’s prospects in other ways. Scotland has long coastlines and Scots were an ocean-going people, but the river systems they possessed were not as useful for inland navigation as were those in England or France because of the short distances to the fall lines.

Philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment did not invent aesthetics, the philosophical study of beauty, the sublime, and related categories, but they did make a highly significant contribution to it. The two most important writers in the field were Francis Hutcheson and David Hume, though others, such as George Turnbull, George Campbell, Alexander Gerard, Allan Ramsay (the painter), Henry Home (Lord Kames), Adam Smith, Thomas Reid, Hugh Blair and Archibald Alison, were significant writers on the subject. Indeed, the sheer number of truly inventive works on aesthetics was a distinctive feature of the Enlightenment in Scotland. In section one I offer some critical reflections on Hutcheson's work, paying particular attention to the role that the doctrine of the association of ideas plays in his thinking. Hume's work on aesthetics owes a great deal to Hutcheson's though he reaches different conclusions. Section two explores Hume's conclusions regarding the existence and identification of the standard of taste. In the writings of the two men moral and aesthetic categories are often combined. A particularly interesting exercise in the combination of these categories is to be found in the writings of George Turnbull, regent at Marischal College, Aberdeen between 1721 and 1727, and section three contains a discussion of his contribution to this field. In the final section I consider the views of George Turnbull and his pupil George Campbell on truth in the arts. Aesthetic theory in the Scottish Enlightenment is a field filled with a rich variety of good things, and in this chapter I shall cover only a small area of this field and shall attend to only a very few of the thinkers who made a significant contribution.

Three features stand out in the legal theory of the Scottish Enlightenment: the engagement of the legal profession generally in such theorising; a strong interest in history and law, leading on to investigations of a proto-anthropological and proto-sociological nature; and the move away from an emphasis on legislation to one on development of the law through the formulation of new rules through the decision of specific cases. In all of these there was a complex interplay between legal theory and legal practice. Some of this was common to legal theorising in general in the period; some, however, was distinctive to the Scottish Enlightenment, arising not only out of the particular circumstances of the Scots lawyers themselves (particularly of the bar, the Faculty of Advocates), but also out of certain developments in ethics in Scotland.

To explore these features it is necessary to examine the development of thinking about law under the impact of the natural law tradition, focusing not so much on the natural law theories in detail, but rather on the institutionalisation among lawyers of an approach to law that valued natural law theorising in legal education and practice. This chapter will thus examine the intellectual culture that had arisen among Scots lawyers by 1700 and their education, showing how, through the eighteenth century, their training came to privilege learning in natural law in some form or another over an older legal humanism.

COMMON FEATURES

Natural jurisprudence in the Scottish Enlightenment was first of all a theory of justice. Understood in this way, there are at least a couple of characteristics which give Scottish natural jurisprudence a specific difference from other major schools of thought and lend it a certain coherence for a century or more. One of them is that justice was not seen as a particular state of affairs or condition of the world in general. Scottish justice is not directly a matter of the distribution of goods or relations between classes of people. Nor is justice a formal quality of law in the abstract, a criterion for whether a rule in some sense really is 'valid law'. To put it more directly, eighteenth-century Scottish natural jurisprudence is neither Platonic, Aristotelian, Thomistic, Kantian nor utilitarian. In several of its expressions, it does have features in common with the empirical and naturalistic sides of Aristotelianism and utilitarianism, but neither suffices to characterise it. The common feature of the various Scottish theories of natural jurisprudence is that justice is to be treated as a characteristic of the individual person. Of course, a society – or a world – consisting of people with this feature is just, but that quality derives from the individuals making up the collective, and in the same way the justice of just law is a matter of the character of the individuals who adhere to such law.

In other words, for the Scottish theorists, justice was primarily a personal virtue. By virtue they meant two things, the propensity to a certain type of behaviour, and the ability to appreciate the moral worth of such behaviour both in oneself and in others.

INTRODUCTION

Scottish Enlightenment discussions of the human mind and its powers developed from areas of investigation that on the face of it could hardly have been more disparate. Among them were angelology and scientific methodology. I shall comment on perceived relations between these various fields and shall then discuss some of the salient features of the studies on the mind and its powers. I shall pay particular attention to the fact that philosophers writing on the human mind saw themselves as natural scientists in exactly the sense in which physicists, botanists and physiologists were natural scientists. For they were all investigators of the natural world, a world which includes not only bodies, human and otherwise, but also human minds, and they all sought to work within the methodological constraints that characterise good natural science.

PNEUMATOLOGY AND NATURAL SCIENCE

Under the heading ‘pneumatology’, theologians had for centuries written on the nature of spirits, divine, angelic and human. It was, however, common for such writings to focus on angels, the good ones and the bad. In the Scottish universities through the seventeenth and into the eighteenth century angels slipped down, and in some cases off, the agenda of pneumatological studies as the focus shifted to humans, and pneumatology was transformed into the systematic study, particularly the philosophical study, of the human mind because that is the kind of mind into which we have the most insight.

James Dunbar commented that humans are sociable long before they are rational. In this chapter we shall explore the implications, both negative and positive, of that remark. The negative implications of Dunbar's remark concern the fact that certain prominent accounts of the role of reason in society must be rejected if Dunbar is correct. In particular, a major theme of writings on society and politics from the middle of the seventeenth century up to and beyond the end of the Enlightenment concerned the question whether, or to what extent, society and civic life were a product of people reasoning about what would be best for them. Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Jean- Jacques Rousseau all wrote on this question and it was impossible for anyone else dealing with the topic to proceed as if these three had not spoken. The Scottish response to the three was in the main strongly hostile, and in the first section of this chapter their reaction will be considered. The positive implications of Dunbar's remark concern the way in which our being social affects us as individuals, and concern also the principles that produce and sustain social coherence. These implications are importantly linked in the writings of the Scots and constitute one of the most salient and characteristic features of their thought. It is to these positive implications that the remainder of the chapter will be devoted.

WAS THERE A SOCIAL CONTRACT?

The claim that humans are social before they are rational means that it is wrong to explain human social living as the product of reason, that is, of a process of calculation.

The historiography of the Scottish Enlightenment has had an unparalleled influence on the way history has been understood in the United Kingdom, North America and throughout the erstwhile British Empire. It is to the Enlightenment that we owe the ideas of historical progress, of state development through time and, ultimately, the whole teleological apparatus which for many years sustained what was known as the school of Whig history: the analysis of the past not on its own terms, but in the light of what it could contribute to an account of progress towards the present. In the last century historiography has diversified from this model, but the teleological vision still exercises a hold on both the popular imagination and some areas of historical scholarship, particularly in the narrative history still dominant in media programmes and school textbooks. When, for example, some of the new British History traces the past foundations of our country 'for the sake of the present' and its contemporary anxieties over Britishness rather than 'making the past our present and attempting to see life with the eyes of another century', then in Herbert Butterfield's words, we are partaking in 'the subordination of the past to the present', and this vision was central to the Enlightenment. When in The Whig Interpretation of History (1931), Butterfield argued of the past that 'their generation was as valid as our generation, their issues as momentous as our issues and their day as full and vital to them as our day is to us' he was striking not only at posterity's condescension, but at issues which lay at the heart of the complex world of the historiography of David Hume (1711-76) and William Robertson (1721-93) among others.