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Pascal's Idea of Nature

N HIS STUDY of Blaise Pascal's contemporary Marin Mersenne, the Abbe I Lenoble distinguishes between the idea of nature as an active principle, which Aristotelian physics has as its object, and nature viewed as an ensemble de phe'nomenes, with which mechanistic physics is "correlative."' Pascal, unlike Mersenne, is not content simply to relegate the former conception to the realm of metaphysics and reduce the scope of physical science to investigating and describing the empirical connections between the phenomena which go to make up nature in the second sense.2 On the contrary, in Pascal's case, which does not seem as clear-cut, the term nature, construed as an active principle, is found in a wide variety of contexts throughout his writings. This is not to say that Pascal believes it is nature as an active principle that physical science is concerned with. But it does suggest that his curiously ambivalent attitude to the mechanistic worldview may result in part from a conviction that it fails to take account of this aspect of nature.