because “the limits of such a power might,” he says, “be too easily overstepped, and would have left room for belief that greater liberties had been taken than was actually the case.” “The manuscripts,” he adds, “have been read, or rather studied, page by page, line by line, syllable by syllable, to the end; and, with the exception of illegible words (which, however, are carefully indicated), they have passed completely into the present edition.”
So far, this principle has been adhered to by subsequent editors. There has been no further tampering with Pascal’s words, but more or less latitude has been taken in publishing all the manuscript details, and especially in the arrangement of the several fragments. Faugère fancied that he could trace in Pascal’s own notes the indication of an interior arrangement, into which the several parts of his proposed work in defence of religion were intended to fall; and he has grouped the fragments in his second volume according to these supposed indications. M. Havet does not think that it is possible any longer to discover the true order of the fragments. He does not believe that any such order existed in the author’s own mind. He had a general design, and certain great divisions; a preface was sketched page 163here, and a chapter there; but in throwing his thoughts upon paper as they presented themselves to him, he did not stop to assort them, or to bring them into any fitting connection. What Pascal himself did not do, M. Havet does not think it possible any editor can do. Accordingly, he recurs to the old, if somewhat arbitrary, arrangement of Bossut, as the most familiar and useful. M. Rochet follows an elaborate arrangement, professedly founded on the original plan of Pascal, as sketched by himself in the conversation reported by his nephew in the preface to the primary edition of the fragments. He considers that all the Thoughts find their natural place in this plan and in no other. But M. Rochet’s classifications are, partly at least, inspired by his own ecclesiastical tendencies; and he is far from just to the labours of M. Faugère, and the real light and order which these labours introduced into the development of Pascal’s ideas.