CHAPTER II. PASCAL’S SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERIES.

to M. Carcavi, on the 17th August of the same year, 1649—that he was greatly interested in hearing of the success of the experiments, having two years before besought Pascal to make them, and assured him of success—because the supposed explanation was one, he adds, “entirely consistent with the principles of my philosophy, apart from which he [Pascal], would not have thought of it, his own opinion being quite contrary.”¹⁶ This may or may not be true. Pascal certainly held as long as he could to the old maxim of “Nature’s abhorrence of a vacuum.” “I do not think it allowable,” he says in his letter to M. Périer, “to depart lightly from maxims handed down to us by page 45antiquity, unless compelled by invincible proofs.” But the notions of Descartes on the subject of a vacuum were at least as confused as those originally held by Pascal.¹⁷ It is absurd, therefore, to suppose that the latter could have been indebted to the principles of the Cartesian philosophy—not to say that this is a very different suggestion from that of the former letter, that Descartes himself had advised the experiment to be made. Evidently the older philosopher wrote under vague and somewhat inflated ideas of the value of his labours and his conversation with Pascal; while the latter, again, absorbed in his own thoughts on the subject, and unconscious that he had received any special impulse from Descartes or his philosophy, naturally made no mention of