The Science of Conjecture: Evidence and Probability Before Pascal

by James Franklin

The story resumes, as do so many in the history of ideas, with the twelfth-century Renaissance. The period was one of the discovery of the inner life and the origin of European individualism.2 Antiquity does not have autobiography, in the modern sense, and the meaning of the word “classical” attests to a certain impersonality that everyone can sense in ancient art. The Gospels’ ethical emphasis on the intention of the heart, developed by Augustine’s Confessions, provided the foundation for a new orientation.3 The twelfth century concentrates on the personal in sculpture and stained glass, in the autobiographies of Abelard and others, in the poetry of the troubadours and Chrétien de Troyes, in the piety of confession and devotion to Mary, and in Abelard’s theory that sin is essentially a matter of internal consent to evil.