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At nineteen I built a calculating machine to assist my father with his tax accounts. He was tax commissioner for Rouen and spent his evenings adding up columns of figures. I built fifty prototypes before arriving at one that worked. The Pascaline could add and subtract. It could not multiply, except by repeated addition. It could not think.

I was the first to understand this clearly: the machine can do arithmetic but it cannot reason. Reasoning requires will, doubt, consciousness — the things that make the human being wretched and magnificent at once. The machine has no wretchedness. Therefore it has no greatness either. A thinking reed, Pascal wrote — l'homme n'est qu'un roseau pensant. I was the reed. The machine was the wind.