Blaise Pascal Quotes on Mind

Pascal's Pensées draw a sustained contrast between the order of the heart and the order of reason that has shaped the post-Cartesian French philosophical tradition. The heart has its reasons that reason does not know, the famous fragment runs: knowledge of first principles, of God, and of the love that orders a human life proceeds through the heart — a faculty distinct from but not opposed to discursive reason — and the merely geometric mind that confines itself to the order of reason loses access to the truths that the geometric method by its nature cannot reach. The analysis frames the philosophical anthropology of the human being as a thinking reed suspended between the two infinities, irreducibly subject to both the demands of reason and the more primordial movements of the heart.