Pascal seemed, on the surface to make one of the most famous reasoned and calculated defenses of Western Christian philosophy when the French thinker made his 'wager' that it was better to suppose that God existed, rather than did not exist, given the proposition of eternal life if one acquiesced, and the certainty of damnation of one did not. But in Pascal's less quoted but more extensive musings on his "View of the Heart" in relation to, in reaction with, and ultimately in support of the limits of rational human philosophy, Pascal suggested that reason did not alone satisfy all of the functions of human philosophy. In fact, in his Pensees 423 Pascal states: "The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing." The heart, in Pascal's philosophy, stands opposed to the pure rationalism of the head, when really the heart should, and does, guide the head in relation to its sensations of the deity.

             In 423, Pascal further states that "the heart has its reasons, which reason knows nothing," in other words that emotional feeling within the human animal senses the Universal Being, the Being that is God as one of its natural components. Thus the human heart loves this all-pervasive unity as naturally, indeed, as the owner and possessing authority of the heart loves him or herself. "I say that the heart naturally loves the Universal Being, and also itself naturally, according as it gives itself to them," both God and the self.

             Because "we feel it in a thousand things," Pascal suggests that God must have a reality that is substantiated by our sensing of that reality and of something connecting the real nature of human existence. In contrast to belief, thus disbelief is a hardened, willful, and unnatural act of the heart alone, as opposed to the more natural conjunction and perception of the human heart and emotion. Human reason alone, or incorrectly applied is a hardening of the self against God, and against the emotional truth perceived by the human heart.