.

             Furthermore, the pervasiveness of God and the pervasive sense one has of God is analogous to self-love, a sense of self, and the drive for self-preservation in a positive sense. Thus, Pascal's French Catholic philosophy, rather than world-denying, is world affirming, as it uses the world and the sense of the self or soul, not to criticize humanity's self fixation, but to praise one's intuitive sense of love and respect for one's body and soul, as created by the Universal Being. Moreover, Pascal grounds his argument in a sensation of integrity of the self that he believes God inserts in the emotional life of the human creation, and the human heart is only robbed of, through incorrect and overly zealous use of reason alone. .

             Of one who only is filled with self-love and focused on the purely rational, Pascal states, "you have rejected the one [God and the love of God] and kept the other [a sense of self]. Is it by reason that you love yourself?" (423) Although this could be contended, Pascal believes that no human being rationally decide to preserve, focus on, and love the self-it happens naturally and through emotion. Pascal does not admit to the possibility of natural and intuitive self-hatred in human beings. Also, Pascal goes farther, in 424 when he states because "it is the heart which perceives God and not reason," that is, faith is God perceived by the heart, not reason." In other words, as faith springs from love and emotion, a true believer must seek to hold onto that initial emotion of the heart, and use that faith and love as springboards for their source of faith and belief, not seek to find belief in reason after the fact. Emotion is the first cause, rationality proceeds after the fact.

             The most obvious people Pascal is waging his argument against are those philosophers who advance an atheistic or skeptical point of view. Skeptics, Pascal suggests in his Proposition 110, claim to argue from first principles by demanding proof of God's existence, while humans "know truth, not only by the reason, but also by the heart, and it is in this last way that we know first principles; and reason, which has no part in it, tries in vain to impugn them.