natural element. If we offend the principles of reason, our
religion will be absurd and ridiculous.

274

All our reasoning reduces itself to yielding to feeling.

But fancy is like, though contrary to feeling, so that we cannot
distinguish between these contraries. One person says that my feeling is
fancy, another that his fancy is feeling. We should have a rule. Reason
offers itself; but it is pliable in every sense; and thus there is no
rule.

275

Men often take their imagination for their heart; and they believe they
are converted as soon as they think of being converted.

276

M. de Roannez said: "Reasons come to me afterwards, but at first a thing
pleases or shocks me without my knowing the reason, and yet it shocks me
for that reason which I only discover afterwards." But I believe, not
that it shocked him for the reasons which were found afterwards, but
that these reasons were only found because it shocks him.

277

The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know. We feel it in a
thousand things. I say that the heart naturally loves the Universal
Being, and also itself naturally, according as it gives itself to them;
and it hardens itself against one or the other at its will. You have
rejected the one, and kept the other. Is it by reason that you love
yourself?

278

It is the heart which experiences God, and not the reason. This, then,
is faith: God felt by the heart, not by the reason.

279

Faith is a gift of God; do not believe that we said it was a gift of
reasoning. Other religions do not say this of their faith. They only
gave reasoning in order to arrive at it, and yet it does not bring them
to it.

280

The knowledge of God is very far from the love of Him.

281

Heart, instinct, principles.

282

We 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. The sceptics, who have only
this for their object, labour to no purpose. We know that we do not
dream, and however impossible it is for us to prove it by reason, this
inability demonstrates only the weakness of our reason, but not, as they
affirm, the uncertainty of all our knowledge. For the knowledge of first
principles, as space, time, motion, number, is as sure as any of those
which we get from reasoning. And reason must trust these intuitions of
the heart, and must bas