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Le cœur a ses raisons, que la raison ne connaît point. On le sent en mille choses. C'est le cœur qui sent Dieu, et non la raison. Voilà ce que c'est que la foi parfaite, Dieu sensible au cœur.
The Project Gutenberg has translated the original French passage as (Pascal, 1958, p. 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?”
The first half of the sentence, thus, maybe interpreted in another way. The heart has reasons which “science” knows nothing about. The Project Gutenberg translation thus has dichotomous tones which is not heard in the more commonly used translation that the author has used here.
Interestingly, the Google Translate (http://translate.google.com) version reads:
The heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing. You feel a thousand things. It is the heart that feels God and not the reason. That's what faith is perfect, God felt by the heart.
This is closer to the commonly used translation, and also mirrors the one used by the author, although the spiritual overtones are preserved.
The author uses the more colloquially accepted (and also less controversial) version of the quotation, which, by dint of wide usage, has become accepted in most cases. Although the quote does have a linguistic or semantic quirk, there is no doubt that it does bring the article to a logical and philosophical ending, so one cannot contest its appropriateness.
At the end of the day, narratives like these just point out the lacunae in the medical education system which causes medical professionals to have empathetic epiphanies only after they have been on the bed instead of at the bed.