In his article about Michael McCarthy (“Healing spirit”, 29 August), Jonathan Tulloch attributes the saying “The heart has its reasons of which the mind knows nothing” to St Ignatius. Maybe, but Blaise Pascal who lived in seventeenth century France wrote “Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît pas”. This is taught to French or French-speaking schoolchildren (I am Belgian). Pascal was a well-known adversary of the Jesuits. He was a Jansenist and