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We may have intuitional knowledge, and this intuitional knowledge is as susceptible to reason as if we had obtained it by observation. The knowledge that comes through intuition tells us of matter vibrating in another great octave just beyond our own, which Science has chosen to name the etheric octave, or plane.
What would be the inevitable conclusion of the thinker if he were to consider only the outer, the manifest, the visible results of a given achievement? He would conclude that civilization is insane. If we did not know with an intuitional grasp of truth that all this which we call "marvels of achievement" is symbolical of what Man is in his interior nature, it would be the veriest folly.
For it has so happened to races on other planets that complete degeneration and final extinction has come about by the entire dependence of the individual and afterwards of the entire race, on machinery to do the work required of the individual by the Creator, such dependence finally terminating in almost complete atrophy of the worker's intuitional faculties.
Modern progress has consisted in no slight degree in the development of logical powers, and particularly in the power of doubting and examining intuitions. To say that the East is conspicuously intuitional and the West is conspicuously logical is fairly true, but this misses the real difference. The West is intuitional plus logical.
Ordinary men and those who go on more intellectual and less intuitional lines will say that these ideas are really contrary to human nature and to nature generally. Yet I think that those people who say this in the name of Science are extremely unscientific, because a very superficial glance at nature reveals that the very same thing is taking place throughout nature.
The point is this: If I have seemed at any time to make light of intellectual development, subserving it to intuitional expression, it is only because nineteen-twentieths of the effort of current educational systems is toward mental training to the neglect of those individual potencies which are the first value of each life, and the expression of which is the first purpose of life itself.
I doubt if there ever was a writer of such wide and lasting influence as Emerson, in whom the logical sense was so feeble and shadowy. He had in this respect a feminine instead of a masculine mind, an intuitional instead of a reasoning one. It made up in audacious, often extravagant, affirmations what it lacked in syllogistic strength.
In one respect, however, they have an advantage over direct proofs, from the fact that the mode of arguing by contradiction, which they employ, renders our understanding of the question more clear, and approximates the proof to the certainty of an intuitional demonstration. The true reason why indirect proofs are employed in different sciences is this.
As to the few who reduce the moral intuitions to a minimum, and, like Kant and Sidgwick, end with one or two ultimate intuitional moral principles, we may say that they, like other men, are compelled, in the actual conduct of life, to turn to intuitions of lower orders. All sorts of moral intuitions are actually found helpful by all sorts of men.
But what little he had learned from other sources, combined with his own intuitional and experimental knowledge of human capabilities for penetrating the veil, had already furnished him with conclusions which nothing in his devoted study of Catholic mystical writers forced him to lay aside: "Belief in the special guidance of God has been the faith of all deeply religious men.
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