12 MYSTICISM AND LOGIC 



physical creed, I shall maintain, is a mistaken outcome 

 of the emotion, although this emotion, as colouring and 

 informing all other thoughts and feelings, is the inspirer 

 of whatever is best in Man. Even the cautious and 

 patient investigation of truth by science, which seems 

 the very antithesis of the mystic s swift certainty, may 

 be fostered and nourished by that very spirit of reverence 

 in which mysticism lives and moves. 



I. REASON AND INTUITION 1 



Of the reality or unreality of the mystic s world I know 

 nothing. I have no wish to deny it, nor even to declare 

 that the insight which reveals it is not a genuine insight. 

 What I do wish to maintain and it is here that the 

 scientific attitude becomes imperative is that insight, 

 untested and unsupported, is an insufficient guarantee of 

 truth, in spite of the fact that much of the most important 

 truth is first suggested by its means. It is common to 

 speak of an opposition between instinct and reason ; in 

 the eighteenth century, the opposition was drawn in 

 favour of reason, but under the influence of Rousseau and 

 the romantic movement instinct was given the preference, 

 first by those who rebelled against artificial forms of 

 government and thought, and then, as the purely 

 rationalistic defence of traditional theology became 

 increasingly difficult, by all who felt in science a menace 

 to creeds which they associated with a spiritual outlook 

 on life and the world. Bergson, under the name of 

 &quot;intuition,&quot; has raised instinct to the position of sole 



1 This section, and also one or two pages in later sections, have been 

 printed in a course of Lowell lectures On our knowledge of the external 

 world, published by the Open Court Publishing Company. But I have 

 left them here, as this is the context for which they were originally 

 written. 



