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800 Pages in One Simple Essay

Immanuel Kant, the Becker portrait
Immanuel Kant, shortly before isolating himself for ten years to excogitate the Critique of Pure Reason.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is one of the most important—and difficult—books ever written. Its central idea is surprisingly simple: the mind does not merely observe the world, but helps to shape the world as we experience it.

In 1781, after a decade of introspection, Immanuel Kant published a book so difficult that even leading philosophers struggled to finish it. Kant’s friend and rival Moses Mendelssohn described the Critique of Pure Reason as a ‘nerve-juice consuming book’. Yet, buried within its more than 800 pages is one of the most influential ideas in the history of thought—an idea that Kant himself compared to the revolution begun by Copernicus in astronomy.

Previously, everyone believed that the Sun revolved around the Earth. Copernicus (1473-1543) turned the tables by asking how it would be if, instead, the Earth revolved around the Sun. Kant believed that human thought itself required a similar reinvention. It had always been assumed that human knowledge must conform to the world, that the human mind was just a passive observer. But what if it was the other way round? What if it was the world that needed to conform to the structures of the human mind?

Why Kant’s Revolution Was Needed

Since Descartes (1596-1650), a debate had been dominating philosophy. On one side stood the rationalists such as Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, who believed that the senses were deceptive and that reason was the only secure source of knowledge. On the other side stood the empiricists, especially Locke and Hume, who argued that the mind starts as a blank slate and that all knowledge is founded in sense experience.

Hume (1711-1776) pushed the empiricist position to its logical conclusion, which is that there are only two kinds of human knowledge: ‘matters of fact’, which are founded in observation, and ‘relations of ideas’, such as logic and mathematics, which are true by definition. Anything that is neither—including God, the soul, and free will—belongs to the realm of illusion and speculation.

This scepticism deeply troubled Kant. Hume’s position undermined many of the concepts on which science and social life depend, not least causation. We assume that causes produce effects, but never—according to Hume—observe causality itself: all we do is observe one event regularly following another. Kant fully acknowledged his debt to Hume: ‘I freely confess: it was the objection [to the principle of cause and effect] of David Hume that first … interrupted my dogmatic slumber…’

The Synthetic à Priori

Kant’s response was to seek a new foundation for knowledge, based on a distinction between different kinds of judgement.

Some statements, such as, ‘All bachelors are unmarried men’, are analytic, in that their truth is contained within the meanings of the words themselves. Other statements, such as, ‘The cat is on the mat’, are synthetic, in that they carry new information. Most of the claims that we make are synthetic, because, unless you’re a pedant like me, new information about the world is a lot more useful and interesting than tautologising.

Kant also distinguished between knowledge that is à priori (acquired independently of sense experience) and knowledge that is à posteriori (acquired from sense experience).

Whereas analytic truths are à priori, synthetic truths are à posteriori. But could some synthetic truths be à priori? If so, we could learn something genuinely new about the world independently of sense experience.

Kant believed that mathematics, geometry, and, indeed, causation are prime examples of synthetic à priori knowledge.

But how could reason alone provide us with new knowledge, independently of sense experience?

Kant’s Categories and the Active Mind

Kant’s answer was revolutionary. The human mind is not a passive recipient of information, but actively shapes experience.

The mind possesses built-in structures that organise raw sense data. Among these ‘categories of understanding’ are concepts such as causality, substance, unity, plurality, and necessity.

Whenever we experience the world, these categories are already at work. They are not learned from experience; rather, they make experience possible in the first place. They package raw sense data into forms that are graspable to the human mind. If, as per Hume, we never observe causality, this is because causality is a feature of the human mind.

The same is true also of space and time, which are not features of the world, but ‘forms of intuition’ by which the human mind organises sense experience. Space is the framework by which we perceive external objects. Time is the framework by which we order events and mental states.

That space, time, and causation are in the mind does not make them subjective fantasies. Because all humans share these cognitive structures, they provide a common framework for objective experience. Simply put, there is, for a human being, no other way of seeing the world.

And here lies the price of Kant’s solution: the same structures that make knowledge possible also place limits upon what we can know—for we can only know what it is possible for a human to know.

The Limits of Metaphysics According to Kant

So here we have it. The mind does not conform to an independently structured world; rather, the world as we experience it conforms to the structures of the mind. Thus, we can know some things about the world by knowing about our mind. This is what underlies and enables the synthetic à priori. This is, in other words, what makes it possible for reason, working outside of sense experience, to arrive at new knowledge.

Causation and mathematics arise from the very conditions that make human experience possible. But the flipside is that we cannot know what lies outside of human experience. We cannot know how the world is in itself. Unlike the phenomenal world of human experience, this noumenal world is closed to reason, science, and knowledge.

Thus, metaphysical questions about God, the soul, and freedom are outside the scope of human knowledge. Kant may have rescued causation from Hume and the empiricists, but he did not rescue God (although, later, he defended belief in God on moral grounds). He acquired the nickname ‘the All-Crusher’ because he seemed to have demolished centuries of metaphysical speculation about God, the soul, and free will, which, he thought, were outside the scope of human knowledge.

The Antinomies of Pure Reason

Whenever reason attempts to venture into the realm of metaphysics, it becomes entangled in contradictions. Kant demonstrated this through four specific ‘antinomies of pure reason’, that is, contradictions that reason falls into when trying to understand ultimate reality.

Here is my own example of an antinomy of pure reason. After more than two thousand years of debate, there is still no consensus on who made the stronger case: Heraclitus, in arguing that the universe is in constant, perpetual flux (thesis), or Parmenides in arguing that it is in fact a single, static, unchanging, and eternal whole (antithesis).

Reason, Kant noticed, can construct persuasive arguments on both sides. The resulting conflicts reveal not the failure of reason but the danger of taking it beyond its proper domain. Plato demonstrated something similar in the Parmenides, though less explicitly than Kant.

The Legacy of the Critique of Pure Reason

Unlike the German idealists whom he inspired (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel…), Kant did not go so far as to claim that the mind creates reality, only that the world as it appears to us is structured through the forms and categories of human cognition.

Since Kant’s time, developments in modern physics, particularly non-Euclidean geometry and Einstein’s theory of relativity, have challenged some of Kant’s specific claims about space. But his central insight continues to shape philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science.

We do not simply discover the world. We actively shape the way it appears to us. This was Kant’s Copernican revolution: the insight that knowledge is not merely a mirror of reality but the outcome of a dynamic interaction between the mind and the world. By redefining the relationship between human beings and experience, Kant transformed philosophy as profoundly as Copernicus transformed astronomy.

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To explore Kant’s ideas in their historical context—and discover how they influenced Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche—see my book, The German Greeks.

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Arthur Schopenhauer on Noise and Genius

In August 1821, while living in Berlin, the 33-year-old Arthur Schopenhauer had an altercation with a neighbour, the 47-year-old seamstress Caroline Louise Marquet. On that day, he was enraged by the noise of three women talking in the private anteroom to his apartment. When he demanded that they leave, two of the women complied but Marquet refused.

Later, Marquet claimed that Schopenhauer kicked and punched her and threw her down the stairs, leaving her paralysed on the right side and unable to work. He countered that he had only pushed her, and that she fell to the ground on purpose so that she could sue him.

Following a six-year legal battle ending in May 1827, he was made to pay her medical expenses along with a maintenance allowance of 60 thalers per annum for the rest of her life. On the day she died in 1842, the great philosopher of compassion recorded in his ledger, in Latin, Obit anus, abit onus [The crone dies, the burden is lifted].

The Case of Immanuel Kant

Schopenhauer built his pessimistic philosophy on that of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), who also hated noise. Although gregarious and fond of laughter, Kant needed absolute quiet to write. According to lore, he once moved lodgings on account of a crowing rooster.

In May 1784, Kant, who lived all his life in Königsberg (present-day Kaliningrad), penned a letter to the police superintendent to complain about the “stentorian singing of prayers by the hypocritical inmates of the jail” (in the Iliad, the Greek herald Stentor had a voice as loud “as fifty voices of other men”). He was offended not merely by the noise but also by the insincerity of the prayers, which were offered, he thought, simply to appear God-fearing to the jailor.

Schopenhauer on Noise

In his essay On Noise (1851), Schopenhauer rails hardest not against the nattering of women but the cracking of whips in narrow resounding streets (the nineteenth century equivalent of revving motorbikes or these fart-can cars with modified exhausts): “Hammering, the barking of dogs, and the screaming of children are abominable; but it is only [his emphasis] the cracking of a whip that is the true murderer of thought.” To him, the cracking of whips was all the more unbearable for being unnecessary, and, worse than unnecessary, useless.

Schopenhauer links misophonia [the hatred of sound] with intellect and creativity: “Certainly there are people, nay, very many, who will smile at [my predicament], because they are not sensitive to noise; it is precisely these people, however, who are not sensitive to argument, thought, poetry, or art, in short, to any kind of intellectual impression: a fact to be assigned to the coarse quality and strong texture of their brain tissues.”

For Schopenhauer, genius is precisely this: the ability of the mind to remain focused on a single point and object. But as soon as a focused mind is interrupted or distracted, it is no better than an ordinary mind. It is, says Schopenhauer, as with a large diamond, which, if shattered, loses most of its value; or as with an army, which, if dispersed, loses most of its power.

It is not merely a matter of genius but also of happiness, because, as every creative person knows, there is no happiness greater than that of the mind at play. Aristotle famously conceived of God, the traditional fount of all reason, as a mind that turns blissfully upon itself. In contrast, people who are too frightened to put two and two together, or too dense to do so, use noise to help occupy and numb their minds.

What Science Says

Was Schopenhauer being fanciful in linking misophonia (the hatred of noise) with intellect and creativity? In recent years, researchers at Northwestern University have found that real-world creativity may be associated with a reduced ability to filter “irrelevant” sensory information. “Leaky” sensory gating may help our brains integrate ideas that are outside the focus of our attention and thereby promote associative and creative thinking. But if these extraneous ideas are, well, noise, it can also cripple us.

The genius mind is like a high-compression engine, which knocks if fuelled with lower octane gasoline, i.e. nonsense. Even if he might have overstated his case, Schopenhauer, it seems, was on to something.

Neel Burton is author of The German Greeks: German Philosophy and the German Philosophers.

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Schopenhauer on the Benefits of Skipping School

Schopenhauer at the age of 14
Schopenhauer at the age of fourteen.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Essay substantially revised on 16 August 2026.

Arthur Schopenhauer was born on February 22, 1788, at 114 Heiliggeistgasse in the free city of Danzig (present-day Gdańsk, Poland). His father, Heinrich Floris, was one of the city’s most prominent merchants. Heinrich Floris was determined that his only son should become a merchant, and regularly upbraided him for his poor posture and even worse handwriting.

In 1793, when Arthur was five years old, Prussia annexed Danzig. The Schopenhauer family then moved to the free Hanseatic city of Hamburg. At nine years old, Arthur was sent to Le Havre in France to live with the family of his father’s business associate, Grégoire de Blésimaire, who had a son, Jean Anthime, of Arthur’s age. The two years that Arthur spent in Le Havre were, he claimed, among the happiest of his life. He became fluent in French, learnt to play the flute, and forged a lifelong friendship with Jean-Anthime. Later in life, Schopenhauer would play the flute every day—leading Nietzsche to wonder whether he was indeed such a pessimist.

When Arthur was in his mid-teens, the principal of his private school, Dr Runge, who recognised his exceptional potential, attempted to persuade Heinrich Floris to redirect him onto an academic path. Arthur, too, exerted considerable pressure on his father. To settle the matter in his favour, the wily Heinrich Floris offered Arthur a Hobson’s choice between remaining in Hamburg to learn Latin and prepare for university, or accompany his parents on a luxurious two-year pleasure tour through Europe—on the condition that he commit to a merchant apprenticeship upon their return.

Picking Up English

Thus, in 1803, Arthur set off on a tour of Holland, Britain, France, Switzerland, Austria, and Prussia. In England, he spent twelve weeks at Reverend Thomas Lancaster’s academy in Wimbledon, while his parents toured the North. Teachers thought of him as a ‘seething, belligerent pupil’. He developed a lifelong antipathy towards Anglicanism and later described the experience as a form of ‘incarceration’. But he became fluent in English, and, later, would write German in a more limpid English style.

Indeed, Schopenhauer is regarded as one of the greatest stylists in the German language. In On Language and Words, he would argue that language, though essential for human reasoning, shapes and limits our thoughts. It often serves as a substitute for true thinking and distances us from intuitive perception and action. However, learning another language can increase our range and flexibility of thought by obliging us to separate the concept from the word and to break down and reconstruct thoughts according to a different organisational scheme. This is all the more true of the classical languages (Latin and Greek), which call for a non-literal translation that forces a melting down and recasting of thought.

Three Hangings and a Penitentiary

Tourism in those days could take in the ugly as well as the beautiful. On June 8, 1803, Arthur witnessed three hangings from the window of a pub opposite Newgate prison in London. He noted in his travel diary that the men, right before the drop, took to praying: ‘One of them, who moved his hands up and down as he prayed, made the same movement a couple more times after he had fallen.’

On April 8, 1804, he visited the Bagne de Toulon, to be made famous by Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. ‘Can one think of a more terrible feeling than that of one of these unfortunates as he is chained to the bench in the dark galley and from which nothing but death can separate him?’

Later, he would compare the whole world to a penitentiary, and this period of his life to the Buddha’s awakening, when Prince Siddhartha (later, the Buddha) ventured out of the palace only to be confronted everywhere by the ‘Four Sights’ of age, sickness, death, and an ascetic monk.

Why Schopenhauer Warned Against Book Knowledge

There can be no doubt that Arthur gained a lot more from his travels than he would have done from sitting in a Hamburg classroom. Ironically, had his father never taken him out of school, he may never have become Schopenhauer. 

His worldliness, he would argue, gave him an advantage over ‘mere scholars’ or ‘book philosophers’, for true thought must be rooted in direct observation and firsthand experience of the world.

Reliance on books is like ‘thinking with somebody else’s head’ and produces only superficial knowledge, which, ‘like an artificial limb, false tooth, or waxen nose’, is not organically woven into our being. Children, he thought (like Jean-Jacques Rousseau), should not be exposed to ‘theories and doctrines’ until the age of sixteen.

In On Reading and Books, he wrote:

For the person who studies to gain insight, books and studies are merely rungs of the ladder he climbs to the summit of knowledge. As soon as a rung has raised him one step, he leaves it behind. On the other hand, the many who study to fill their memory do not use the rungs of the ladder for climbing, but take them off and load themselves with them to take away, rejoicing at the increasing weight of the burden. They remain below forever, since they are carrying what ought to have carried them.

Can Reading Make You Stupid?

Schopenhauer cannot have believed that all reading makes us stupid, or he would not have written so many books. The problem is not reading as such, but what kind of reading, and when or in what order. The point, as he himself says, is to use books as rungs and climb beyond them, rather than gather a burden of rungs and carry them around like a donkey.

Much formal education consists in feeding us detached facts in the hope that some may stick and perhaps even inspire us to follow the subject. But true learning often proceeds in the opposite direction. We learn far more readily when we start from a place of meaning and emotion. Then, rather than being weighed down by the information, we thoroughly assimilate it, actively seeking out the answers to the further questions that it raises and moving, as it were, onto the next rung of the ladder.

Consider philosophy. Many people read Sartre at school or university. They hear that ‘existence precedes essence’, write an essay on existentialism, pass an examination, and then carry on living as if they were none the wiser. But pick up Sartre because you feel trapped and are questioning your life choices, and suddenly Existentialism Is a Humanism becomes electrifying. For Schopenhauer, Newgate and Toulon were not abstract answers to somebody else’s questions, but vivid experiences that set him—as the Four Sights did the Buddha—onto the path to enlightenment.

The problem, then, is not reading per se, but reading without intellectual appetite. When we are hungry for knowledge, we will make sure not to read the unedifying books that merely confirm or comfort us without being able to lift us onto the next rung of the ladder.

The best education makes us hungry before it feeds us, or trusts us to feed ourselves.

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Schopenhauer was the first major Western philosopher to engage seriously with Indian thought. The German Greeks explores his philosophy alongside those of Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche, tracing the remarkable development of German philosophy from the Enlightenment to modernity.

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You Will Laugh and Cry

Schopenhauer portrait
Arthur Schopenhauer in 1852, possibly the earliest philosopher to be photographed.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Whereas Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel could all count as optimists, believing that human life could improve, Schopenhauer is the first—and perhaps the last—thinker in the Western tradition to have constructed a complete and systematic philosophy of pessimism.

Despite, or because of, this, he may also have been its funniest philosopher.

He is interesting for other reasons too—some of which are close to my heart. For his Great Philosophers series (1987), Bryan Magee, who wrote a thick book on Schopenhauer, introduced him as ‘the only major Western philosopher to draw serious and interesting parallels between Western and Eastern thought’.

Magee continued: ‘He was the first major Western philosopher to be openly and explicitly atheist. He placed the arts higher in the scheme of things and had more to say about them than any other important philosopher … He was himself among the supreme writers of German prose. Many of his sentences are so brilliantly aphoristic that they’ve been torn out of context and published separately in little books of epigrams.

Schopenhauer’s Epigrams

To give you a flavour, here are a few of Schopenhauer’s many epigrams:

  • Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.
  • Life is a business that does not cover its costs.
  • The pleasure in this world, it has been said, outweighs the pain… If the reader wishes to see shortly whether this statement is true, let him compare the respective feelings of two animals, one of which is engaged in eating the other.
  • What everyone most aims at in ordinary contact with his fellows is to prove them inferior to himself.
  • Almost all of our sorrows spring out of our relations with other people. There is no more mistaken path to happiness than worldliness.
  • It is difficult to find happiness within oneself, but it is impossible to find it anywhere else.

Probably, you chuckled while reading these aphorisms. But why did you chuckle?

Why You Laughed

Schopenhauer had his own theory of laughter, which is a version of the incongruence theory, according to which laughter arises from a contradiction between a concept (what people think is happening) and the reality (what is in fact happening)—highlighting a failure of reason over perception. Thus, when people laugh at us (rather than along with us) they are filling the gap between our idea of ourself, or people’s general idea of us, and the sad reality.

Many people who read Schopenhauer’s aphorisms laugh only half-heartedly because they feel threatened by them. But the few who laugh full-throatedly feel liberated by their insight. In this moment of pure perception, while they laugh, they escape, if only for a few seconds, from the tyranny of the Will—the blind, irrational force that, in Schopenhauer’s philosophy, underlies all reality, and drives us to exist and strive and suffer without purpose.

Schopenhauer’s Theory of Weeping

Schopenhauer also had a theory of weeping.

Weeping, which is a physical expression of mental misery, is a form of self-compassion. As such, it requires an outside perspective on the self, which is why animals don’t cry, and children don’t cry if no one is watching. Schopenhauer cites the example of a person who did not think to weep over their misery until their case was summarised to them in court and they were brought to reflect upon their suffering—when they suddenly broke into a stream of tears.

When we weep, we become ‘both the sufferer and the compassionate onlooker’. Because weeping originates from self-compassion, it suggests to others that the crier is capable of compassion, and thus worthy of compassion.

Psychopaths don’t cry, or only crocodile tears.

Why Schopenhauer Matters

To me, Schopenhauer is important because he is the first philosopher since antiquity to offer a comprehensive solution to the problem of living and suffering.

As well as a great philosopher, Schopenhauer was a fine psychologist, so that we often find ourselves laughing along with him. But almost as often, we find ourselves laughing at him, owing, I think, to the incongruence between his lofty philosophy of temperance and compassion and his own bad-boy ways.

Had Schopenhauer met himself, he would have laughed.

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Schopenhauer was the first major Western philosopher to engage seriously with Indian thought. The German Greeks explores his philosophy alongside those of Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche, tracing the remarkable development of German philosophy from the Enlightenment to modernity.

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The Psychology and Philosophy of Intuition

a spider's web: a metaphor for how intuition operates
Intuition often reveals the connections that reason has yet to trace.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Intuition is one of humanity’s highest cognitive faculties. Yet it has never been more neglected or devalued than in our rational-scientific age.

At a wine bar in Corsica, I ordered a glass of Vermentino and got chatting about wine with the sommelier who brought it to me. After a time, I ordered another glass, and we spoke again. I like testing my intuitions, so I said, at point blank, “You write poetry, don’t you?” The chap, taken aback by my sorcery, confirmed that he did indeed write poetry, and even that some of his poems had been published.

An intuition is a disposition to believe formed without hard evidence or conscious deliberation. I say ‘disposition to believe’ rather than ‘belief’ because an intuition is usually held with less certainty or firmness than a belief; and ‘believe’ rather than ‘know’ because an intuition is not justified in the normal sense, and not necessarily true or accurate.

It is not just that intuition is arrived at without hard evidence or conscious deliberation, but that these can impede it. ‘I am not absentminded,’ wrote the polymath GK Chesterton, ‘it is presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.’

Intuition vs Instinct

Intuition is often confused with instinct. Instinct is not the same as intuition. Whereas intuition is a disposition to believe without conscious reasoning, instinct is an innate tendency towards a particular behaviour. Instinct is not a sense about something, but a tendency to do something. ‘Anna stepped back, intuiting that the dog would follow its instinct and attack.’

Although we ordinarily associate instincts with animals, human beings also have quite a few, even if they are, or can be, strongly modified by culture, temperament, and experience. Examples of human instincts include any number of phobias (fear of heights, fear of spiders, fear of snakes…), territoriality, tribal loyalty, and the urge to procreate and rear their young. These instincts are often modified, redirected, or sublimed: for example, tribal loyalty may find an outlet in sport, and the urge to procreate may take the more rarefied form of romantic love.

In the Rhetoric, Aristotle adds that human beings have an instinct for truth, and in the Poetics, that we have an instinct for rhythm and harmony. Obviously, he hadn’t seen my dancing.

The Psychology and Philosophy of Intuition

If intuition is not instinct, how does it operate?

An intuition involves a coming together of facts, concepts, experiences, thoughts, and feelings that are loosely linked but too disparate and peripheral for deliberate or rational processing. As this reflection is sub- or semi-conscious and the workings are hidden, an intuition appears to arise ex nihilo, out of nothing and nowhere, and cannot, or at least not readily, be justified.

What makes an intuition so hard to support and argue for is that it is founded less on arguments and evidence than on the interconnection of things. It hangs, delicately, intricately, and invisibly, like a spider’s web.

Many of humanity’s greatest insights seem to have arisen in this way. Archimedes is said to have leapt from his bath crying, ‘Eureka!’ after discovering how to determine the purity of a gold crown. Socrates attributed many of his most important decisions to his daimonion, an inner voice that warned rather than reasoned. After struggling for months with a mathematical problem, Henri Poincaré suddenly saw its solution while stepping onto a bus. The chemist August Kekulé dreamt of a snake swallowing its own tail before recognising the ring structure of benzene. Srinivasa Ramanujan attributed many of his astonishing mathematical discoveries to dreams sent by the goddess Namagiri. Such breakthroughs seem sudden only because the mind has been quietly at work beneath the surface.

The surfacing of an intuition, which can also occur in dream or meditation, is often mingled with a concordant feeling such as joy or fear, or simple pride and pleasure at the supreme cognitive and human achievement that an intuition represents.

How to Invite Intuition

If this is how intuition works, we can cultivate it by expanding the range of our experiences, and by tearing down the barriers—such as biases, fears, and inhibitions—that prevent them from coalescing.

We should also give ourselves more time and space for free association. My own intuitive faculty is sharpest when walking, showering, travelling, or otherwise daydreaming, and when I am well rested.

The more richly furnished the mind, the more deeply it can intuit. There is no such thing as wasted knowledge.

Finally, we should acknowledge the place and power of intuition. We have micro-intuitions all the time, about what to eat, what to wear, what road to take, whom to talk to, what to say, how to respond, and so on. I call them micro-intuitions because they rely on a great number of subtle variables and largely escape conscious processing. But what about the macro-intuitions?

Never in the history of humanity has the intuitive or mystic faculty been more neglected or devalued than in our rational-scientific age.

Perhaps our greatest error has been to pit intuition against reason. They are not rivals, but partners. Intuition points the way; reason clears the path.

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If you enjoyed this article, you might also enjoy my books Hypersanity, on heightened insight, creativity, and wisdom, and How to Think Like Plato and Speak Like Cicero, on the ancient art of clear thinking.

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