To the last I subordinate reason. It is
absolute knowledge founded on the identity of the mind knowing with
the object known. (_Letter to Flaccus._)
We have discovered that sense knowledge, however acute, has to be
corrected by the intellect, which tells us that the sun does not go
round the earth, although it appears to our observation to do this. So
possibly, in turn, the intellect, however acute, may have to be
corrected by intuition, and the impotence of brain knowledge in dealing
with the problem of life is leading slowly to the perception that to
_know_ in its true sense is not an intellectual process at all.
Further, in Bergson's theory of the nature of mind, and in his theory of
rhythm, he seems to indicate the lines of a technical explanation of
some part of the mystic experience.[84] The soul, or the total psychic
and mental life of man, he says, is far greater than the little bit of
consciousness of which we are normally aware, and the brain acts as a
sheath or screen, which allows only a point of this mental life to touch
reality. The brain or the cerebral life is therefore to the whole mental
life as the point of a knife is to the knife itself.
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