The Accounting or Mapping Department

Words not only clarify, they may also obscure. I can’t help believing that what the schoolmen called Intellect is but the accounting department of the enterprise we call the soul. The counting house is important, to be sure, but the store or factory matter more. It seems clear to me that, as humans, we gain knowledge not merely and exclusively from sensory experience, which the medievals and moderns both assert; on the contrary, I think we also get knowledge from invisible dimensions. In both cases our knowledge is direct; our understanding flashes up or slowly dawns. I hold that the intellectual operations of abstraction and reasoning arise a little later—an eyewink or much labor later—as we engage in ordering and relating our direct and spontaneous grasp of reality into larger patterns of coherence.

Another way to put this is that the intellect produces maps, but maps are not, as it were, universals. We think of universals or essences—perceptions shorn of accidents, so-called—as in some manner superior to particulars. I see that as an assertion that maps are superior to the landscapes they depict. I’m very fond of maps; I’m devoted to patterns of all kinds; they’re indispensable for orientation but, ultimately, we never visit maps; we visit places.

The interesting fact here is the iterative functioning of what I view as the higher power of the soul, its intuitive grasp. The intellect is a servant; reason is a tool. Intuition first understands the particular and then, once intellect produces its patterns, intuition understands and grasps those in turn—enriched by both but never deceived by what is what: the landscape is the landscape and the map’s a map.