To: Sidney Reilly who wrote (27101 ) 12/18/1998 5:29:00 PM From: Sam Ferguson Read Replies (1) | Respond to
The entire course of modern education -- to say nothing of modern instruction -- is against accepting the idea that man has within himself unused and usually unawakened faculties by the training and employment of which he may know truths of Nature, visible and invisible, with a depth of intellectual penetration and keen accuracy of instinctive feeling obtainable in no other manner whatsoever. Differing in this from our modern selves, the ancient peoples without exception knew this now forgotten verity; they knew that all proof lies ultimately in the man himself; they knew that judgment and cognition of truth lie within him and not without; and for these reasons they were more largely introspective than we are, who pride ourselves upon, yes, actually boast of, the modern idea that extraspection, or looking without, is the sole highway to truth. This modern conception is all wrong because it is entirely one-sided. The attaining of truth by the individual runs in both directions, in the sense that while we should cultivate the faculty of looking outwards in order to discern the facts of Nature, we can only understand those facts by using the power of understanding, of discrimination, of judgment, of intellectual analysis; and that power of understanding and comprehension is not outside of but within us, as seems obvious enough.
