Intuition in the West
Below is a list of the quoted references made during the lecture. If you would like a more detailed reference, including the publisher and page number of a particular reference, email:
nascentstatepublishing@gmail.com
The lecture was based on the book Intuition in the West, which is available on Amazon. You can read the synopsis and order the book by clicking on the image below:
I also run Intuition Workshops here in Bath. The Workshops are designed to provide the individual with a direct experience of the intuitive mind. The exercises involved are drawn from many sources, including Zen, Sufism, and Western esotericism. Here is a link to the Workshops page:
Lecture Quotes
‘Because, in the main, intuition is an unconscious process, the conscious apprehension of its nature is a very difficult matter.’
Carl Jung, Psychological Types
‘It (a paradigm) stands for the entire constellation of beliefs, values, techniques, and so forth shared by the members of a given community.’
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
‘A contradiction is an opposition which of its very nature excludes any middle. That part of a contradiction which affirms something of something else is an affirmation; that which denies something of something else is a negation.’
Aristotle, The Organon, Posterior Analytics
‘Aristotle’s most important work in logic is the doctrine of the syllogism. A syllogism is an argument consisting of three parts, a major premiss, a minor premiss, and a conclusion.’
Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy
‘If, then, Plato defined the wise man as one who imitates, knows, loves this God, and who is rendered blessed through fellowship with Him in His own blessedness, why discuss with the other philosophers? It is evident that none come nearer to us than the Platonists.’
Saint Augustine, City of God
‘Now the first and most evident of all principles is that it is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be at the same time and in the same respect.’
Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics
‘The goal of an encyclopaedia is to assemble all the knowledge scattered on the surface of the earth, to demonstrate the general system to the people with whom we live, and to transmit it to the people who will come after us, so that the works of centuries past is not useless to the centuries which follow….’
Denis Diderot, Encyclopedie, Introduction
‘The word ‘truth’ itself ceases to have its old meaning. It describes no longer something to be found, with the individual conscience as the sole arbiter… it becomes something to be laid down by authority, something which has to believed in the interest of unity…’
Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
‘By intuition I mean instinct that has become disinterested, self-conscious, capable of reflecting upon its object and of enlarging it indefinitely.’
Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution
‘No act of cognition can be absolutely free from emotion… no emotion can be absolutely free from cognition.’
Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Psychology
‘I remember the first such experience. Coming, as it did, after years of detailed analytical thinking, it was so overwhelming that I burst into tears…’
Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics
‘I watched the storms with peculiar delight and passed many a night at the window watching the lightning. My elder brother used to say, ‘The thunder is God’s artillery’ and punished me for my stubborn persistence. But it was this mysterious power that I was determined to harness.’
Nikola Tesla, My Inventions
‘Great attention was paid to it by Pythagoras, as will be found by one who clearly unfolds the significance and arcane conceptions of the Pythagorean symbols, thus developing the great rectitude and truth they contain when liberated from their enigmatic form.’
Iamblichus, The Life of Pythagoras
‘I am enough of the artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination circles the world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution. It is, strictly speaking, a real factor in scientific research.’
Albert Einstein, George Sylvester Viereck interview, Oct 26, 1929
‘It is a good thing to have two ways of looking at a subject, and to admit that there are two ways of looking at it.’
James Clerk Maxwell, On Faraday’s Lines of Force.
‘In the sphere of natural science let us remember that we have always to deal with an insoluble problem. Let us prove keen and honest in attending to anything which is in any way brought to our notice, most of all when it does not fit in with our previous ideas.’
Goethe, Maxims and Reflections
‘If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.’
Rene Descartes, Principles of Philosophy
Don’t stir the fire with a knife (don’t stir the passions)
Don’t step over the beam of a balance (equanimity)
Don’t eat your heart (don’t waste time on petty troubles)
Diogenes Laertius on Pythagoras
‘Great attention was paid to it by Pythagoras, as will be found by one who clearly unfolds the significance and arcane conceptions of the Pythagorean symbols, thus developing the great rectitude and truth they contain when liberated from their enigmatic form.’
Iamblichus, On the Pythagorean Life
‘The perfect freedom with which they were endowed meant repudiation of all formal religious institutions and law.’
Alain de Lille, from Wakefield and Evans, Heresies of the High Middle Ages
‘The archetype of dualist heresy in Christian eyes soon came to be another offshoot of Gnosticism, which also incorporated Zoroastrian, Buddhist and Christian ideas. This was Manichaeism.’
Wakefield and Evans, Heresies of the High Middle Ages
‘Under no circumstances will they kill any animal or winged creature, for they say and believe that there are in brute animals and even in birds those spirits which leave the bodies of men…and that these spirits pass from one body to another.’
Bernard Gui, from Wakefield and Evans, Heresies of the High Middle Ages
‘People in China and also in Japan – I do not know about India – when some difficult problems come up, often say ‘Think with your abdomen’, or simply ‘Ask your belly’.
D. T. Suzuki, Studies in Zen
‘In 1209, Arnold Aimery exulted to the Pope that the capture of Beziers had been ‘miraculous’; and that the crusaders had killed 15,000, ‘showing mercy neither to order, nor age nor sex’. Prisoners were mutilated, blinded, dragged at the hooves of horses and used for target practice.’
Paul Johnson, A History of Christianity
‘The first point to be mentioned in this connection is the conflict between conceptual thinking and symbolic thinking, which gives the literature and history of the Kabbalah their unique character. Beginning with the earliest documents, the Kabbalah expressed itself essentially in images, often distinctly mythical in content.’
Gershom Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism
‘This liberty goes very far. Sometimes a portal, a façade, an entire church, presents a symbolical sense absolutely foreign to worship, or even hostile to the Church.’
Victor Hugo, Notre Dame
‘One brilliant opportunity has at least been missed, for it has not so far occurred to any one that the Tarot might perhaps have done duty and even originated as a secret symbolical language of the Albigensian sects.’ (‘Albigensian’ being his term for the Cathars).’
Arthur Edward Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot
‘In the society that he founded, men and women were admitted on equal terms; property was held in common, and there was a common way of life.’
Bertrand Russell on Pythagoras, History of Western Philosophy
‘Master, let the women come to an end of their questions, that we may question thee.’ Jesus said unto Mary and the [other] women: ‘Give place to your brethren, that they also may question.’
George Robert Stowe Mead, the Pistis Sophia
‘This they (Gnostics) apply even to women, with the same proviso that they belong to their sect. Thus they teach that every holy person is a priest.’
Bernard Gui, from Wakefield and Evans, Heresies of the High Middle Ages
‘I will now endeavour briefly to hint to the reader what this book contains, though in it the spirit of wisdom cannot be delineated with pen and ink, no more than a sound can be painted, or the wind grasped in the hollow of the hand….’
Jacob Boehme, The Signature of All Things
‘The peasant can see the externals, but the physician’s task is to see the inner and secret matter. In order to make these things visible, Nature must be compelled to show itself… Take a piece of wood. It is a body. Now burn it. The flammable part is the Sulphur, the smoke is the Mercury, and the ash is the Salt.’
Paracelsus, trans. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke
‘With characteristic defiance he (Paracelsus) invited the faculty to a lecture, in which he promised to teach the greatest secret in medicine. He began by uncovering a dish which contained excrement. The doctors, indignant at the insult, departed precipitously, Paracelsus shouting after them ‘If you will not hear the mysteries of putrefactive fermentation, you are unworthy of the name of physicians.’
Arthur Edward Waite, The Lives of the Alchemystical Philosophers
‘I have sought to follow the example of Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle, whose common endeavor it was not to allow any of the doctrines of the ancients to perish, but to gather them into one corpus… My desire, I say, has been to set forth the harmony which exists among the philosophies of various nations and times.’
Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man
‘Thus in the address to the senate at Wittenberg before leaving the university, Bruno named the foremost of those whom he regarded as Builders of the Temple of Wisdom: the list begins with the Chaldeans among the Egyptians and Assyrians; there follow Zoroaster and the Magi among the Persians, the Gymnosophists of India, Orpheus and Atlas among Thracians and Libyans, Thales and other wise men among the Greeks….’
James Lewis McIntyre, Giordano Bruno,
‘The present system of logic rather assists in confirming and rendering inveterate the errors founded on vulgar notions than in searching after truth, and is therefore more hurtful than useful.’
‘As the present sciences are useless for the discovery of effects, so the present system of logic is useless for the discovery of the sciences.’
Francis Bacon, Novum Organum
‘Conscience is the voice of the soul; the passions are the voice of the body. Is it astonishing that often these two languages contradict each other? Too often reason deceives us; we have only too much acquired the right of refusing to listen to it; but conscience never deceives us; it is the true guide of man.’
Rousseau, Émile, or On Education
‘They are properly what we call in scientific and poetic matters, an apercu; the perception of a great maxim, which is always a genius-like operation of the mind: we arrive at it by pure intuition; that is by reflection, neither by learning nor tradition.’
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Memoirs
‘May God us keep
From single vision
And Newton’s sleep.’
William Blake, Letter to Thomas Butts
‘My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie. I saw — with shut eyes, but acute mental vision, — I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together.’
Mary Shelley, Author’s Introduction to Frankenstein.
‘An absolute can only be given in an intuition, while all the rest is analysis.’
‘By intuition is meant the kind of intellectual sympathy by which one places oneself within an object in order to coincide with what is unique in it and consequently inexpressible. Analysis, on the contrary, is the operation which reduces the object to elements already known.’
Henri Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics
‘There comes a time when the mind takes a higher plane of knowledge but can never prove how it got there. All great discoveries have involved such a leap.’
Albert Einstein, George Sylvester Viereck interview, Oct 26, 1929
‘The pioneer scientist must have ‘a vivid intuitive imagination,’ for new ideas are not generated by deduction, but by artistically creative imagination.’
Max Planck, A Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers
‘The press, the machine, the railway, the telegraph are premises whose thousand-year conclusion no one has yet dared to draw.’
Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
‘I’m very worried about AI taking over lots of mundane jobs…that should be a good thing, it’s going to lead to a big increase in productivity which leads to a big increase in wealth. If that wealth was equally distributed that would be great but it’s not going to be…’
Geoffrey Hinton, BBC Newsnight, 8 Oct 2024, at 5.35.
Jim Blackmann, December 2025