Ancient and Modern Physics | Page 6

you that the earth revolves daily
and he will reply that it would be the job of his life. It can be done at great expense and
great labor, but that is because we know the answer and can invent a way of showing it,
not because there are any observations from which a deduction would naturally follow.
Nearly if not all our great discoveries have come to us through intuition and not from
observation and experience. When we know the lines on which to work, when intuition
has given us the KEY, then the observation and experience men prize so highly, and the
reason they worship so devoutly, will fill in the details. The knowledge that flows from
observation and the reasoning from the facts it records, is never more than relatively true,
it is always limited by the facts, and any addition to the facts requires the whole thing to
be restated. We never know all the facts; seldom even the more important; and reason
grasps only details.
Lamarck's theory of evolution, known to all Asiatic races from time immemorial, was the
intuitional and absolute knowledge that comes to all men when they reach a certain stage
of development. Reason could never have furnished it from the facts, as Cuvier proved in
the great debate in the French Academy in 1842, when he knocked Lamarck out, for the
time being, because "it did not conform to the facts, and did not follow from any relation
of the facts."
Darwin's theory of the survival of the fittest in the struggle for existence, as an
explanation of the origin of species, was from observation and experience. It was based
on observed facts. But Darwin was an evolutionist--a disciple of Lamarck. He held the
Key. He used the Key. The value of Darwin's work does not lie in his discovering that
some bugs have been derived from other bugs and that the intermediate bugs have died
off. Its overwhelming value to mankind was in showing that work on the theory of
evolution was correct work and that the theory was true. When the intuition of man points
out the way the reason of man can follow the path and macadam the road. It usually does

and claims all the credit for itself as the original discoverer.
This knowledge through intuition is absolute and exact. It is not relatively true. It is
absolutely and invariably true. No additional facts will ever modify it, or require a
restatement.
When Sir William Hamilton based his Logic on the dictum that "All knowledge is
relative, and only relatively true," the proposition was self-evidently false. It was in itself
a statement of absolute knowledge about a certain thing. It was in itself knowledge that
was not relative. All knowledge could not be relative if this knowledge was not. This
knowledge could not be either absolute or relative without upsetting his whole
proposition, for, if relative, then it was not always true; and if absolute, then it was never
true.
Sir William did not know the distinction between the two kinds of knowledge, and what
he meant to say was that "All knowledge obtained by observation and experience is
relative, and only relatively true."
His knowledge of this relativity was not obtained by observation or from reason. It could
not possibly have been obtained in that way. It came from intuition, and it was absolute
and exact. A man may have absolute and exact knowledge and yet not be able to put it
into words that exactly express it to another. Hamilton had this knowledge. But it was not
clearly formulated even in his own mind. He had two separate and distinct meanings for
the word "knowledge," without being conscious of it.
We have yet to coin a proper word to express what comes to us through intuition. The old
English word "wisdom" originally did. The old verb "wis" was meant what a man knew
without being told it, as "ken" meant knowledge by experience. Try and prove by reason
that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points, or that a part can never be
greater than the whole, and your reason has an impossible task. "You must take them for
axioms," it says. You must take them because you wis them, not because you know (ken)
them.
Intuitional knowledge must not be confounded with the relative knowledge that flows
through the reason: that "If the sum of two numbers is one and their difference is five,"
the numbers are minus two and plus three.
The point cannot be too strongly enforced that there is a distinction between the sources
of what we know, and that while all we know through our sensations is only relatively
true, that which we know from intuition is invariably