quote: intuition

"In all who seek passionately for the fugitive and difficult goods, the conviction is almost irresistible that there is in the world something deeper, more significant, than the multiplicitity of little facts chronicled and classified by science. Behind the veil of these mundane things, they feel something quite different obscurely shimmers, shining forth clearly in the great moments of illumination, which alone give anything worthy to be called real knowledge of truth. To seek such moments, therefore, is to them the way of wisdom, rather than, like the man of science, to observe coolly, to analyse without emotion, and to accept without question the equal reality of the trivial and the important.

Of the reality or unreality of the mystic's world I know nothing. I have no wish to deny it, nor even to declare that the insight which reveals it is not a genuine insight. What I do wish to maintain -and it is here that the scientific attitude becomes imperative- is that insight, untested and unsupported, is an unsufficient guarantee of truth, in spite of the fact that much of the most important truth is first suggested by its means."

-Russell, Bertrand. Our Knowledge of the External World (1914). London, Routledge, 1993. pp. 30-31