er, or prakriti.

But matter is not confined, we know, to this great octave,
although our sensual knowledge of it is strictly confined to it.
How do we know it?

Knowledge comes to us in two ways, and there are two kinds of
knowledge.

1. That which comes through our senses, by observation and
experience. This includes reasoning from relation.

2. That which comes through intuition--or, as some writers
inaccurately say, "through the formal laws of thought."

All the observation and experience of the rising and the setting
of the sun for a thousand centuries could only have confirmed the
first natural belief that it revolved daily around the earth;
nor by joining this experience with other experiences could any
deduction have come from our reason that would have opposed it.
Not our reason but our intuition said that the sun stood still
and the earth revolved daily. The oldest books in existence tell
us that this axial revolution of the earth was not only known in
the very dawn of time but that it has been known to every race
(except our own of European savages) from before the time thought
was first transmitted by writing.

Ask the ablest living geographer or physicist to prove to 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 Acade