ality, that is, they are universal and
necessary. Instead of being circumscribed within the limits of
experience, they surpass and govern it; they are universal in the midst
of particular phenomena; necessary, although mingled with things
contingent; and absolute, even when appearing within us the relative and
finite beings that we are.[70] Necessary, universal, absolute truth is a
direct emanation from God. "Such being the case, the decision of reason
within its own peculiar province possesses an authority almost divine.
If we are led astray by it, we must be led astray by a light from
heaven."[71]

[Footnote 70: Cousin, "True, Beautiful, and Good," p. 40.]

[Footnote 71: Id., "Lectures," vol. ii. p. 32.]

The second proof is derived from _the distinction between the
spontaneous and reflective movements of reason_.

Reflection is voluntary, spontaneity is involuntary; reflection is
personal, spontaneity is impersonal; reflection is analytic, spontaneity
is synthetic; reflection begins with doubt, spontaneity with
affirmation; reflection belongs to certain ones, spontaneity belongs to
all; reflection produces science, spontaneity gives truth. Reflection is
a process, more or less tardy, in the individual and in the race. It
sometimes engenders error and skepticism, sometimes convictions that,
from being rational, are only the more profound. It constructs systems,
it creates artificial logic, and all those formulas which we now use by
the force of habit, as if they were natural to us. But spontaneous
intuition is the true logic of nature,--instant, direct, and infallible.
It is a primitive affirmation which implies no negation, and therefore
yields positive knowledge. To reflect is to return to that which was. It
is, by the aid of memory, to return to the past, and to render it
present to the eye of consciousness. Reflection, therefore, creates
nothing; it supposes an anterior operation of the mind in which there
necessarily must be as many terms as are discovered by reflection.
Before all reflection there comes spontaneity--a spontaneity of the
intellect, which seizes truth at once, without traversing doubt and
error. "We thus attain to a judgment free from all reflection, to an
affirmation without any mixture of negation, to an immediate intuition,
the legitimate daughter of the natural energy of thought, like the
inspiration of the poet, the instinct of the hero, the enthusiasm of the
prophet." Such is the first a