n does
its typical work; but often the objects of our insight fail to meet
the more intense needs of life.

Thus, then, inarticulate intuitions, ordinary or sometimes more
scientific observations of the details of life, and mathematical
reasonings concerning the unity and the connections of highly ideal
objects such as numbers, come to stand in our experience as more or
less sharply sundered grades of imperfect insight. Thus we naturally
come to view the typical achievements of our reason as a thing apart,
and the rational or exact sciences as remote both from the intuitive
faith of the little ones and from {102} the wealthy experience of the
men of common-sense and of the men of natural science. As a fact, all
these stages of insight are hints of what the Supreme Court meant when
it appealed to the "rule of reason." True insight, if fulfilled, would
be empirical, for it would face facts; intuitive, for it would survey
them and grasp them, and be intimate with them; rational, for it would
view them in their unity.

IV

Our lengthy effort to define the work and the place of the reason has
brought us to the threshold of an appreciation of its relation to the
religious insight which we are seeking.

In looking for salvation, we discover that our task is defined for us
by those aspects of individual and social experience upon which our
two previous lectures have dwelt. We have learned from the study of
these two sorts of experience that, whatever else we need for our
salvation, one of our needs is to come into touch with a life that in
its unity, in its meaning, in its perfection, is vastly superior to
our present human type of life. And so the question has presented
itself: Have we any evidence that such a superhuman type of life is a
real fact in the world? The mystics, and many of the faithful, answer
this question by saying: "Yes. We have such evidence. It is the
assurance that we get through intuition, through feeling, through the
light revealed to us {103} in certain moments when thought ceases, and
the proud intellect is dumb, and when the divine speaks quite directly
to the passive and humbled soul." Now when we calmly consider the
evidence of such moments of inarticulate conviction, they strongly
impress upon us what we have called the religious paradox. Faith, and
the passive and mysterious intuitions of the devout, seem to depend on
first admitting that we are naturally blind a