Wearied by the artifices and the lack of imagination of academic rationalism, many of our contemporaries in rejecting it reject true metaphysics as well, because they think it "abstract" - which in their minds is synonymous with "artificial" - and seek the "concrete," not beyond the rational and in the order of ontological prototypes, but in crude fact, in the sensory, the "actual"; man becomes the arbitrary measure of everything, and thereby abdicates his dignity as man, namely his possibility of objective and universal knowledge. He is then the measure of things not in a truly human but in an animal way; his dull empiricism is that of an animal which registers facts and notices a pasture or a path; but since he is despite all a "human animal," he disguises his dullness in mental arabesques. The existentialists are human as it were by chance; what distinguishes them from animals is not human intelligence but the human style of an infra-human intelligence. The protagonists of "concrete" thought, of whatever shade, readily label as "speculations in the abstract" whatever goes beyond their understanding, but they forget to tell us why these speculations are possible, that is to say what confers this strange possibility on human intelligence. Thus what does it mean that for thousands of years men deemed to be wise have practiced such speculations, and by what right does one call "intellectual progress" the replacement of these speculations by a crude empiricism which excludes on principle any operation characteristic of intelligence? If these "positivists" are right, none but they are intelligent; all the founders of religions, all the saints, all the sages have been wrong on essentials whereas Mr. So-and-So at long last sees things clearly; one might just as well say that human intelligence does not exist. There are those who claim that the idea of God is to be explained only by social opportunism, without taking account of the infinite disproportion and the contradiction involved in such a hypothesis; if such men as Plato, Aristotle   or Thomas Aquinas   - not to mention the Prophets, or Christ or the sages of Asia - were not capable of noticing that God is merely a social prejudice or some other dupery of the kind, and if hundreds and thousands of years have been based intellectually on their incapacity, then there is no human intelligence, and still less any possibility of progress, for a being absurd by nature does not contain the possibility of ceasing to be absurd. sophiaperennis: Existentialism

Thus metaphysical certitude is absolute because of the identity between the knower and the known in the Intellect. If an example may be drawn from the sensory sphere to illustrate the difference between metaphysical and religious knowledge, it may be said that the former, which can be called ’esoteric’ when it is manifested through a religious symbolism, is conscious of the colourless essence of light and of its character of pure luminosity; a given religious belief, on the other hand, will assert that light is red and not green, whereas another belief will assert the opposite; both will be right in so far as they distinguish light from darkness but not in so far as they identify it with a particular colour. sophiaperennis: Difference between Metaphysics and Philosophy

Not only is scientistic philosophy ignorant of the Divine Presences, it ignores their rhythms and their "life": it ignores, not only the degrees of reality and the fact of our imprisonment in the sensory world, but also cycles, the universal solve et coagula; this means that it ignores the gushing forth of our world from an invisible and fulgurant Reality, and its reabsorption into the dark light of this same Reality. All of the Real lies in the Invisible; it is this above all that must be felt or understood before one can speak of knowledge and effectiveness. But this will not be understood, and the human world will continue inexorably on its course. sophiaperennis: Scientistic philosophy

Profane philosophy is ignorant not only of the value of truth and universality in Revelation, but also of the transcendence of the pure Intellect; [NA: For example, the Cartesian Cogito is neither conformable to Revelation, nor the consequence of a direct intellection: it has no scriptural basis, since according to Scripture the foundation of existence is Being and not some experience or other; and it lacks inspiration, since direct intellective perception excludes a purely empirical process of reasoning. When Locke   says Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu, the statement is false in the same two respects; firstly, Scripture affirms that the intellect derives from God and not from the body - for man, "made in the image of God," is distinguished from animals by the intelligence not by the senses - and secondly, the intellect conceives of realities which it does not discern a priori in the world, though it may seek their traces a posteriori in sensory perceptions.] it entails therefore no guarantee of truth on any level, for the quite human faculty which reason is, insofar as it is cut off from the Absolute, is readily mistaken even on the level of the relative. The efficacy of reasoning is essentially conditional. sophiaperennis: Profane "thinkers"

Apart from the forms of sensory knowledge, Kant   admits the categories, regarded by him as innate principles of cognition; these he divides into four groups inspired by Aristotle, [NA: Quantity, quality, relation, and modality; the latter no doubt replacing the Aristotelian " position."] while at the same time subjectivizing the Aristotelian notion of category. He develops in his own way the peripatetic categories that he accepts while discarding others, without realizing that, regardless of Aristotelianism, the highest and most important of the categories have eluded his grasp. [NA: Such as the principial and cosmic qualities which determine and classify phenomena, or the universal dimensions which join the world to the Supreme Essence and which include each in its own manner the qualities mentioned above. Aristotle for his part had the right not to speak of them in that he accepted God as being self-evident and his approach was in no way moralistic and empirical; since he accept ed God, he did not consider his categories to be exhaustive.] The categories are a priori independent of all experience since they are innate; Kant recognized this, yet he considered that they were capable of being "explored" by a process he called "transcendental investigation." But how will one ever grasp the pure subject who explores and who investigates? sophiaperennis: Kantianism

Another feature of this suicidal rationalism is the following: we are asked to believe that knowledge, thus reduced to a combination of sensory experiences and the innate categories, shows us things such as they appear to be and not such as they are; as if the inherent nature of things did not pierce through their appearances, given that the whole point of knowledge is the perception of a thing-in-itself - an aseity - failing which the very notion of perception would not exist. sophiaperennis: Kantianism

We do not think we are going too far in saying that the necessity for a dogmatic faith answers to a collective tendency to deny the supernatural in accordance with a mentality which is more passional than contemplative and thereby riveted to "bare facts," whence a philosophy which makes deductions from the sensory to the Universal, instead of starting from the latter in order to understand the former; it is not a question here of passion as such, which is a general human fact, but of its intrusion into the field of the intelligence. sophiaperennis: Rationalism

True aesthetics [NA: This word is used in its ordinary present-day meaning; it is not used to designate theories of sensory knowledge.] is nothing else than the science of forms and its aim must therefore be what is objective and real, not subjectivity as such. Forms, intellections: the whole of traditional art is founded on this correspondence. Moreover, a feeling for form may also play an important part in intellective speculation. The rightness - or the logic - of proportions is a criterion of truth or error in every domain into which formal elements enter. sophiaperennis: AESTHETICS AND SYMBOLISM IN ART AND NATURE

A striking feature of modern science is the disproportion between the scientific, mathematical, practical intelligence and intelligence as such: a scientist may be capable of the most extraordinary calculations and achievements but may at the same time be incapable of understanding the ultimate causality of things; this amounts to an illegitimate and monstrous disproportion, for the man who is intelligent enough to grasp nature in its deepest physical aspects, ought also to know that nature has a metaphysical Cause which transcends it, and that this Cause does not confine itself to determining the laws of sensory existence, as Spinoza   claimed. What we have called the ’inhuman’ character of modern science also appears in the monstrous fruits it produces, such as the overpopulation of the globe, the degeneration of humankind, and, by compensation, the means of mass destruction. [Stations of Wisdom, p. 38-39]. sophiaperennis: Science and intelligence

If it is modern science which has created the abnormal and deceiving conditions which afflict youth today, that is because this science is itself abnormal and deceiving. No doubt it will be said that man is not responsible for his nihilism, that it is science which has slain the gods, but this is an avowal of intellectual impotence, not a title of glory, since anyone of who knows what the gods signify will not let himself be carried away by discoveries in the physical realm - which merely displace sensory symbols, but do not abolish them - and still less by gratuitous hypotheses and the errors of psychologists. Even if we know that space is an eternal night sheltering galaxies and nebulae, the sky will still stretch blue above us and symbolize the realm of angels and of Bliss. [Understanding Islam, p. 112]. sophiaperennis: Science and Revelations

To say that Revelation is "supernatural" does not mean that it is contrary to nature in so far as nature can be taken to represent, by extension, all that is possible on any given level of reality, it means that Revelation does not originate at the level to which, rightly or wrongly, the epithet "natural" is normally applied. This "natural" level is precisely that of physical causes, and hence of sensory and psychic phenomena considered in relation to those causes. sophiaperennis: Science and Revelations

It is not surprising that a science arising out of the fall — or one of the falls— and out of an illusory rediscovery of the sensory world should also be a science of nothing but the sensory [NA: This distinction is necessary to meet the objection that science operates with elements inaccessible to our senses.], or what is virtually sensory, and that it should deny everything which surpasses that domain, thereby denying God, the next world and the soul [NA: Not all scientists deny these realities, but science denies them, and that is quite a different thing.], and this presupposes a denial of the pure Intellect, which alone is capable of knowing everything that modern science rejects. For the same reasons it also denies Revelation, which alone rebuilds the bridge broken by the fall. sophiaperennis: Science and Revelations

A symbol [NA: The word "symbol" implies "participation" or "aspect", whatever the difference of level may be involved.] is intrinsically so concrete and so efficacious that celestial manifestations, when they occur in our sensory world, "descend" to earth and "reascend" to Heaven; a symbolism accessible to the senses takes on the function of the supra-sensible reality which its reflects. Light-years and the relativity of the space-time relationship have absolutely nothing to do with the perfectly "exact" and "positive" symbolism of appearances and its connection at once analogical and ontological with the celestial or angelic orders... sophiaperennis: Science and Revelations

... it is normal for humanity to live in a symbol, which is a pointer towards heaven, an opening towards the Infinite. As for modem science it has pierced the protecting frontiers of this symbol and by so doing destroyed the symbol itself; it has thus abolished this pointer, this opening, even as the modem world in general breaks through the space-symbols constituted by traditional civilizations; what it terms ’stagnation’ and ’sterility’ is really the homogeneity and continuity of the symbol. [NA: Neither India nor the Pythagoreans practiced modern science, and to isolate where they are concerned the elements of rational technique reminiscent of our science from the metaphysical elements which bear no resemblance to it is an arbitrary and violent operation contrary to real objectivity. When Plato is decanted in this way he retains no more than an anecdotal interest, whereas his whole doctrine aims at installing man in the supra-temporal and supradiscursive life of thought of which both mathematics and the sensory world can be symbols. If, then, peoples have been able to do without our autonomous science for thousands of years and in every climate, it is because this science is not necessary; if it has appeared as a phenomenon of civilization suddenly and in a single place, that is to show its essentially contingent nature.’ (Fernand Brunner: Science et Réalité, Paris, 1954-)] [Understanding Islam, p. 30-31]. sophiaperennis: Science and Tradition

To say that Revelation is "supernatural" does not mean that it is contrary to nature in so far as nature can be taken to represent, by extension, all that is possible on any given level of reality, it means that Revelation does not originate at the level to which, rightly or wrongly, the epithet "natural" is normally applied. This "natural" level is precisely that of physical causes, and hence of sensory and psychic phenomena considered in relation to those causes. [Light on the Ancient Worlds, 34-38]. sophiaperennis: Science and Tradition

It is not surprising that a science arising out of the fall - or one of the falls - and out of an illusory rediscovery of the sensory world should also be a science of nothing but the sensory, or what is virtually sensory, [NA: This distinction is necessary to meet the objection that science operates with elements inaccessible to our senses] and that it should deny everything which surpasses that domain, thereby denying God, the next world and the soul, [NA: Not all scientists deny these realities, but science denies them, and that is quite a different thing.] and this presupposes a denial of the pure Intellect, which alone is capable of knowing everything that modern science rejects. sophiaperennis: Science and negation of Transcendence

A symbol is intrinsically so concrete and so efficacious that celestial manifestations, when they occur in our sensory world, "descend" to earth and "reascend" to Heaven; a symbolism accessible to the senses takes on the function of the supra-sensible reality which its reflects. Light-years and the relativity of the space-time relationship have absolutely nothing to do with the perfectly "exact" and "positive" symbolism of appearances and its connection at once analogical and ontological with the celestial or angelic orders, The fact that the symbol itself may be no more than an optical illusion in no way impairs its precision or its efficacy, for all appearances, including those of space and of the galaxies, are strictly speaking only illusions created by relativity. [Light on the Ancient Worlds, 36-37]. sophiaperennis: Science and negation of Transcendence