The centaur Author:Algernon Blackwood Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Not that he was fool enough to despise Reason in what he called its proper place, but that he was ' wise' enough—not that he was ' intellectual' enough !— to rec... more »ognize its futility in measuring the things of the soul. For him there existed a more fundamental understanding than Reason, and it was, apparently, an inner and natural understanding. ' The greatest Teacher we ever had,' I once heard him say, c ignored the intellect, and who, will ye tell me, can by searching find out God ? And yet what else is worth finding out ? . . . Isn't it only by becoming as a little child—a child that feels and never reasons things—that any one shall enter the kingdom ? . . . Where will the giant intellects be before the Great White Throne when a simple man with the heart of a child will top the lot of 'em ?' ' Nature, I'm convinced,' he said another time, though he said it with puzzled eyes and a mind obviously groping, ' is our next step. Reason has done its best for centuries, and gets no further. It can get no further, for it can do nothing for the inner life which is the sole reality. We must return to Nature and a purified intuition, to a greater reliance upon what is now subconscious, back to that sweet, grave guidance of the Universe which we've discarded with the primitive state—a spiritual intelligence, really, divorced from mere intellectuality.' And by Nature he did not mean a return to savagery. There was no idea of going backwards in his wild words. Rather he looked forwards, in some way hard to understand, to a state when Man, with the best results of Reason in his pocket, might return to the instinctive life—to feeling with—to the sinking down of the modern, exaggerated intellectual personality into its rightful place as guide instead ofleader. He called it a Return to Nat...« less