Apprehension and Comprehension

Dr. Ted Thornton · Confusing Words Series · 6 pages

A short editorial note distinguishing two words for grasping something, and locating each in a different faculty. Cold reason is called purely human, a faculty of the brain, while natural instinct is an endowment of deity — and the two stand in inverse relation, reason developing only at the expense of instinct. Reason is the outcome of the slow development of the human brain, the noetikon; instinct is the spiritual unity of the five senses, the aisthetikon.

Comprehension, on this reading, waits on something not yet generally present: only when the sixth sense fully develops in the average man of the Sixth Race, by Buddhi galvanised by the essence of the awakened Manas, can a man comprehend clearly what he beholds. That state is called spiritual clairvoyance as against psychic — the one normal and real, the other abnormal and counterfeit. Four epigraphs frame the argument, from Shakespeare on man in apprehension how like a god, Newton on the point that a man may imagine what is false but can only understand what is true, Bergson on some faculty other than intellect being necessary, and Balzac on wisdom as the apprehension of heavenly things. A fuller treatment is in Sixth Sense is Reason over Instinct, in the Constitution of Man series.

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