Knowledge and Love

Frithjof Schuon
a section from Spiritual Perspectives and Human Facts.

The Intellect is not cerebral nor is it specifically human or angelic; all beings “possess” it. If gold is not lead, this is because it “knows” the Divine better; its “knowledge” is in its very form, and this amounts to saying that the form does not belong to it in its own right since matter cannot know. Nonetheless we can say that the rose differs from the water lily by its intellectual particularity, by its “way of knowing”, and thus by its mode of intelligence.

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Spiritual Perspectives and Human Facts: A New Translation with Selected Letters. World Wisdom, 2007. Republished here with thanks.