Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays

Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays, by Bertrand Russell, includes a passage saying that mystical philosophy, in all ages and in all parts of the world, is characterised by certain beliefs. The passage names, first, the belief in insight as against discursive analytic knowledge, a way of wisdom, sudden, penetrating, coercive, contrasted with the slow and fallible study of outward appearance. The text quotes the words that you cannot know what is not, that this is impossible, nor utter it, for it is the same thing that can be thought and that can be.

A passage on continuity says that to know that actual space has these properties would require an infinite exactness of sense-perception. The text gives, as the chief reason for supposing a principle true, that it seems scarcely possible to believe that we can make a judgment or entertain a supposition without knowing what it is that we are judging or supposing about.