14. Our highest degree of knowledge is intuitive, without reasoning.
Some of the ideas that are in the mind, are so
there, that they can be by themselves immediately compared one with another: and in these the mind is able to
perceive that they agree or disagree as clearly as that it has them. Thus the mind perceives, that an arch of a circle
is less than the whole circle, as clearly as it does the idea of a circle: and this, therefore, as has been said, I call
intuitive knowledge; which is certain, beyond all doubt, and needs no probation, nor can have any; this being the
highest of all human certainty. In this consists the evidence of all those maxims which nobody has any doubt
about, but every man (does not, as is said, only assent to, but) knows to be true, as soon as ever they are proposed
to his understanding. In the discovery of and assent to these truths, there is no use of the discursive faculty, no
need of reasoning, but they are known by a superior and higher degree of evidence. And such, if I may guess at
things unknown, I am apt to think that angels have now, and the spirits of just men made perfect shall have, in a
future state, of thousands of things which now either wholly escape our apprehensions, or which our short-sighted
reason having got some faint glimpse of, we, in the dark, grope after.
