"The mind can assert anything and pretend it has proved it. My beliefs I test on my body, on my intuitional consciousness, and when I get a response there, then I accept"
About this Quote
Reason, for Lawrence, is a brilliant actor that can perform any part and then bow as if the play were fact. Logic can stitch together arguments that feel airtight while remaining detached from lived reality; we rationalize, decorate our preferences with syllogisms, and mistake fluency for truth. The phrase "pretend it has proved it" exposes how easily the intellect slips from inquiry into theater, using the props of proof to mask desire or fear.
His countermeasure is a test in the flesh: beliefs must pass through the body and the deep, pre-verbal layer he called intuitional consciousness. When he feels a real response there, he accepts. This is not mere gut impulsiveness but a call to embodied verification. In his essays he spoke of "blood-consciousness", a knowing older than the bladed light of intellect. The stance grows from his broader revolt against a mechanized modernity that prized control, abstraction, and utility, often at the expense of vitality. After a war that showcased the cold prowess of reason yoked to machines, he looked for a ground more trustworthy than argument alone.
The body offers such a ground because it registers consequences without rhetoric. A belief that is true-for-life will steady the breath, clarify attention, kindle or quiet the nerves; a false one will cramp, numb, or agitate. This is a pragmatic measure akin to William James: truth shows itself in the cash value of experience. It also anticipates embodied cognition and somatic therapies that treat the body as a site of intelligence, not just a vehicle.
Lawrence is not urging anti-intellectualism. He wants hierarchy reversed: intellect as servant to a richer organismic sense. The test is existential, not mathematical; it yields guidance, not universal proof. By marrying thought to felt life, he seeks a form of knowledge resistant to self-deception, a standard intimate enough to be honest and robust enough to resist the mind’s talent for pretending.
His countermeasure is a test in the flesh: beliefs must pass through the body and the deep, pre-verbal layer he called intuitional consciousness. When he feels a real response there, he accepts. This is not mere gut impulsiveness but a call to embodied verification. In his essays he spoke of "blood-consciousness", a knowing older than the bladed light of intellect. The stance grows from his broader revolt against a mechanized modernity that prized control, abstraction, and utility, often at the expense of vitality. After a war that showcased the cold prowess of reason yoked to machines, he looked for a ground more trustworthy than argument alone.
The body offers such a ground because it registers consequences without rhetoric. A belief that is true-for-life will steady the breath, clarify attention, kindle or quiet the nerves; a false one will cramp, numb, or agitate. This is a pragmatic measure akin to William James: truth shows itself in the cash value of experience. It also anticipates embodied cognition and somatic therapies that treat the body as a site of intelligence, not just a vehicle.
Lawrence is not urging anti-intellectualism. He wants hierarchy reversed: intellect as servant to a richer organismic sense. The test is existential, not mathematical; it yields guidance, not universal proof. By marrying thought to felt life, he seeks a form of knowledge resistant to self-deception, a standard intimate enough to be honest and robust enough to resist the mind’s talent for pretending.
Quote Details
| Topic | Truth |
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