Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 3. 1936-37
1936-37
If even the intellect usually takes a hasty look without reasoning in a logical way, why should people spend so much time, energy and money developing it? The growth of the physical mind should serve their purpose!
People don’t take time etc. for developing the intellect. It is only one man out of thousands who has a trained intellect. In others it is either ill-developed, undeveloped or very partially developed.
The intellect of most men is extremely imperfect, ill-trained, 
half-developed – therefore in most the conclusions of the intellect are hasty, ill-founded and erroneous or, if right, right more by chance than by merit or right working. The conclusions are formed without knowing the facts or the correct or sufficient data, merely by a rapid inference, or the process by which it comes from the premises to the conclusion is usually illogical or faulty – the process being unsound by which the conclusion is arrived at, the conclusion also is likely to be fallacious. At the same time the intellect is usually arrogant and presumptuous, confidently asserting its imperfect conclusions as the truth and setting down as mistaken, stupid or foolish those who differ from them. Even when fully trained and developed, the intellect cannot arrive at absolute certitude or complete truth, but it can arrive at one aspect or side of it and make a reasonable or probable affirmation; but untrained, it is a quite insufficient instrument, at once hasty and peremptory and unsafe and unreliable. That is why I laid stress on its habit of hasty look and conclusion.