Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 2. On His Own and Others’ Poetry
Section 2. On Poets and Poetry
Philosophers, Intellectuals, Novelists and Musicians

Intellectual Capacity of Mystics

A great scientist has written that mystics and spiritual men the world over have in general always been men of very average intelligence, a handful of rare instances excepted.

As for your great scientist I wonder who he had in mind as spiritual men — so far as I know history both in the East and the West there have been any number of spiritual men and mystics who have had a great or fine intellectual capacity or were endowed with a great administrative and organising ability implying a keen knowledge of men and much expenditure of brain-power. With a little looking up of the records of the past I think one could collect some hundreds of names — which would not include of course the still greater number not recorded in history or the transmitted memory of the past.