The fact that the philosophic mode of thought is centered on logic and not directly on intuition implies that intuition is left at the mercy of logic's needs: in Scholastic disputations it was a question of avoiding certain truths which, given the general level of mentality, might have given rise to certain dangerous conclusions.

Scholasticism, it should be remembered, is above all a defense against error: its aim is to be an apologetic and not, as in the case of "metaphysically operative" doctrines – gnosis or jnana – a support for meditation and contemplation. Before Scholasticism, Greek philosophy had also aimed to satisfy a certain need for causal explanations rather than to furnish the intelligence with a means of realization; moreover, the disinterested character of truth easily becomes, on the level of speculative logic, a tendency towards "art for art's sake," whence the ventosa loquacitas philosophorum stigmatized by Saint Bernard.

Some will certainly raise the objection that traditional metaphysics, whether of the East or the West, makes use of rational argumentations like any philosophy; but an argumentation a man uses to describe to his fellow men what he knows is one thing, and an argumentation a man uses on himself because he knows nothing is quite another. This is a capital distinction for it marks the whole difference between the intellectual "visionary" and the mere "thinker" who "gropes alone through the darkness" (Descartes) and whose pride it is to deny that there could be any knowledge which does not proceed in the same fashion.