René Guènon's books take a standpoint which attracts an increasing number of Europeans. It needs to be understood thoroughly. It represents the latest of several of his own personal phases--including Catholic, Sceptical, Hindu, and lastly Muhammedan-Sufi. Guènon makes two important contributions to thought. First, he rightly perceives that science can add metaphysics not to displace itself but to complete itself. But what sort of metaphysics shall it be? If merely a speculation or a dogmatism, then that may lead only to further error. It must be a metaphysics based primarily on the mystical intuition and secondarily on the metaphysics of Truth, whose principle tenet, mentalism, is raised both out of observed facts, out of man's sense relations of the external world and his experience of it, and out of mystical seership. Is Guènon's system of this kind? Unfortunately, it is only partially so. Therefore, its grand truths suffer from certain insufficiencies and some errors. Second, Guènon rightly sees the existence of a universal crisis, but he misses one chief purpose and result of this crisis and that is its tremendous destructiveness. It is breaking adherence to past tendencies and shattering old forms. He fails to see that any return to vanished tradition could never be an internal but only an external one. It would lack reality, naturalness, and vitality. Yet his work possesses special importance not only, as he believes, for Western seekers who have thrown off conventional religious fetters but especially for the more intellectual.
-- Notebooks Category 7: The Intellect > Chapter 7 : Metaphysics of Truth > # 98
