There is one path which may be called the way of the intellectual. When an intellectual person has risen above his intellectuality it is then that he may be called an intelligent person. For there is a difference between the intellectual and the intelligent. An intellectual person is he who has gathered knowledge by impressions, by studies; and he is the king of the domain of his intellect. What he has learned, what he has studied, what he has experienced, he has kept in the book of his mind; and that is his world. But it makes him captive to a limited horizon of knowledge, and it is the rising above that knowledge which may be called intelligence.

Yet it is the intellectual person who is capable of being intelligent; intellect is a cover over intelligence, and when this cover is taken off then a person becomes intelligent.

The intelligent one is he who perceives for himself, who learns for himself, who understands for himself, who recognizes things by himself, who is a pupil and who is a teacher within himself at the same time.

Once a person has risen above the boundaries of his limited knowledge, then the higher knowledge begins to come to him by itself. He begins to learn more in one moment than an intellectual person would learn after having read all the books in the library during many years. When once an intelligent person has got an insight into the hidden laws of nature, he begins to see a way opening to the higher knowledge. His reasoning changes its nature; it becomes the essence of reason. He does not see things through the reason he has learned from the world, but he begins to see the reason of all reasons, the reason which is covered by ordinary reasoning.

Man is born intelligent; it is afterwards that recovers his intelligence and that he is glad to call it intellect. Then he is recognized as being learned, and he thinks that he has acquired some knowledge, but it is at this point that he makes his intelligence limited. And as long as his intelligence is limited, he cannot see further than he sees.

There is a time in a person's life when he is learning, and there comes a time when he himself is knowledge. It is at the time when the soul becomes knowledge itself that it begins to have glimpses into the hidden laws of nature; and this illumination may develop so that a person sees the whole of manifestation clearly and fully in the light of intelligence.

The Qur'an says, "God is the Light of the heavens and of the earth."

And if there is any spark of God that can be found in man, it is his intelligence. Naturally, therefore, when this divine light which is hidden in man is once brought to a blaze and has risen as a flame, it illuminates his path towards perfection.