Prophecy in general is a modification of inspiration.  Inspiration is sight, or rather it is insight. All our knowledge comes to us through the intellectual power which may be called sight, which is of two kinds,—­the sight of external things, or outsight; and the sight of internal things, which is insight, or intuition.  The senses constitute the organization by which we see external things; consciousness is the organization by which we perceive internal things.  Now the organs of sense are the same in kind, but differ in degree in all men.  All human beings, as such, have the power of perceiving an external world, by means of the five senses.  But though all have these five senses, all do not perceive the same external phenomena by means of them.  For, in the first place, their senses differ in degrees of power.  Some men’s eyes are telescopic, some microscopic, and some are blind.  Some men can but partially distinguish colors, others not at all.  Some have acute hearing, others are deaf.  And secondly, what men perceive through the senses differs according to what is about them.  A man living in China cannot see Mont Blanc or the city of New York; a man on the other side of the moon can never see the earth.  A man living in the year 1871 cannot see Alexander the Great or the Apostle Paul.  And thirdly, two persons may be looking at the same thing, and with senses of the same degree of power, and yet one may be able to see what the other is not able to see.  Three men, one a geologist, one a botanist, and one a painter, may look at the same landscape, and one will see the stratification, the second will see the flora, and the third the picturesque qualities of the scene.  As regards outsight then, though men in general have the same senses to see with, what they see depends (1) on their quality of sense, (2) on their position in space and time, (3) and on their state of mental culture.

That which is true of the perception of external phenomena is also true of the perception of internal things.

Insight, or intuition, has the same limitations as outsight.  These are (1) the quality of the faculty of intuition; (2) the inward circumstances or position of the soul; (3) the soul’s culture or development.  Those who deny the existence of an intuitive faculty, teaching that all knowledge comes from without through the senses, sometimes say that if there were such a faculty as intuition, men would all possess intuitively the same knowledge of moral and spiritual truth.  They might as well say that, as all men have eyes, all must see the same external objects.