What is intellect ? Maeterlinck calls it "the quality which enables us to comprehend at last that all is incomprehensible". Humphreys says "intellect is an essential tool in the hands of a developed man. By it alone he climbs beyond the power of merely sensuous reaction and the sway of his desires. By it alone he compares, selects and evaluates in terms of an ever receding ideal.

According to R.H. Blyth "the intellect is guilty of constructing dogmas, systems of philosophy which imprison the mind until it mopes like a monkey in a cage".

According to Aldous Huxley "In the last analysis the use and purpose of reason is to create the internal and external conditions fovourable to its own transfiguration by and into spirit. It is the lamp by which it finds the way to go beyond itself"

Dr. Suzuki points our "the intellect upsets the blissful peace of ignorance, and yet it does not restore the former state of things by offering something else… It is not final, it awaits for something higher than itself for the solution of all the questions it will raise regardless of consequences".