There is admittedly an uncomfortable tension in articulating the role of the intuitive because it would seem to pit science and reason against touchy-feely hocus-pocus. It need not do that as long as it simply remembers this: our universe is such that some but not all phenomena can be explained. Should a day come when all questions have been answered, art will cease to exist or have meaning. That day is inconceivable to the human mind, which processes a duality of infinites and finites. The mind is a microcosm in this respect — consciousness of a finite cosmos would preclude everything we know and how we go about knowing it.

Doctor-cum-novelist Walker Percy warned of the dangers of a "quasi-religious" scientific orthodoxy (Signposts in a Strange Land, 394), ironically enough since he was fond of describing himself as a "lapsed Catholic." He characterized his Catholic existentialism thus:

I suppose I would prefer to describe it as a certain view of man, an anthropology, if you like; of man as wayfarer, in a rather conscious contrast to prevailing views of man as organism, as encultured creature, as consumer, Marxist, as subject to such-and-such a scientific or psychological understanding — all of which he is, but not entirely. It is the "not entirely" I'm interested in — like the man Kierkegaard described who read Hegel, understood himself and the universe perfectly by noon, but then had the problem of living out the rest of the day. (Signposts in a Strange Land, 375, italics mine)

However religion may have played a role in his personal reckonings with the angst he felt, Percy left behind some of the most powerful writings we have on this peculiar "not entirely" aspect of being human. Fittingly, his preferred tactic was to "novelize philosophy" (382) much as Sartre had; that is, to use methods that were not purely philosophical, and not purely novelistic, to achieve something altogether greater than the sum of its parts. Percy can keep his religion; we need only appreciate the motives that drove him there. For that matter, I can still appreciate from a certain point of view a common refrain of one of my childhood preachers: "We are in this world, but we aren't of it."

That sentiment of displacement has been expressed by many philosophers and theologians. We exist between our own reasoned and intuited concepts of existence. We also exist between our artistic and scientific models of the world. We exist between what Hegel described as a kind of fundamental displacement or madness (Verrücktheit) and our developed consciousness (Daniel Berthold-Bond, Hegel's Theory of Madness, 39). We exist between void and infinity.