Why can't nature be determined through reason alone?

If our minds and our reason evolved to model the natural world for the purpose of predicting circumstances and enhancing our survival, it should follow that our minds would be suited to understanding the natural world.

It should also stand to reason that our success as a species points to successful modelling of the natural world, since an inaccurate perception would hinder our ability to flourish.

However, many of the greatest minds throughout history have attempted to investigate the nature of things through their own reason and failed monumentally. It is only since the advent of the scientific method, which plants seeds of distrust of our own perceptions, that we have developed an accurate view of the natural world.

So why have we evolved a sense of reason that does not regularly understand the physical world intuitively?