Intuition

“ Truths are known to us in two ways: some are known directly, and of themselves; some through the medium of other truths. The former are the subject of Intuition, or Consciousness;4 the latter, of Inference. The truths known by intuition are the original premises from which all others are inferred. Our assent to the conclusion being grounded on the truth of the premises, we never could arrive at any knowledge by reasoning, unless something could be known antecedently to all reasoning.
Examples of truths known to us by immediate consciousness, are our own bodily sensations and mental feelings. ”

“ Understanding, or the force of conceiving and combining, independently of the sensible order, is another of the data furnished by our own experience. As this is a fact of consciousness, we know it by intuition, not by abstract ideas; it is the exercise of an activity which we feel within ourselves; it is the me which we ourselves are. ”

“ Intuition, in its wide sense, furnishes material; reason works it up. Intuition moves about in worlds not systematised; reason reduces them to order. Reflective thought dealing with the phenomena presented to it by sensation has three tasks before it—to find out the nature of the objects, to trace their causes, and to trace their effects. And whereas each intuitional experience stands alone and isolated in its immediacy, reason groups these single experiences together, investigates their conditions, and makes them subserve definite conscious purposes. ”

“ But in fact the opposition of instinct and reason is mainly illusory. Instinct, intuition, or insight is what first leads to the beliefs which subsequent reason confirms or confutes; but the confirmation, where it is possible, consists, in the last analysis, of agreement with other beliefs no less instinctive. Reason is a harmonising, controlling force rather than a creative one. Even in the most purely logical realm, it is insight that first arrives at what is new. ”

“ The student should find in his own intuitions all the proof needed of the existence on this earth of the Wisdom teachers. Behind the screen of the senses reposes the soul of man—an unfathomable factor in the Universe—as unknown to its possessor as to its observers. Intuition is its only avenue of communication, and the language it speaks is known only to him who understands arcane knowledge or occultism. ”

“ Certainly perception is intuition: the perception of the room in which I am writing, of the ink-bottle and paper that are before me, of the pen I am using, of the objects that I touch and make use of as instruments of my person, which, if it write, therefore exists;—these are all intuitions. ”

“ This divining power of intuition is the power which lies above and behind the so-called rational mind; the rational mind formulates a question and lays it before the intuition, which gives a real answer, often immediately distorted by the rational mind, yet always embodying a kernel of truth. It is by this process, through which the rational mind brings questions to the intuition for solution, that the truths of science are reached, the flashes of discovery and genius. ”

“ Now, as all our intuition is sensuous, imagination, by reason of the subjective condition under which alone it can give a corresponding intuition to the conceptions of the understanding, belongs to sensibility. ”

“ We have intended, then, to say that all our intuition is nothing but the re-presentation of phenomena; that the things which we intuite are not in themselves the same as our re-presentations of them in intuition, nor are their relations so constituted as they appear to us; and that if we take away the subject, or even only the subjective constitution of our senses in general, then not only the nature and relations of objects in space and time, but even space and time themselves disappear.... ”

“ The thoughts which are most valuable are those which come unbidden, rising to the surface of consciousness from unknown depths. The best scientific discoveries are made in much the same way; the investigator has an intuition and forthwith sets to work to justify it. Reason, by which we ordinarily mean the conscious exercise of the mental faculties, plods along as if on four feet; intuition soars on wings. ”

“ Or does one seriously think he understands better how the knower 'connects' its objects, when one calls the former a transcendental Ego and the latter a 'Manifold of Intuition' than when one calls them Thought and Things respectively? Knowing must have a vehicle. Call the vehicle Ego, or call it Thought, Psychosis, Soul, Intelligence, Consciousness, Mind, Reason, Feeling,—what you like—it must know. ”

“ Intuitive cognition is that in which the object is presented to the understanding, such as it is, and upon which the perceptive faculty has to exercise no function but that of contemplation; it is therefore called intuition, from intueri, to see. ”

“ It is not in philosophy, therefore, that we can hope to see intuition at its best. On the contrary, since the true objects of philosophy, and the habits of thought demanded for their apprehension, are strange, unusual, and remote, it is here, more almost than anywhere else, that intellect proves superior to intuition, and that quick unanalysed convictions are least deserving of uncritical acceptance. ”

“ Because of these affinities the spirit swiftly by intuition can interpret nature to itself even as our humanity instinctively comprehends the character betrayed by the curve of lips or the mood which lurks within haunting eyes. ”

“ Was it in any way born of the senses, or of the effect of nature upon the brain—that is to say, of things seen, or heard, or touched? Is a "spiritual intuition" an entity? If man can exist without the "spiritual intuition," do you insist that the "spiritual intuition" can exist without the man? ”

“ If this perception is called intuition, we have intuition of the substantiality of our soul.
48. The thinking being not only perceives itself but it knows itself as a real object, to which, by means of reflection, it applies the ideas of being, unity, permanence, and the subject of modifications. Therefore the soul may be the true predicate of propositions resting on logic and consciousness. ”

“ Is there really any special difficulty in supposing that the infinite intelligence can directly disclose His nature to a creature fashioned in His image, the disclosure quickening the latent power of intuition, which, thus touched from above, springs forth to meet its source and object? ”

“ Subject and object in one,—the conscious being and that of which I am conscious, gifted with intuitive knowledge and myself revealed in that intuition, the thinking mind and myself the object of the thought—inseparable, and ever present to each other. ”

“ It is, we repeat, a spiritual sense opening inwardly, as the physical senses open outwardly; and because it has the capacity to perceive, grasp, and know the truth at first hand, independent of all external sources of information, we call it intuition. ”

“ All our knowledge begins with sense, proceeds thence to understanding, and ends with reason, beyond which nothing higher can be discovered in the human mind for elaborating the matter of intuition and subjecting it to the highest unity of thought. ”

“ Are you not making a transient confusion of intuitions with innate ideas? The most thorough experientialists admit intuition—i.e., direct impressions of sensibility underlying all proof, as necessary starting-points for thought. ”

“ I reply that, in fact, all true insight is, to my mind, rational insight, upon one or another level of the development of our power to become rational beings. But you will remember that insight, as I defined it, also means knowledge which is intimate and manifold, as well as knowledge which views facts and relations in their unity. The words intuition and experience are often used to lay stress upon that aspect of our insight which either makes it intimate or else brings it into touch with many and various facts. ”

“ The twofold action of the Ego in reflection upon intuition—that by which it contemplates intuition as the object, that by which subjectively it is aware that the intuition is a mental fact—explains the thought-relation between the external object as the original, and the intuition as its copy or representative, and also explains the distinction we draw in consciousness between inner and outer intuition. ”

“ Intuition and conceptions constitute, therefore, the elements of all our knowledge, so that neither conceptions without an intuition in some way corresponding to them, nor intuition without conceptions, can afford us a cognition. ”

“ Indeed, I will incidentally remark that I suspect the word “intuition” has been a very good addition to our vocabulary, and I suppose its proper import might be represented as follows:—Reason has two modes of his exercise, the one is called reasoning, and the other intuition. Intuition is the decision of reason on one single point; reasoning—a word proper to demonstrative truth—seems to be nothing more than intuition looking not merely at one point, but at several points successively. ”

“ We understand him to define ideal intuition as an act of God presenting himself to the intellect as its object, and to call the act of the intellect apprehending this ideal object empirical intuition. We understand him also to identify the immediate object on which the active intellect exercises its discursive operations with real, necessary being—i.e. God—although it does not make the judgment that eternal verities are real being, and that real being is God, immediately, but by means of reflection and reasoning. ”

“ Either we affirm the intuition of the concrete, real object, from which the abstract conception of the good, the beautiful, and the true is derived, or we can prove only the existence of these conceptions in the mind, and cannot argue from the conceptions to the reality, or in any way perceive clearly the existence of the reality in an order external to our own mind. ”

“ If you have intuitions at all, they come from a deeper level of your nature than the loquacious level which rationalism inhabits. Your whole subconscious life, your impulses, your faiths, your needs, your divinations, have prepared the premises, of which your consciousness now feels the weight of the result; and something in you absolutely knows that that result must be truer than any logic-chopping rationalistic talk, however clever, that may contradict it. ”

“ Suppose that he replies, 'This intuition may be valid evidence for you, but I have no such irrepressible instinct; I see no evidence in favour of innate ideas in the soul, or of a substance underneath the phenomena of nature of which we can have any adequate knowledge;' we may close the argument by simple re-assertion, and vindicate our procedure on the ground that in the region of first principles there can be no farther proof. ”

“ The effort of intuition is the reversal of the intellectual effort to abstract and explain which is our usual way of treating facts, and these two ways of attending are incompatible and cannot both be carried on together. Intuition, (or, to give it a more familiar name, direct knowledge,) reveals fact: intellectual attention analyses and classifies this fact in order to explain it in general terms, that is to explain it by substituting abstractions for the actual fact. ”

“ Which treats of the intuition of naked truths in the understanding, explaining how they are of two kinds and how the soul is to conduct itself with respect to them.
In order to speak properly of this intuition of naked truths which is conveyed to the understanding, the writer would need God to take his hand and to guide his pen; for know, dear reader, that what they are to the soul cannot be expressed in words. ”

“ The notion that truths external to the mind may be known by intuition or consciousness, independently of observation and experience, is, I am persuaded, in these times, the great intellectual support of false doctrines and bad institutions. ”

“ This intuition of a homogeneous medium, an intuition peculiar to man, enables us to externalize our concepts in relation to one another, reveals to us the objectivity of things, and thus, in two ways, on the one hand by getting everything ready for language, and on the other by showing us an external world, quite distinct from ourselves, in the perception of which all minds have a common share, foreshadows and prepares the way for social life. ”

“ Their immediate ideal intuition is something involute and out of the reach of consciousness, until contact with sensible objects, reflection, experience and instruction bring it into the state of evolution. ”

“ These same defenders, when the nature of intuition is explained to them from the laws of intelligence itself, themselves draw this inference anew, and never weary of repeating that there must be something external to us which compels us to this belief. ”

“ If the intuition must conform to the nature of the objects, I do not see how we can know anything of them a priori. If, on the other hand, the object conforms to the nature of our faculty of intuition, I can then easily conceive the possibility of such an a priori knowledge. ”

“ The first or surface mind of man is in itself only cell consciousness, touched by man's own intellect, and it is known as instinct, his second expression of mind is known as reason, the third is emotion or feeling, and the fourth is instinct, reason and emotion blended into one, and called intuition. ”

“ But in any case, whether one be analyst, physicist, biologist or psychologist, the characteristic trait of the intuition is the direct appreciation of relationships between the objects of thought, which unite them into a complete structure, unitary in character and harmonious in form. ”

“ The importance of recognizing our power of thus giving direction to the intuition cannot be exaggerated, for if the mind is attuned to sympathy with the highest phases of spirit this power opens the door to limitless possibilities of knowledge. ”