Intuitionism

“ It is a faculty, the importance of which is but little understood by the majority of men. Inasmuch as the mental image must always precede the material manifestation, the cultivation of the Imagination becomes a matter of great importance and worthy of the closest study.
Intuition is the faculty of the Mind whereby it evolves what have been called Primary Truths or Primary Ideas. By Primary Ideas are meant the ideas of Space, Time, Cause, Identity, etc. By Primary Truths are meant the so-called "Self-Evident Truths" of geometry, mathematics and logic. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But the image that is now passing through my brain of a me writing in another room, in another town, with different paper, pen and ink, is also an intuition. This means that the distinction between reality and non-reality is extraneous, secondary, to the true nature of intuition. If we assume the existence of a human mind which should have intuitions for the first time, it would seem that it could have intuitions of effective reality only, that is to say, that it could have perceptions of nothing but the real. ”

“ When did this "spiritual intuition" become the property of man—before, or after, birth? Is it of supernatural, or miraculous, origin, and is it possible that this "spiritual intuition" is independent of the man? Is it based upon experience? 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? ”

“ We are so constructed, mentally, that we must believe those primary facts which the sensory impressions certify to us to be facts. On the veracity of this certification we are absolutely dependent, because we can not contradict the affirmations of reality which causation makes to our intuitive mental perceptions. On this veracity we risk our lives; we could not be safe if we were not subjected to this belief. Intuition, therefore, is something anterior to experience; it is that power by which the first experience and the last become to us the means of belief in a reality. ”

“ The plane of mind immediately above that of Intellect is that known as Intuition. Intuition is defined by Webster as follows: "Direct apprehension or cognition; immediate knowledge, as in perception or consciousness, involving no reasoning process; quick or ready insight or apprehension." It is difficult to explain just what is meant by Intuition, except to those who have experienced it—and these people do not need the explanation. Intuition is just as real a mental faculty as is Intellect—or, to be more exact, is just as much a collection of mental faculties. ”

“ 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.... ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The more it advances in this work, the more will it perceive that intuition is mind itself, and, in a certain sense, life itself: the intellect has been cut out of it by a process resembling that which has generated matter. Thus is revealed the unity of the spiritual life. We recognize it only when we place ourselves in intuition in order to go from intuition to the intellect, for from the intellect we shall never pass to intuition.
Philosophy introduces us thus into the spiritual life. And it shows us at the same time the relation of the life of the spirit to that of the body. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If intuition were the most perfect sort of knowledge we should not need — and indeed there could not be — any science of Psychology, at least if the object of psychology is supposed to be the knowledge of "data or processes of consciousness". ”

“ Revelation is probable, as the voice of God's mercy to the child of His love. Inspiration becomes [pg 029] possible, for the intuitional consciousness seems adapted to be used by divine Providence as its instrument.104
But the type of mind created by the use of intuition as a test of truth is rarely alone. It is cognate to, if it is not connected with, that produced by the third of the above-named tests, feeling. The emotions, according to a law of spiritual supply and demand, suggest the reality of the objects toward which they are aspirations. ”

“ When a stone lies before me, I am conscious of certain sensations which I receive from it; but if I say that these sensations come to me from an external object which I perceive, the meaning of these words is, that receiving the sensations, I intuitively believe that an external cause of those sensations exists. The laws of intuitive belief, and the conditions under which it is legitimate, are a subject which, as we have already so often remarked, belongs not to logic, but to the science of the ultimate laws of the human mind. ”

“ Analysis cuts the channels; intuition supplies the water. Intuition acquires and analysis expends.
It is not a question of banning analysis; science could not do without it, and philosophy could not do without science. But we must reserve for it its normal place and its just task.
Concepts are the deposited sediment of intuition: intuition produces the concepts, not the concepts intuition. From the heart of intuition you will have no difficulty in seeing how it splits up and analyses into concepts, concepts of such and such a kind or such and such a shade. ”

“ That is to say, the form of thought is declared to be superior to the matter of thought—a truly remarkable contention! What is reason if it has no material to work up? And whence comes the material but from sensation and intuition? Moreover, even when the material is furnished to the reasoning processes, the conclusions arrived at have to be brought continuously and relentlessly to the bar, not only of physical fact, but also to that of intuition and sentiment, if serious errors are to be avoided. Systematising and speculative zeal have a tendency to run ahead of their data. ”

“ But to admit the independence of intuition as regards concept does not suffice to give a true and precise idea of intuition. Another error arises among those who recognize this, or who at any rate do not explicitly make intuition dependent upon the intellect, to obscure and confuse the real nature of intuition. By intuition is frequently understood perception, or the knowledge of actual reality, the apprehension of something as real. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Necessarily, nothing can be so simple, or so certain, in one sense, as intuitions, that is, those things which we know or believe without any intermediate process of thought, and yet, down to the present time, those who have most deeply studied the subject hesitate to decide exactly as to what are intuitions, and what are not. ”

“ But if the critical intellect carrying our intuition (if we may so speak in a figure) round the circle of our nature, and in turn placing it in juxtaposition with the rest, finds that no collision ensues, we may safely conclude that the witness of that intuition is true. ”

“ If this conception is to indicate by the term substance, an object that can be given, if it is to become a cognition, we must have at the foundation of the cognition a permanent intuition, as the indispensable condition of its objective reality. For through intuition alone can an object be given. But in internal intuition there is nothing permanent, for the Ego is but the consciousness of my thought. ”

“ Its province is, as it were, to capture ideas from the infinite and present them to the mind to be dealt with at its discretion. In our mental constitution the intuition is the point of origination and, therefore, for it to cease to act spontaneously would be for it to cease to act at all. But the experience of a long succession of observers shows that the intuition can be trained so as to acquire increased sensitiveness in some, particular direction, and the choice of the general direction is determined by the will of the individual. ”

“ At the most they may be considered as proper to the human spirit, but since the human spirit belongs to the universal spirit, and the universal spirit is identical with the whole, and the whole is inexpressible because it cannot be distinguished from anything else (since no reality exists outside it) , your final result is that intuition is an element of reality—that is to say, you know just as much about it as you knew before. ”

“ Abstract conceptions are, in fact, in the live and serious work of thought, a mere preparation for intuitions and experiences that lie on higher levels than those which, apart from abstract conceptions, we men can reach. Reasoning processes are fruitful because they involve sorts of experience, forms of intuition, that you cannot reach without them. In brief, reason and experience are not opposed. There is an opposition between inarticulate intuition and articulate insight. There is also an opposition between relatively blind experience of any sort and relatively rational experience. ”

“ Material senses reasoned that, given all these qualities, such a play must be horrible, and unduly strenuous. But intuition set all this reasoning awry. You see, intuition doesn’t reason; it knows. It is better to know than to reason. ”

“ In intuition we are simply spectators, and the object affirms itself to us. In intuition of the infinite, it is not we who perceive and affirm the infinite, by our own intellectual act, but the infinite that reveals and affirms itself to our intellect. ”

“ 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. ”