INTUITION, a term employed in philosophy and in ordinary life in many different meanings, some of which indeed are not only different but opposite. To disentangle them all adequately would require a discussion of the philosophical conceptions which lie at their several bases. The salient points may be indicated as follows. The constant element in the meaning of the term is that of direct or immediate apprehension.
Difficulty of Definition.—The difficulties and differences arise from different views as to what really is apprehended directly, as distinguished from what only appears to be so appre hended. One thing all would probably be agreed upon, namely, that the term intuition excludes all inference, all discursive reasoning, which is an indirect rather than a direct mode of apprehension. For the rest, however, the views are very con flicting. Some would include under intuition both sense intuition (or sense perception), like seeing a patch of colour, and conceptual or intellectual intuition, like grasping that "things equal to the same thing are equal to one another." Some would restrict the term to sense intuition only, and exclude all intellectual or con ceptual elements from it. And others, again, employ the term to denote a process that is hardly comparable with ordinary sense perception or with ordinary intellectual intuition. This is true not only of certain mystics, but also of some philosophers. In ordinary life, moreover, the term is often used to cover beliefs or prejudices which one cannot justify or excuse. Now even if intuitions may need no justification, it is a flagrant fallacy to treat every unwarranted opinion as an intuition, not to say an inspiration.
In Spinoza's Philosophy.—In the history of modern phil osophy the term intuition occupies a prominent position chiefly in the philosophy of Spinoza, in the moral philosophy of the so-called intuitionist or intuitionalist school, and in the philosophy of Bergson. The intuitionist school of moral philosophy is dealt with in the articles ETHICS and ETHICS, HISTORY OF. So we need only add a few words about intuition in the thought of Spinoza and of Bergson. Spinoza distinguished three main grades of knowledge or cognition. The lowest is that which is merely empirical, and does not rise above sense-perception ; the next higher stage is what may be called scientific knowledge, the knowledge acquired by careful reasoning about observed phe nomena—at this stage knowledge is no longer confined to mere particulars, more or less in isolation from each other, but in cludes the laws which connect them and gives them a certain orderliness. At the highest stage human knowledge rises to the comprehension of the whole universe as one inter-connected, self-dependent system, a complete pattern, so to say, of which the laws discovered at the second stage are the continuous but single strands. This highest kind of knowledge Spinoza called "intuitive knowledge" (scientia intuitiva). It rises above em pirical and scientific knowledge, but it grows out of them; they culminate in it. Spinoza did not want to deprecate either sense perception or ordinary conceptual activity when he set up "in tuitive knowledge" as the goal of intellectual and spiritual en deavour.
In Bergson's Philosophy.—In the philosophy of Bergson the case is rather different. His stress on intuition is definitely a pro
test against what he conceives to be the excessive tribute usually paid to intellect, or intelligence, and to science as the ripest fruit of intelligence. Bergson's advocacy of the claims of intuition is. one aspect of the growing recognition in recent decades of the part played by instinct, as contrasted with intelligence in human life. For Bergson intuition is simply "instinct that has become disinterested, self-conscious, capable of reflecting upon its object and of enlarging it indefinitely." Intelligence, according to Berg son, has for its original function the construction and use of inor ganic tools in the service of life. It is, therefore, most at home in the world of inert solids. Now, for the practical purpose of making tools it is convenient to treat material bodies as discrete units each divisible ad libitum. But when intelligence becomes theoretical, and seeks to explain life and thought as well as inert matter, then it leads astray. For it tends to treat all things as if they consisted of lifeless matter, and the whole of reality is re duced to a dead mechanism, for intelligence is unable to compre hend life.
This defect of intelligence must be made good by intuition, which as instinct is moulded on life, so that its procedure is organic, not mechanical. When the consciousness which slumbers in instinct awakes, when it is wound up into intuition instead of being wound off into action, it can reveal the most intimate secrets of life. Intuition leads us to the very inwardness of life as suc cessfully as intelligence guides us into the secrets of matter. Human consciousness is predominantly intellectual. But man is not entirely lacking in intuition, which functions whenever our deepest interests are at stake. "On our personality, our liberty, on the place we occupy in the whole of nature, on our origin and, perhaps, also on our destiny, it throws a light feeble and vacillating, but which none the less pierces the darkness of the night in which the intellect leaves us." And it is the function of philosophy to seize, to expand, and unite these floating intuitions, and so to introduce us into the spiritual life. Still, intuition must not be divorced from intellection, nor philosophy from science. A philos ophy which rises upon and above scientific foundations is a very different thing from mere mysticism.
Largely as the result of Bergson's stand against the exaggerated estimate of the conceptual or intellectual elements in human ori entation, various other thinkers have voiced the claims of what has been called the non-rational elements in human knowledge. It is possible that the pretensions of some forms of rationalism need checking. But the non-rational is apt to be rather inarticu late, and it is easy for obscurity to harbour the irrational as well as the merely non-rational or merely non-conceptual. (See also KNOWLEDGE, THEORY OF; LOGIC; ETHICS).
See H. Bergson, Introduction to Metaphysics (1912) and Creative Evolution (1922) ; R. Irrationalismus (1922).
(A. Wo.)