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INTUITION
Every one of us possesses the faculty, the
interior sense, that is known by the name of intuition, but
how rare are those who know how to develop it! It is, however,
only by the aid of this faculty that men can ever see things
in their true colours. It is an instinct of the soul, which
grows in us in proportion to the employment we give it, and
which helps us to perceive and understand the realities of
things with far more certainty than can the simple use of
our senses and exercise of our reason. What are called good
sense and logic enable us to see only the appearances of things,
that which is evident to every one. The instinct of which
I speak, being a projection of our perceptive consciousness,
a projection which acts from the subjective to the objective,
and not vice versa, awakens in us spiritual senses and power
to act; these senses assimilate to themselves the essence
of the object or of the action under examination, and represent
it to us as it really is, not as it appears to our physical
senses and to our cold reason. "We begin with instinct,
we end with omniscience."
- H. P. BLAVATSKY
Intuition
Intuition (Latin intueri, to look into) is a psychological
and philosophical term which designates the process of immediate
apprehension or perception of an actual fact, being, or relation
between two terms and its results. Hence the words Intuitionism
or Intuitionalism mean those systems in philosophy which consider
intuition as the fundamental process of our knowledge or at
least give to intuition a large place (the Scottish school),
and the words Intuitive Morality and Intuitional Ethics denote
those ethical theories which base morality on an intuitive
apprehension of the moral principles and laws, or consider
intuition as capable of distinguishing the moral qualities
of our actions (Shaftesbury, Hutcheson Reid, Dugald Stewart).
As an element of educational method intuition means the grasp
of knowledge by concrete, experimental or intellectual, ways
of apprehension. The immediate perception of sensuous or material
objects by our senses is called sensuous or empirical intuition,
the immediate apprehension of intellectual or immaterial objects
by our intelligence is called intellectual intuition. It may
be remarked that Kant calls empirical intuitions our knowledge
of objects through sensation, and pure intuition our perception
of space and time as the forms a priori of sensibility. Again,
our intuitions may be called external or internal, according
as the objects perceived are external objects or internal
objects or acts.
The importance of intuition as a process and
element of knowledge is easily seen if we observe that it
is intuition which furnishes us with the first experimental
data as well as with the primary concepts and the fundamental
judgments or principles which are the primitive elements and
the foundation of every scientific and philosophical speculation.
This importance, however, has been falsely exaggerated by
some modern philosophers to an extent which tends to destroy
both supernatural religion and the validity of human reason.
There has been an attempt, on their part, to make of intuition,
under different names, the central and fundamental element
of our power of acquiring knowledge, and the only process
or operation that can put us into contact with reality. So
we have the creation or intuition of the ego and non ego in
the philosophy of Fichte; the intuition or intellectual vision
of God claimed by the Ontologists in natural theology (see
ONTOLOGISM), W. James's unconscious intuition or religious
experience (The Varieties of Religious Experience), Bergson's
philosophy of pure intuition the experience or experiential
consciousness of the Divine of the Modernists (Encyclical
"Pascendi gregis"). According to the Ontologists,
our knowledge of notions endowed with the character of necessity
and universality, as well as our idea of the Infinite, are
possible only through an antecedent intuition of God present
in us. Other philosophers start from the principle that human
reasoning is unable to give us the knowledge of things in
themselves. The data of common sense, our intellectual concepts,
and the conclusions reached through the process of discursive
reasoning do not, they say primarily represent reality, but
acting under diverse influences such as those of our usual
and practical needs, common sense and discursive reason result
in a deformation of reality; the value of their data and conclusions
is one of practical usefulness rather than one of true representation
(see PRAGMATISM). Intuition alone, they maintain, is able
to put us in communication with reality and give us a true
knowledge of things. Especially in regard to religious truths,
some insist, it is only through intuition and internal experience
that we can acquire them. "God", says the Protestant
A. Sabatier in his Esquisse d'une philosophie de la religion,
"is not a phenomenon which can be observed outside of
the ego, a truth to be demonstrated by logical reasoning.
He who does not feel Him in his heart, will never find Him
outside . . . . We never become aware of our piety without
at the same time feeling a religious emotion and perceiving
in this very emotion, more or less obscurely, the object and
the cause of religion, namely, God." The arguments used
by the Schoolmen to prove the existence of God, say the Modernists,
have now lost all their value; it is by the religious feeling,
by an intuition of the heart that we apprehend God (Encycl.
"Pascendi gregis" and "II programma dei modernisti").
Such theories have their source in the principle
of absolute subjectivism and relativism -- the most fundamental
error in philosophy. Starting with Kant's proposition that
we cannot know things as they are in themselves but only as
they appear to us, that is, under the subjective conditions
that our human nature necessarily imposes on them, they arrive
at the conclusion that our rational knowledge is subjectively
relative, and that its concepts, principles, and process of
reasoning are therefore essentially unable to reach external
and transcendental realities. Hence their recourse to intuition
and immanence. But it is easy to show that if intuition is
necessary in every act of knowledge, it remains essentially
insufficient in our present life, for scientific and philosophical
reflection. In our knowledge of nature we start from observation;
but observation remains fruitless if it is not verified by
a series of inductions and deductions. In our knowledge of
God, we may indeed start from our nature and from our insufficiency
and aspirations, but if we want to know Him we have to demonstrate,
by discursive reasoning, His existence as an external and
transcendent Cause and Supreme End. We may indeed, in Ethics
have an intuition of the notion of duty, of the need of a
sanction; but these intuitive notions have no moral value
if they are not connected with the existence of a Supreme
Ruler and Judge, and this connection can be known only through
reasoning. The true nature, place, and value of intuition
in human knowledge are admirably put forth in the Scholastic
theory of knowledge. For the Schoolmen the intuitive act of
intellectual knowledge is, by its nature, the most perfect
act of knowledge, since it is an immediate apprehension of
and contact with reality in its concrete existence, and our
supreme reward m the supernatural order will consist in the
intuitive apprehension of God by our intelligence: the beatific
vision. But in our present conditions of earthly life, our
knowledge must of necessity make use of concepts and reasoning.
All our knowledge has its starting-point in the intuitive
data of sense experience, but in order to penetrate the nature
of these data, their laws and causes, we must have recourse
to abstraction and discursive reasoning. It is also through
those processes and through them alone that we can arrive
at the notion of immaterial beings and of God himself (St.
Thomas "Contra Gentes", I, 12; "Summa Theologica"
I:84-88, etc.) . Our mind has the intuition of primary principles
(intellectus) but their application, in order to give us a
scientific and philosophical knowledge of things, is subject
to the laws of abstraction and successive reasoning (ratio,
discursus, cf. I:58:3, II-II:49:5, ad 2um). Such a necessity
is, as it were, a normal defect of human intelligence; it
is the natural limit which determines the place of the human
mind in the scale of intellectual beings.
Concepts
and reasoning therefore are in themselves inferior to intuition;
but they are the normal processes of human knowledge. They
are not, however a deformation of reality, though they give
only an imperfect and inadequate representation of reality
-- and the more so according to the excellency of the objects
represented -- they are a true representation of it.
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