INTUITION
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INTUITION
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 appre-
hension 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 appre-
hension. 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 calleil intellectual intuition. It may be remarked
that Kant calls (>mpirical intuitions our knowledge
of oljjects 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 per-
ceived are external objects or internal objects or acts.
The importance of intuition as a process and ele-
ment of knowledge is easily seen it we observe
that it is intuition which furnishes vis with the
first experimental data as well as with the pri-
mary concepts ami 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 con-
tact with reality. So we have the creation or intui-
tion 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 Ex-
perience); 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 knowl-
edge 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 them-
selves. 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
mfluences 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 Pragm.\tism). Intui-
tion alone, they maintain, is able to put us in com-
munication 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 ", p. 379, " is not a phenom-
enon which can be observed outside of the ego, a
truth to be demonstrated bj; 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 emo-
tion and perceiving in this very emotion, more or less
obscurely, the object and the cause of religion,
namely, God. " The argviments used by the School-
men to prove the existence of God, say the Mod-
ernists, 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 thejr 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, prin- ci|iles, and process of reasoning are therefore essen- tially unable to reach external and transcendental realities. Hence their recourse to intuition anil immanence (see Imm,\nence). But it is easy to show that if intuition is necessary in every act of knowl- edge, it remains essentially insufficient in our present life, for scientific and philosophical reflection. In our knowledge of nature we start from obser\'a- tion; but observation remains fruitless if it is not verified bv 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 connexion can be known only through reasoning. The true nature, place, and value of intuit ion in human knowledge are admirably put forth in the Scholastic theory of knowledge. For the Schoolmen the intui- tive 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 con- crete existence, and our supreme reward in the super- natural order will consist in the intuitive apprehen- sion 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 pro- cesses 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 Theol. ", I, Q. Lxxxiv-lxxxviii, etc.). Our mind has the intuition of primarj- principles {inteUectus), but their application, in order to give us a scientific and philo- sophical knowledge of things, is subject to the laws of abstraction and successive reasoning (ratio, dis- cursus, cf. I, Q. Iviii, a. 3; II-II, Q. xlix, a. 5, ad 2"™). Such a necessity is, as it were, a normal defect of human intelligence; it is the natural limit which de- termines 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 pro- cesses of human knowledge. They are not, however, a deformation of reality, though they give only an im- perfect and inadequate representation of reality, — and the more so according to the excellency of the objects represented, — they are a true representation of it.
St. Thomas, QQ. Disp. De veritate; Maher. Psychology, ch. xiii and XV (Stonvhurst Series, 5th ed., London, 1002): Rousselot. L'InteUectualisme de St. Thomas (Paris, 1908): Piat, Imuffl-
