It is hardly conceivable that any careful observer of human experience
would deny the presence and power of intuition in that experience. The
fact is too patent. Many who would not give the place to intuition which
is assigned to it by Bergson would be ready to say that there may be
more in the thrilling and passionate intuitive moments than Philosophy,
after an age-long and painful effort, has been able to express. All
knowledge, indeed, may be said to be rooted in intuition. Many a thinker
has been supported and inspired through weary years of inquiry and
reflection by a mother-idea which has come to him, if not unsought yet
uncompelled, in a flash of insight. But that is the beginning, not the
end, of his task. It is but the raw material of knowledge, knowledge in
potentia. To invert the order is to destroy Philosophy not to serve
it, is, indeed, a mere counsel of desperation. An intuitive Philosophy
so-called finds itself sooner or later, generally sooner, in a blind
alley. Practically, it gives rise to all kinds of crude and wasteful
effort. It is not an accident that Georges Sorel in his Reflexions sur
la Violence takes his "philosophy" from Bergson or, at least, leans on
him. There are intuitions and intuitions, as every wise man knows, as
William James once ruefully admitted after his adventures with nitrous
oxide, or as the eaters of hashish will confess. To follow all our
intuitions would lead us into the wildest dervish dance of thought and
action and leave us spent and disheartened at the end. "Agnosticism"
would be too mild a term for the result. Our intuitions have to be tried
and tested; there is a thorny and difficult path of criticism to be
traversed before we can philosophically endorse them and find peace of
mind. What Hoffding says is in a sense quite true: "When we pass into
intuition we pass into a state without problems." But that is, as
Hoffding intends us to understand, not because all problems are thereby
solved, but because they have not yet emerged. If we consent to remain
at that point, we refuse to make the acquaintance of Philosophy; if we
recognize the problems that are really latent there, we soon realize
that the business of Philosophy is yet to be transacted.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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