Galileo’s law of falling bodies, the Newtonian law, Robert Mayer’s law of the conservation of energy, are all intuitions. But many another flash of insight to which science has denied the status of legitimate child, contemning them instead for bastards, are like intuitions--such as the phrenology of Gall, Hahnemann’s idea of _similia similibus curantur_, which has blossomed into the methods of treatment so fraught with blessing to humanity, of homœopathy, and many others. All these intuitions have this in common that they have not been abstracted from a duly defined number of experiments. They are each an _experience_ in the domain of cognition that has come to pass by reason of a unique impulse. They are each a process of mental growth, mental development that has been evoked by an impulse of a special character. As all vegetable growth demands an impulsion, a provocation, so also does that mental growth which science names “intuition.” One does not arrive at an intuition by the paths of induction-deduction; one _grows_ into it. Were the power of comprehending things so fashioned that it could lay hold of, work up, and assimilate a definite impulsion, as result there would blossom forth such a sequence as could never be reached by the path of experiment. A single impulsion, the lighter coloured blood of the venous circulation in the tropics, gave Robert Mayer his intuition. A single impulsion, a remark in Cullen’s _Materia Medica_, about China and its characteristic of giving rise to intermittent fever, supplied Hahnemann with his intuition. A single impulse--so it is said--a falling apple, furnished Newton with his intuition; and so on through many examples. Such an intuition is the Buddha-thought also. The sight of an aged man, a sick person, a corpse--so says the legend--gave rise in the Buddha to that impulsion which, worked up by him, and proceeding to bud and bloom, drove him forth from the home of his fathers, forced him into asceticism, eventuating finally the ripe fruit of the Buddha-teaching. The Buddha-teaching is a pure intuition, is _the_ intuition, and proves itself such in that any attempt to treat of it after the methods of science, to master it inductively, is impossible. Though I lay the Buddha-teaching before the ablest scientific man that ever lived, it must always remain for him an entirely insipid thing if his intellectual faculty is not in such a condition as to vibrate in harmony with it, react to the “provocation” offered, work it up, assimilate it. As little as it can be proven that a given food is nourishing for me--it can only be offered, and I myself must eat, whereupon the food of itself proves its own nutritive quality or its worthlessness--just as little can the truth of the Buddha-thought be proven: it can only be offered, and I myself must try it, whereupon the thought is either worked up as nourishing stimulus or rejected as entirely worthless. Here holds good the old saying: “_Sapere aude!_”