Essays on Educational ReformersQuick, Robert Hebert
History
Essays on Educational Reformers
Quick, Robert Hebert
Education -- History; Educators
“Intuition is just the most natural and most spontaneous action of human
intelligence, the action by which the mind seizes a reality without
effort, hesitation, or go-between. It is a ‘direct apperception,’ made as
it were at a glance. If it has to do with some matter within the province
of the senses, the senses perceive it at once. Here we have the simplest
case of all, the most common, the most easily noted. If the thing
concerned is an idea, a reality, that is, beyond the reach of the senses,
we still say that we seize it by intuition when all that is necessary is
that it present itself to the mind, and the mind at once grasps it and is
satisfied with it without any need of proof or investigation. We advance
by intuition whenever our mind, acting by the senses, or by the judgment,
or by the conscience, knows things with the same amount of evidence and
the same amount of speed that a distinct view of an object affords the
eye. So intuition is no separate faculty; it is nothing strange or new
in the mind of man. It is just the mind itself ‘intuitively’ recognising
what exists in it or around it” (_Les Conférences Péd. faites aux
Instituteurs_, Delagrave, 1879, p. 331). So the “intuitive method” (to
keep the French name for it) is of very wide application. “It appeals to
this force _sui generis_, to this glance of the mind, to this spontaneous
spring of the intelligence towards truth.” It sets the pupil’s mind to
work in following his own intellectual instincts. If in our teaching we
can use it, we shall have gained, as M. Buisson says, the best helper in
the world, viz., the pupil. If he can be got to take an active part in
the instruction all difficulty vanishes at once. Instead of having to
drag him along, you will see him delighted to keep you company.
§ 95. According to M. Buisson there are three kinds of
intuition—sensuous, intellectual, and moral. Similarly M. Jullien
(_Esprit de Pestalozzi_, 1812, vol. j, p. 152) says that there are
“intuitions” of the “internal senses” as well as of the external: the
“internal senses” are four in number: first, the sense for the true;
second, the sense for the beautiful; third, the sense for the good;
fourth, the sense for the infinite.
§ 96. Without settling whether this analysis is complete we shall have
no difficulty in admitting that both body and mind have faculties by
means of which we apprehend, lay hold of, what is true and right; and it
is on the use of these faculties that Pestalozzi bases instruction. No
Englishman may have found a good word to indicate _Anschauung_, but one
Englishman at least had the idea of it long before Pestalozzi. More than
a century earlier Locke had called knowledge “the internal perception of
the mind.” “Knowing is seeing,” said he; “and if it be so, it is madness
to persuade ourselves we do so by another man’s eyes, let him use never
so many words to tell us that what he asserts is very visible” (_Supra_
p. 222).
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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