Besides, do you think they have always marched step by step with no
vision of the goal they wished to attain? They must have divined the way
leading thither, and for that they needed a guide. This guide is, first,
analogy. For example, one of the methods of demonstration dear to
analysts is that founded on the employment of dominant functions. We
know it has already served to solve a multitude of problems; in what
consists then the rôle of the inventor who wishes to apply it to a new
problem? At the outset he must recognize the analogy of this question
with those which have already been solved by this method; then he must
perceive in what way this new question differs from the others, and
thence deduce the modifications necessary to apply to the method.
But how does one perceive these analogies and these differences? In the
example just cited they are almost always evident, but I could have
found others where they would have been much more deeply hidden; often a
very uncommon penetration is necessary for their discovery. The
analysts, not to let these hidden analogies escape them, that is, in
order to be inventors, must, without the aid of the senses and
imagination, have a direct sense of what constitutes the unity of a
piece of reasoning, of what makes, so to speak, its soul and inmost
life.
When one talked with M. Hermite, he never evoked a sensuous image, and
yet you soon perceived that the most abstract entities were for him like
living beings. He did not see them, but he perceived that they are not
an artificial assemblage and that they have some principle of internal
unity.
But, one will say, that still is intuition. Shall we conclude that the
distinction made at the outset was only apparent, that there is only one
sort of mind and that all the mathematicians are intuitionalists, at
least those who are capable of inventing?
No, our distinction corresponds to something real. I have said above
that there are many kinds of intuition. I have said how much the
intuition of pure number, whence comes rigorous mathematical induction,
differs from sensible intuition to which the imagination, properly so
called, is the principal contributor.
Is the abyss which separates them less profound than it at first
appeared? Could we recognize with a little attention that this pure
intuition itself could not do without the aid of the senses? This is the
affair of the psychologist and the metaphysician and I shall not discuss
the question. But the thing's being doubtful is enough to justify me in
recognizing and affirming an essential difference between the two kinds
of intuition; they have not the same object and seem to call into play
two different faculties of our soul; one would think of two
search-lights directed upon two worlds strangers to one another.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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