CHAPTER XXV.

INTUITIVE JUDGMENT.

It is very possible for impulses and intuitions to be safer than the most deliberate judgment. Everybody knows how, on many great political

and judicial questions, the slow detail and careful technicality of legislators. and judges do violence to truth and justice, while the public mind has seen the justice of the case from the first, and suffers sore disappointment at the manner in which truth has been smothered under the forms of logic and of law. Dynamic Sociology, II, 327.

Only a very small proportion of our actions are directed to new conditions; experience has already determined the proper conduct in all the circumstances upon which our preservation and well-being most directly depend; and action in these circumtances does not demand comparison and judgment, while it must usually be so prompt as to forbid deliberation or thought. The power of quick and proper action in the innumerable exigencies of ordinary life, independent of reflection, is at least equally important with the power to extend our field of rational action. W. K. BROOKS : Popular Science Monthly, June, 1879 (Vol. XV, pp. 154-155).

Experience of the order of events has shown that under certain circumstances, of frequent occurrence, certain conduct is proper and conducive to welfare, while its opposite is hurtful. This experience being constantly repeated, the tendency to do the proper thing when the circumstances occur gradually takes the shape of an instinct, intuition, habit, or law of duty. Hencefoward, all persons who have the impulse which has thus been formed will act in the same way when the circumstances arise, but two persons who have not the impulse will follow their individual judgments, and may or may not act alike.-W. K. BROOKS: Ibid., July, 1879, p. 348.

It is necessary to deal next with a form of intuition which differs in its general aspect and mode of application much more from what has been called intuitive reason than this differs from what was called intuitive perception, although it is, unlike the others, an exclusively human attribute. Nevertheless it will, I trust, be shown to the satisfaction of the reader that

this divergence is only one of form and application and not of essence. Intuitive judgment does not differ greatly from what is probably the most commonly accepted sense of the word intuition. If primitive animal intuition, intuitive perception, and intuitive reason consist psychologically in a perception of relations, however simple or however involved, intuitive judgment may be said psychologically to consist in a perception of truth. Truth itself, it may be said, is a relation, and so it is, but we saw that the relations perceived by the primitive intellect were not those of identity, agreement, disagreement, etc., such as are affirmed by an act of judgment, but relations of resistance, direction, velocity, distance, etc. Intuitive judgment does not deal with relations of this latter class, or with such as it is necessary to take immediate advantage of in guiding present movements. It is much less directly connected with the conative powers, and approaches more closely to the derivative intellectual faculties which have formed the almost exclusive theme of philosophy. And yet it is not the same as any of these. It is in no sense a deliberative, reflective faculty, or one of abstraction or disinterested ideation. It is not, for example, as some have supposed, a form of reasoning. The idea that it consists of the rapid or instantaneous combination of a long train of inferences, is one of the errors which have resulted from the inverted order in which mental phenomena have been studied, from beginning at the roof of the structure instead of at the foundations. The intellectual faculties that have chiefly absorbed attention are all secondary or derivative, and it was natural that when any other came forward for consideration it should be sought to explain it in terms of these, whereas in this case, the new-found attribute is really the primary and original one from which as a main trunk the others. have been given off as branches.

As a sample of this mistake of the logicians the following remark of Bishop Whately may be quoted, which might be paralleled in the writings of many others of his school. He

says "It continually happens that even long trains of reasoning will flash through the mind with such rapidity that the process is performed unconsciously, or at least leaves no trace in the memory, any more than the motions of the muscles of the throat and mouth in speaking, or the judgments by which we decide as to the distances of visible objects: so that a conclusion may be supposed to be seized by intuition, which in reality is the result of rapid inference." (Logic, Introduction, § 4.) In the same general line Dr. Carpenter remarks: "I have long recognized as a fact that judgments really grounded on a long succession of small experiences mostly forgotten, or perhaps never brought out into very distinct consciousness, often grow into the likeness of intuitive perceptions. I believe this to be the explanation of the intuitive insight thought to be characteristic of women; and of that which is often found in experienced practical persons who have not attended much to theory, nor been often called on to explain the grounds of their judgments. I explain in the same manner whatever truth there is in presentiments." (Mental Physiology, p. 486.)

Mr. Herbert Spencer in arguing for the simplicity or psychological unity of intuitional judgments (Principles of Psychology, Vol. II, § 277) carries it perhaps too far in applying it to the involved judgments of an engineer, but he is right in saying (ibid. § 278, foot-note) that the common acceptation of the word intuition is that of "an undecomposable mental act." It will not be denied that the mental antecedents of most intuitions of this class are exceedingly complex, the chief contention is that the mind does not go through with any process. of connecting these elements into a train of reasoning or methodical arrangement of separate inferences. It is in no sense a process of deduction. The data for an intuition are combined already in the brain into a psychological unit which is used as an integer and not decomposed by the intuitive act. In more physiological terms, the cerebral preparation for such an act has become constitutional, the appropriate cortical nuclei

have been previously built up by the registration of experiences, and the discharge is direct and immediate from these readymade centers.

While this faculty of intuitive judgment is adapted and is frequently applied to questions that have no direct bearing upon self-preservation, such for example as the truth of axiomatic propositions in geometry or logic, or the more complex relations of strength to strain in engineering, it was not by such exercise that its cerebral fabric was originally built up. These are only derivative applications of an instrument which was constructed for a very different purpose. That purpose, like the purpose for which intuitive perception and intuitive reason were created, was an intensely practical one and had to do directly with the interests of the race and its preservation and safety. The other forms of intuition that have been considered were calculated to direct action in the immediate present; this form was adapted to direct action in the near, or more or less remote future. Besides the necessity of knowing what course to pursue to secure the satisfaction of a present desire, it became important to know what course it would be best to adopt in case a certain combination of circumstances should arise. At first such combinations of circumstances were confined to those that were known from repeated experience to be likely to arise, but later those were provided against which were of less and less frequency and probability, and at length a degree of adjustment was attained which would constitute a preparation for, or, defense against almost any possible combination of circumstances. It is this primary and practical side of the subject that has the greatest significance and importance to both psychology and sociology. And if one can once get out of the rut of the old philosophy, it is easy to see that this is the side which furnishes the best and most numerous examples.

Men do not depend upon their reason in the ordinary affairs of life. They do not employ the syllogism in seeking to decide

what will be the best course to adopt to insure success in any enterprise. They use what is popularly called "common sense," and this scarcely differs at all from what is here denominated intuitive judgment. One finds little in the books about common sense. When used, as in Reid's works, it is soon either restricted to some one little known application or diverted wholly from its primary meaning. The most that has been written about this faculty beyond the phase to be considered in the next chapter relates to cases in which, as frequently happens, the labored reasoning out of a problem leads to erroneous conclusions which are seen to be so from the start

by pure intuition. Elaborate judicial opinions, as is well known, not only often tend to obscure the subject, but actually befog the judge's mind, divert it from the central notions of justice or right involved, and lead him to decide questions wrongly where the truth is intuitively arrived at by others, perhaps by a whole people in great issues, such as the Dred Scott decision.