ESSAY ON INTUITION

Another very stupid notion that I find common to most people is that fact and intuition are identical. In other words, it is widely held that the poet who creates, the merchant and the diplomat who manoeuvre, the society woman who plays on the feelings of men, make use of the same faculty. A phrenologist will tell you it is the faculty of human-nature. The mistake is excusable, but it is a mistake none the less. A more minute consideration will show to us the difference. The creative faculty of character (of the poet) is composed of imagination and introspection; a poet is selfish, he builds others from himself. Falstaff is Shakespeare as truly as Pudita, Iago, Othello, Desdemona are Shakespeare.

Great minds know mankind through knowledge of themselves, whereas little minds must have experience to know men.

Considering existence deeply, we cannot but allow that, outside the fact that we live, scarcely anything can be known. We wander in such a maze that we may be excused asking if we exist. True, the further thought doth go, are those lines of Shakespeare:

        We are such stuff

        As dreams are made on, and our little life

        Is rounded with a sleep.

The deeper thought goes, the more our hearts are torn as the strangeness of life is evident. We are beings of intuition, and if we know, it is because we know that we know. Not a million Haeckels can contest that.