INTELLECTUAL FACULTIES
PART FOURTH.
INTUITIVE POWER.
CHAPTER I.
EXISTENCE AND NATURE OF THE INTUITIVE FACULTY.
Office of this Power.—In our analysis of the powers of the mind, one was described as having for its office the conception of truths that lie apart from the region and domain of sense—first principles and primary ideas, fundamental to, and presupposed in, the operations of the understanding, yet not directly furnished by sense. They are awakened in the mind on occasion of sensible experience, but it is not sensible experience which produces them. On the contrary, they spring up in the mind as by intuition, whenever the fitting occasion is presented. We must attribute their origin to a special power of the mind by virtue of which, under appropriate circumstances, it conceives the truths and ideas to which we refer. This power we have termed the originative or intuitive faculty.
Specific Character.—In its specific character and function it is quite distinct from any of the faculties as yet considered. It does not, like the presentative power, bring before us, in direct cognizance, sensible objects; nor does it, like the representative faculty, replace those objects to thought, in their absence. It neither presents, nor represents, any object whatever. It forms no picture of any thing to the mind's eye. It is a power of simple conception; and yet it differs in an important sense from the other conceptive powers and that is, that it is not reflective but intuitive in its action. Its data are conceptions, but conceptions necessary and intuitive, seen at a glance, not the results of the reflective and discursive process. These data are ideas of reason, rather than notions of the understanding, or processes of reflection. There is no sensible object corresponding to these ideas. We do not see, or hear, or feel, or by any means cognize, any thing of the sort; nor can we form a picture, or represent to ourselves any such thing as, e. g., time, or space, or substance, or cause, and the like. They are conceptions of the mind, and yet we conceive of them as realities. We cannot think them the mere creations and figments of the brain. And in this respect, again, they differ from the notions of the understanding—those classes and genera which we know to be the mere creations of the mind.