CURRENT TENDENCIES 23 



instinct in animals, and by pointing out characteristics of 

 the world which, though intuition can apprehend them, 

 are baffling to intellect as he interprets it. 



Of Bergson's theory that intellect is a purely practical 

 faculty developed in the struggle for survival, and not a 

 source of true beliefs, we may say, first, that it is only 

 through intellect that we know of the struggle for survival 

 and of the biological ancestry of man : if the intellect is 

 misleading, the whole of this merely inferred history 

 is presumably untrue. If, on the other hand, we agree 

 with M. Bergson in thinking that evolution took place 

 as Darwin believed, then it is not only intellect, but all 

 our faculties, that have been developed under the stress 

 of practical utility. Intuition is seen at its best where it 

 is directly useful for example, in regard to other people's 

 characters and dispositions. Bergson apparently holds that 

 capacity for this kind of knowledge is less explicable by 

 the struggle for existence than, for example, capacity for 

 pure mathematics. Yet the savage deceived by false 

 friendship is likely to pay for his mistake with his life ; 

 whereas even in the most civilised societies men are not 

 put to death for mathematical incompetence. All the 

 most striking of his instances of intuition in animals have 

 a very direct survival value. The fact is, of course, that 

 both intuition and intellect have been developed because 

 they are useful, and that, speaking broadly, they are use- 

 ful when they give truth and become harmful when they 

 give falsehood. Intellect, in civilised man, like artistic 

 capacity, has occasionally been developed beyond the 

 point where it is useful to the individual ; intuition, on 

 the other hand, seems on the whole to diminish as civilisa- 

 tion increases. Speaking broadly, it is greater in children 

 than in adults, in the uneducated than in the educated. 

 Probably in dogs it exceeds anything to be found in 



