INTUITION 



I could locate to-day — as if from the clear sky above me — an idea 

 popped into my head as emphatically as if a voice had shouted it." 



" I decided to abandon the work and all thoughts "relative to it, 

 and then, on the following day, when occupied in work of an 

 entirely different type, an idea came to my mind as suddenly as a 

 flash of lightning and it was the solution . . . the utter simplicity 

 made me wonder why I hadn't thought of it before." 



" The idea came with such a shock that I remember the exact 

 position quite clearly.""^ 



Prince Kropotkin wrote : 



" Then followed months of intense thought in order to find 

 out what the bewildering chaos of scattered observations meant 

 until one dav all of a sudden the whole became as clear and 

 comprehensible as if it were illuminated with a flash of light . . . 

 There are not many joys in human life equal to the joy of the 

 sudden birth of a generalisation illuminating the mind after a 

 long period of patient research." 



Von Helmholtz, the great German physicist said that after 

 previous investigation of a problem " in all directions . . . happy 

 ideas came unexpectedly without effort like an inspiration." He 

 found that ideas did not come to him when his mind was fatigued 

 or when at the working table, but often in the morning after a 

 night's rest or during the slow ascent of wooded hills on a 

 sunny day. 



After Darwin had conceived the basic idea of evolution, he 

 was reading Malthus on population for relaxation one day when 

 it struck him that under the struggle for existence favourable 

 variations would tend to be preserved and unfavourable ones 

 destroyed. He wrote a memorandum around this idea, but there 

 was still one important point not accounted for, namely, the 

 tendency in organic beings descended from the same stock to 

 diverge as they become modified. The clarification of this last 

 point came to him under the following circumstances : 



" I can remember the very spot in the road, whilst in my 

 carriage, when to my joy the solution occurred to me." 



The idea of survival of the fittest as a part of the explanation 

 of evolution also came independently to A. R. Wallace when he 

 was reading Malthus' Principles of Population during an illness. 



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