INTUITION 



there is a literary and an artistic taste/" Dale speaks of "the 

 subconscious reasoning which we call instinctive judgment 'V'^ 

 W. Ostwald*^ refers to "scientific instinct", and some people use 

 the words "intuition" and "feeling" in this connection, by which 

 they mean the same thing, but it seems to me more correct to 

 call this faculty taste. It is probably synonymous with "personal 

 judgment", which some scientists would probably prefer, but 

 I think that expression is even less illuminating than is "taste". 

 It is perhaps more exact to say that taste is that on which we 

 base our personal judgment. 



Taste can perhaps best be described as a sense of beauty or 

 aesthetic sensibility, and it may be reUable or not, depending on 

 the individual. Anyone who has it simply feels in his mind that 

 a particular line of work is of interest for its own sake and worth 

 following, perhaps without knowing why. How reUable one's 

 feelings are can be determined only by the results. The concept 

 of scientific taste may be explained in another way by saying 

 that the person who possesses the flair for choosing profitable lines 

 of investigation is able to see further whither the work is leading 

 than are other people, because he has the habit of using his 

 imagination to look far ahead instead of restricting his thinking 

 to established knowledge and the immediate problem. He may 

 not be able to state explicitly his reasons or envisage any particular 

 hypothesis, for he may see only vague hints that it leads towards 

 one or another of several crucial questions. 



An illustration of taste in non-scientific matters is the choice 

 of words and composition of sentences when writing. Only 

 occasionally is it necessary to check the correctness of the language 

 used by submitting it to grammatical analysis; usually we just 

 "feel" that the sentence is correct or not. The elegance and 

 aptness of the English which is produced largely automatically 

 is a function of the taste we have acquired by training in 

 choice and arrangement of words. In research, taste plays an 

 important part in choosing profitable subjects for investigation, 

 in recognising promising clues, in intuition, in deciding on a 

 course of action where there are few facts with which to reason, 

 in discarding hypotheses that require too many modifications and 

 in forming an opinion on new discoveries before the evidence is 

 decisive. 



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