MYSTICISM AND LOGIC 15 



secondly by mentioning remarkable feats of 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 sur 

 vival and of the biological ancestry of man : if the intel 

 lect is misleading, the whole of this merely inferred history 

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

 with him 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 

 civilisation increases. It is greater, as a rule, in children 

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



