I20 MEMORIAL SKETCH. 



a glance, though it may be a shorthand compend of many steps, 

 as " intuitive ; " and in this sense. Bidder's calculations, the 

 visual interpretation of distance, etc., may be called "intuitive;" 

 and you may speak of " the tendency to form intuitions," etc. 

 But in accurate metaphysical speech " intuition " denotes — like 

 the phrase " a priori cognition " — a primary condition of thought 

 at all, a belief or cognition presupposed in experience, and con- 

 stitutive of it. Such cognitions {e.g. space, time, cause) must 

 seem to us immediate and irresolvable (being really so) ; but it 

 is not this seeming (which may be simulated by acquired states) 

 which earns the name : if they can be resolved, they do not 

 deserve it, and it must be handed back to their primary ele- 

 ments till you get to that which you must bring into experience 

 if you are to think it at all. Hence the explanation of intuitions 

 by ancestral inheritance is necessarily without result. The pri- 

 mary conditions of thought cannot be the effect of converging or 

 accumulating lines of thought. All that habit, personal or 

 transmitted, can do, is to facilitate and condense mental actions 

 once difficult and consciously successive ; so as to conceal the 

 steps and prevent detection of the elementary intuitions. But 

 those elementary intuitions must be there, though we may have 

 got hold of the wrong things for them. Thus by denying that my 

 (seeming) intuitions were intuitions to my hundredth grandfather, 

 you only evade the question by pushing it back. Of course, in 

 one sense, no one denies the genesis of intuitions, more than of 

 any other function of a human being who, from end to end, has 

 to be born. The question is not of the ph3'siological building up 

 of the conditions of life, but of i7itellcctual derivation ; and the 

 intuition doctrine simply maintains that intellectual action 

 cannot take place at all, without certain cognitive elements 

 being supplied from vi^ithin. 



I was interested in your new case of recovered vision. It 

 adds a valuable fact. I fancy, however, that the theory to which 

 we have been accustomed requires a good deal of qualification. 

 Even in this case, why should the patient accuse herself of 

 " stupidity " in not recognizing the scissors, if the means of 

 recoo'nition were not there? The co-ordination of the visual 

 and tactual experiences is already within reach by the muscular 



