The 'Intuition' View 285 



tation is no more open to the objection we are consider- 

 ing than any other kind of mental behaviour, and it is not 

 allowed that imitation is no more than repetition, — though, 

 of course, in certain cases it may be no more, — but it 

 seems to be open especially to this criticism because it 

 emphasizes the very point that the current objection to 

 natural history hits upon, i.e., that it makes the mind only 

 a means of reinstatement of relations already existing in 

 nature, and then makes imitative repetition the explicit 

 method of mental history. 



§ 8. TJie 'Intuition' View 



2. The second answer to the view now being criticised 

 may be put in some such way as this. It does not follow 

 that because a product — one of the categories of organiza- 

 tion, such as design, the ethical, etc. — is itself a matter of 

 gradual growth, its application to reality is in any way 

 invalidated. A category must be complete, ready-made, 

 universal, without exceptions, we are told, in order that its 

 application to particular instances be justified. But I fail 

 to see the peculiar and mysterious validity supposed to 

 attach to an intuition because whenever we think by it 

 we allow no exceptions. Modern critiques of belief and 

 modern theories of nervous habit have given us reasons 

 enough for discarding such touchstones as 'universality' 

 and * necessity.' And modern investigations into the 

 race development of beliefs have told us how much better 

 an aspect of reality really is because at one time people in- 

 sisted in thinking in a certain ' intuitive ' way about it. The 

 whole trouble, as I think, with the intuitional way of think- 

 ing is curiously enough that fallacy which I have pointed 

 out as beino: a favourite one of the evolutionists. The evolu- 



