THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

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THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY
How then shall we catch the flow and essence of life if not by think-
ing and the intellect? But is the intellect all? Let us for a while stop
thinking, and just gaze upon that inner reality our selves which is
better known to us than all things else: what do we see? Mind, not
matter; time, not space; action, not passivity; choice, not mechanism.
We see life in its subtle and penetrating flow, not in its "states of mind,"
not in its devitalized and separated parts, as when the zoologist examines
a dead frog's legs, or studies preparations under a microscope, and thinks
that he is a fczologist studying life! This direct perception, this simple and
steady looking-upon (intueor) a thing, is intuition; not any mystic process
5 but the most direct examination possible to the human mind. Spinoza
was right: reflective though*, is not by any means the highest form of
knowledge; it is better, no doubt, than hearsay; but how weak it is beside
the direct perception of the thing itself! "A true is empiricism one that
sets itself the task of getting as close as possible
to the original, of sounding
the depths of life, of feeling the pulse of its spirit by a sort of intel-
lectual auscultation"; 11 we "listen in" on the current of life. By direct
perception we feel the presence of mind; by intellectual circumlocution
we arrive at the notion that thought is a dance of molecules in the brain.
Is there any doubt that intuition here beholds more truly the heart of life?
This does not mean that thinking is a disease, as Rousseau held, or that
the intellect is a treacherous thing which every decent citizen should for-
swear. The intellect retains its normal function of dealing with the
material and spatial world, and with the material aspects or spatial ex-
pressions of life and mind; intuition is limited to the direct feeling of life
and mind, not in their external embodiments but in their inner being. "I
have never maintained that it was necessary 'to put something different
in the place of intellect,' or to set instinct above it. I have simply tried
to show that when we leave the domain of mathematics and physics to
enter that of life and consciousness, we must make our appeal to a certain
sense of life which cuts across pure understanding and has its origin in
the same vital impulse as instinct although instinct, properly so-called,
is quite a different thing." Nor do we try "to refute intellect by intellect";
we merely "adopt the language of the understanding, since only the
understanding has a language"; we cannot help it if the very words that
we use are psychological only by symbolism, and still reek with the
material connotations forced upon them by their origin. Spirit means
breath., and mind means a measure, and thinking points to a thing; never-
theless these are the crass media through which the soul must express
itself. "It will be said that we do not transcend our intellect, for it is still
with our intellect, and through our intellect, that we see the other forms
of consciousness" ; even introspection and intuition are materialist meta-
phors. And this would be a legitimate objection, "if there did not remain,
^Introduction to Metaphysics* p. 14.