CHAPTER II

INTUITION AND REASON

THE Ladies' Home Journal1 prints the following on its editorial page:

"'You wrote a month ago,' says a man, 'that we are always safe to act upon our intuitions. Suppose those intuitions should prompt us wrong; what then?'

"One's intuitions will not prompt one wrong; they can't. Because what we call intuition is simply the voice of the soul; God's voice, in other words, and it is never wrong. The trouble is not that it will lead us wrong so much as we think it will. The voice of God in man's soul is always leading us to the highest standards of right and truth and justice. When it seems to speak to us in other terms it is not the voice of the soul, which is the voice of our higher self; it is the voice of the lower self that is speaking.

...

"Men are afraid to act upon what they call 'intuition,' women are not. They do so act and invariably they are right. But man goes along his customary way, reasoning it out, 'giv

1 July, 1914.

ing the matter careful thought and consideration,' he calls it, and then after a few days or a few weeks-and sometimes after a few years -comes out at exactly the point which the woman decided upon by intuition."

The Engineering and Mining Journal1 contains the following:

"There is a market-letter writer in Wall Street who frankly admits that he judges the course of the market not by reason but by intuition. 'When I write my market advice in the morning,' he says, 'I simply try to get the "feel" of the market. I say that the outlook is that the market will go up, or that the outlook is that it will go down. Sometimes I give my reasons, but very often I don't. I simply cannot give my reasons, because I do not know them. Frankly I write on what I suppose you would call a "hunch.”’'''

The Evening Post, commenting on the above, says:

"People may call this superstition, but people do not know. This market-letter writer often does give the reasons for his predictions; he is a keen student of conditions and of the technical status. . . . His record compared with that of other market-letter writers is astonishingly good.

1 March 31, 1917.

"A phenomenon not unlike this is often observed among fishermen, guides, and others who qualify as local weather prophets. Though they occasionally talk of winds and moisture and the look of the sky, they have little scientific knowledge of the weather; yet they have an uncanny habit of being right.

""Why don't you speculate?' the marketletter writer was asked. 'I used to,' he replied, 'but never successfully. When I speculate my fears and hopes, make me nervous and confused; I try to justify my moves with reasons pro and con, and I lose my "hunch."

"Mining engineers will understand this. What engineer of long experience is there who cannot relate instances of being in an ore-body penetrated by only one drift, with no means for measurement according to the accepted tenets, and feeling the conviction that he was in the midst of a whale of an ore-body; and in another case that he is merely surrounded by a thin shell of ore? Yet in neither case can he outline any real reasons. If he tried to they would very likely be weak.

"Of the same order is the advice, 'Never give reasons. Your judgment may be fine and your reasons feeble.' Who also does not remember cases of the young mining engineer who is superb in his advice to clients and unsuccessful when he goes into mining ventures on his own account?"

In their treatment of our subject these articles are better than are usually found in current periodicals. They are reproduced here as instances of the every-day manifestation of intuition and of the popular interest therein. What the writers say of getting the "feel" of the market, the giving of reasons, and the impossibility of intuition prompting us wrong are especially noteworthy.

In general we become most intuitive concerning that upon which we most concentrate, and we concentrate most easily upon the thing we most love. Love, being fundamental, inspires intuition as it inspires every other faculty. The fingers of the expert pianist become nimble and dexterous to the point where we say his playing is "second nature," which is saying he plays intuitively. The gambler becomes intuitive with respect to his game, the financier concerning the stock-market, the young woman in regard to her lover and the mother as to her child.

Every person has a dual nature. Not that every one is a complete Dr. Jekyll