INTUITION OR REASON

Evening Star, Issue 19760, 10 January 1928, Page 1

INTUITION OR REASON

BUT WHY HOT BOTH ? It is always pleasing to hear of an attack upon a popular notion that has lasted long enough to become thoroughly inaccurate, popular notions being generally found upon examination to have outgrown the social conditions that gave them birth (writes Evelyn Sharp, in the ‘Manchester Guardian’). To that extent Professor C. AV. Valentine was probably right in supposing that women would not seriously object to his conclusion in the paper he read at the British Association in the psychological section, in which he intimated, as the result of experiments, that the intuitive faculty is not, as is generally assumed, more active in woman than in man. Women should be the last to object to the explosion of another of the sex generalisations from which in the past they have been rather greater sufferers than men, although in these days the most hardened feminist would scarcely go as far as the sixteenth century writer who coin plained, through the speech of a heroine, that “we should be marvelous beastes if we wer sutche as you allwais dcscrybe ns.” But “ all this, wo confess, appears to, ns very fanciful,” as Sydney Smith once called it in relation to a discussion on this very point, which led him on to say that “as long as boys and girls run about in the dirt and trundle hoops together they are both precisely alike ... if yon catch up one-half

of the creatures’ sefc_ of actions and train them to a particular set of actions and opinions, and the other half to a perfectly opposite set, of course their understandings will differ.” Not that generalisations of the kind arc by any means always unflattering to women. Buckle, in his ‘lnfluence of AVomen on the Progress of Knowledge,’ insisted that “ if you lose your way in a town abroad it is always best to apply to a woman, because a man will show less readiness of apprehension,” which is flattering enough to please any woman who is not a mere stickler for truth; but it is also an outrageous piece of sex prejudice, for really it cannot be asserted that there are more men than women among the inept “ strangers ” with which a street becomes peopled directly one wants to ask the way.

The absolute psychological differences that do exist in men and women, if there are any, meanwhile remain obscured through this constant obtrusion of artificial and supposed differences. P.rofessor Valentine’s attempt to bring one of them, by a series of tests, within measurable distance of scientific determination is therefore a distinct step forward, and one that sets us wondering whether the further popular assertion of the mutual_ destructiveness of intuition and reason in the same person is also capable of proof. For although it appears to be, true that there may have been some foundation for the idea, when it first got about, that women possessed the one and men the other in a marked degree the line ol demarcation is certainly growing fainter as the education of both tends to assimilate, and we almost begin to speculate as to the chances of a survival of intuition in either. It is so difficult for the individual to recognise where his intuition ends and his reasoning power begins that a doubt also arises as to whether tests imposed from without may not be correspondingly ambiguous. In the first place, speaking as an ordinary person and not as a psychologist, one might suppose that the intuitive faculty depends upon its spontaneity, and that the fact of being called upon to display it at a given moment to disenough to produce self-consciousness, and so destroy its sensitive workings. There is the further difficulty of making a real test within a limited period of time. AA r e may “ have a feeling ” about a stranger at a first meeting; we may never have it again, our reason may deny it; so may our experience, until one day lie suddenly justifies our intuition in some action or word. And thirdly, no one is ever the sajne person to everybody—fortunately for the adventurer in an uneventful modern world! In the report of the professor’s paper we read that the photograph ol a distinguished writer led one woman to describe him as “gentle and kind in disposition,” and another as “cruel and sarcastic but surely both may bo right, since he probably has within him the potentialities of the two characters, being human. Only a prodigy or a prig is always kind and gentle, and only a pathological case could be always cruel and sarcastic

The .suspicion arises that we attach too much importance to the value ol intuition. If ue called it by its right name—jumping to conclusions without being in possession of the tacts—we might be able to compare it more fairly with reason, which may be called tho power of arriving at conclusions through a knowledge of the facts. Yet jumping to conclusions has certain advantages over cold reason. In one ol Professor Valentine’s tests the picture of a murderer was pronounced to be that of a man of “superior moral quality.” Reason, based upon a knowledge of his identity, would certainly have modified this opinion, but none ol ns can deny that it is well within the bounds of possibility for anybody to bo overwhelmed once in a lifetime by a blinding passion leading to murder without* suffering normally from moral turpitude. Possibly, in this test case, intuition revealed a truth hidden from those who knew only the fact of the murder.

But, as a rule, jumping to conclusions cannot be trusted, intuition is bound to he, capricious, working better on some days than on others, and better in relation to some people than to others. It cannot he relied upon scientifically, because if it could it would have ceased to be intuition, and begun to invade the realm of pure reason. Yet this does not seem to prove that the two arc mutually destructive, but only that they may be working against each other instead of harmoniously. By the time that the intuitive and the reasoning faculty have become complementary tn one another in tho same brain T, suppose men and women will have learnt to follow the same wise course in the body politic.' Which shows that this is not a woman’s question at all.’