Note (return) — Chapter II

Reflection is voluntary, spontaneity is involuntary; reflection is personal, spontaneity is impersonal; reflection is analytic, spontaneity is synthetic; reflection begins with doubt, spontaneity with affirmation; reflection belongs to certain ones, spontaneity belongs to all; reflection produces science, spontaneity gives truth. Reflection is a process, more or less tardy, in the individual and in the race. It sometimes engenders error and skepticism, sometimes convictions that, from being rational, are only the more profound. It constructs systems, it creates artificial logic, and all those formulas which we now use by the force of habit, as if they were natural to us. But spontaneous intuition is the true logic of nature,--instant, direct, and infallible. It is a primitive affirmation which implies no negation, and therefore yields positive knowledge. To reflect is to return to that which was. It is, by the aid of memory, to return to the past, and to render it present to the eye of consciousness. Reflection, therefore, creates nothing; it supposes an anterior operation of the mind in which there necessarily must be as many terms as are discovered by reflection. Before all reflection there comes spontaneity--a spontaneity of the intellect, which seizes truth at once, without traversing doubt and error. "We thus attain to a judgment free from all reflection, to an affirmation without any mixture of negation, to an immediate intuition, the legitimate daughter of the natural energy of thought, like the inspiration of the poet, the instinct of the hero, the enthusiasm of the prophet." Such is the first act of knowing, and in this first act the mind passes from idea to being without ever suspecting the depth of the chasm it has passed. It passes by means of the power which is in it, and is not astonished at what it has done. It is subsequently astonished when by reflection it returns to the analysis of the results, and, by the aid of the liberty with which it is endowed, to do the opposite of what it has done, to deny what it has affirmed. "Hence comes the strife between sophism and common sense, between false science and natural truth, between good and bad philosophy, both of which come from free reflection." 72