Editorial note — Chapter VI · AVOIDANCE OF CONSCIOUS USE OF THE WILL

[Footnote 4: It is true that there is a particular phase of our intellectual effort included under the modern terms unconscious or subconscious that is mysterious enough to deserve a special name, but we already have an excellent term for this quality which is not vague but thoroughly descriptive of its activity. This is intuition,—a word that has been in use for nearly a thousand years now and signifies the immediate perception of a truth,—by a flash as it were. We may know nothing about a subject and may have only begun to think about it, when there flashes on us a truth that has perhaps never occurred to any one else and certainly has never been in our minds before. It has been suggested in recent years that such flashes of intelligence are due to the secondary personality or the subliminal self or the other self, and it is often added that it is the development of our knowledge of these phases of psychology that represents modern progress in the science of mind. Only the term for it is new, however, for intuition has been the subject of special intensive study for a long while. Indeed, the reason why the old-time poet appealed to the muses for aid and the modern poet suggests inspiration as the source of his poetic thought, is because both of them knew that their best thoughts flash on them, not as the result of long and hard thinking, but by some process in which with the greatest facility come perceptions that even they themselves are surprised to learn that they have. To say that such things come from the unconscious is simply to ignore this wonderful power of original thought, that is, primary perception. Emerson suggested that intuition represented all the knowledge that came without tuition, as if this were the etymology, and the hint is excellent for the meaning, though the real derivation of the word has no relation to tuition. To attribute these original thoughts to the unconscious or any partly conscious faculty in us is to ignore a great deal of careful study of psychology before our time. It is besides to entangle oneself in the absurdity of discussing an unconscious consciousness.]