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And if, on the contrary, we avail ourselves of it for our own personal advantage, do we not make ourselves participators in injustice, allies and auxiliaries of the Evil Principle? Now, as I have already said, I am myself no intuitionist, but if I were, I should not the less feel warranted in here replying that by no theory of justice, intuitive or other, can the passive spectator of an injustice to which he is no party be bound to assist in repairing the injustice, simply because he has the means.
Shall we follow Cicero, and give only that which costs us nothing? or shall we emulate St. Francis? The general rule may be a faultless skeleton, but it is, after all, only a skeleton, and it cannot walk of itself. Again. The dogmatic intuitionist has quite a collection of rules by which he must judge of his actions. They are severally independent and authoritative.
Philosophers as different as the Neo-Positivist Mach and the Intuitionist Bergson, do indeed attempt to construct systems composed solely of direct Experience and pure Intuition; and, at the same time, almost ceaselessly insist upon the sheer novelty, the utter unexpectedness of all direct Experience, and the entire artificiality of the constructions of Thought constructions which alone adulterate our perceptions of reality with the non-realities repetition, uniformity, foreseeableness.
Of course if an intuitionist can accept this conclusion as to pre-historic men, so assuredly may Mr. Spencer, who traces all morality back to our inherited experience of utility, or Mr. Darwin, who ascribes it to an inherited sympathy, or Mr.
Indian thought has little sympathy with the question whether morality is utilitarian or intuitionist, whether we do good to benefit ourselves or whether certain acts and states are intrinsically good. The Buddha is a physician who prescribes a cure for a disease—the disease of suffering—and that cure is not a quack medicine which pretends to heal rapidly but a regime and treatment.
No intuitionist, therefore, fears to speak of the conscience of his pre-historic ancestor as imperfect, rudimentary, or hardly to be discerned, for he has to admit much the same so as to square his theory to plain modern facts, and that theory in the modern form may consistently be held along with them.
The intuitionist, who, among other precepts, accepts as ultimate those enjoining upon him justice and benevolence, may well ask himself toward whom these virtues are to be exercised, and whether the claims of all who belong to the class in question are identical in kind and degree. If they are not, he must find some rule for estimating their relative importance.
The acceptance of 'intuitions, that is, was the only alternative to thoroughgoing acceptance of 'experience. They supposed, too, that persons vaguely described as 'Kant and the Germans' taught simply a modification of the 'intuitionist' view.
All this an intuitionist who knows his case will now admit, but he will add that, though the amount of the moral sense may and does differ in different persons, yet that as far as it goes it is alike in all. He likens it to the intuition of number, in which some savages are so defective that they cannot really and easily count more than three.
Accepting Mill's view, it is remarkable that the great error of his own school, which professed to be based upon experience, was the rejection of history; and the great merit of the a priori and 'intuitionist' school was precisely their insistence upon history. To this I shall have to return hereafter.
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