distinct and detached. In the
subject-matter of their revelations, too, intuition and instinct are
very different. If the recesses of the soul be compared to a fortified
castle, instinct is the active messenger of the place, continually
issuing forth on secret errands concerning the real nature of which
he is himself often quite ignorant. Intuition, on the contrary, is
the little postern gate at the back of the building, set open at
rare moments to the wide fields and magical forests which extend to
the far-off horizon.

Instinct is always found in close contact with sensation, groping its
ways through the midst of the mass of material impressions, acting
and reacting as it fumbles among such impressions. Intuition seems
to deal directly and absolutely with a clear and definite landscape
behind the superficial landscape, with a truth behind truth, with a
reality within reality.

To take an instance from common experience: a stranger, an
unknown person, enters our circle. Instinct, working automatically
and sensationally, may attract us powerfully towards such a person,
with a steady, irresistible attraction. Intuition, on the contrary,
uttering its revelation abruptly and with, so to speak, one sudden
mysterious cry, may warn us of some dangerous quicksand or
perilous jungle in such a stranger's nature of which instinct was
totally ignorant because the thing was what might be called a
"spiritual quality" lying deeper than those sensational or magnetic
levels through which instinct feels its way.

The instinct of animals or birds for instance warns them very
quickly with regard to the presence of some natural enemy whose
approach they apprehend through some mysterious sense-impression
beyond the analysis of human reason. But when their enemy
is the mental intention of a human being they are only too easily
tricked.

To take quite a different instance. It may easily happen that while
conscience has habitually driven us to a certain course of action
against which instinct has never revolted because of its
preoccupation with the senses, some sudden flash of intuition
reaching us from the hidden substratum of our being changes our
whole perspective and gives to conscience itself a completely
opposite bias. What these intermittent revelations of intuition
certainly do achieve is the preservation in the soul's memory of the
clear and deep and free and unfathomable margins of the ultimate
mystery, those wavering sea-edg