henne de Boulogne; the politician who knows human nature, the
merchant who scents a good venture, etc., furnish examples of intuition.
It does not depend on the degree of culture;--not to mention women,
whose insight into practical matters is well known, there are ignorant
people--peasants, even savages--who, in their limited sphere, are the
equals of fine diplomats.

But all these facts teach us nothing concerning its psychological
nature. Intuition presupposes acquired experience of a special nature
that gives the judgment its validity and turns it in a particular
direction. Nevertheless, this accumulated knowledge of itself gives no
evidence as to the future. Now, every intuition is an anticipation of
the future, resulting from only two processes:--inductive or deductive
reasoning, e.g., the chemist foreseeing a reaction; imagination, i.e.,
a representative construction. Which is the chief process here?
Evidently the former, because it is not a matter of fancied hypothesis,
but of adaptation of former experience to a new case. Intuition
resembles logical operations much more than it does imaginative
combinations. We may liken it to unconscious reasoning, if we are not
afraid of the seeming contradiction of this expression which supposes a
logical operation without consciousness of the middle term. Although
questionable, it is perhaps to be preferred to other proposed
explanations--such as automatism, habit, "instinct," "nervous
connections." Carpenter, who as promoter of "unconscious cerebration,"
deserves to be consulted, likens this state to reflection. In ending, he
reprints a letter that John Stuart Mill wrote to him on the subject, in
which he says in substance that this capacity is found in persons who
have experience and lean toward practical things, but attach little
importance to theory.[131]

Every intuition, then, becomes concrete as a judgment, equivalent to a
conclusion. But what seems obscure and even mysterious in it is the fact
that, from among many possible solutions, it finds at the first shot the
proper one. In my opinion this difficulty arises largely from a partial
comprehension of the problem. By "intuition" people mean only cases in
which the divination is correct; they forget the other, far more
numerous, cases that are failures. The act by which one reaches a
conclusion is a special case of it. What constitutes the originality of
the operation is not its accuracy, but its _rapidity_--the lat