etermine our aesthetic intuition, making it deviate from the common
standard. This kind of error may even approximate in character to an
hallucination of sense when there is nothing answering to a common
source of aesthetic pleasure. Thus, the fond mother, through the very
force of her affection, will construct a beauty in her child, which for
others is altogether non-existent.

What applies to the perception of beauty in the narrow sense will apply
to all other modes of aesthetic intuition, as that of the sublime and the
ludicrous, and the recognition of the opposite of beauty or the ugly. In
like manner, it will apply to moral intuition in so far as it is an
instantaneous recognition of a certain quality in a perceived action
based on, or at least conjoined with, a particular emotional effect. In
men's intuitive judgments respecting the right and the wrong, the noble
and base, the admirable and contemptible, and so on, we may see the same
kind of illusory universalizing of personal feeling as we have seen in
their judgments respecting the beautiful. And the sources of the error
are the same in the two cases. Accidents of experience, giving special
associations to the actions, will not unfrequently warp the individual
intuition. Ethical culture, like aesthetic culture, means a continual
casting aside of early illusory habits of intuition. And further, moral
intuition illustrates all those effects of feeling which we have briefly
traced in the case of aesthetic intuition. The perversions of the moral
intuition under the sway of prejudice are too familiar to need more than
a bare allusion.

_Nature of Insight._

There remains one further mode of cognition which approximates in
character to presentative knowledge, and is closely related to external
perception. I refer to the commonly called "intuitive" process by which
we apprehend the feelings and thoughts of other minds through the
external signs of movement, vocal sound, etc., which make up expression
and language. This kind of knowledge, which is not sufficiently marked
off from external perception on the one side and introspection on the
other, I venture to call Insight.

I am well aware that this interpretation of the mental states of others
is commonly described as a process of inference involving a conscious
reference to our own similar experiences. I willingly grant that it is
often so. At the same time, it must be perfectly plain that it is not
always so.