Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

S. Austin Allibone, comp. Prose Quotations from Socrates to Macaulay. 1880.

Intuition

Those rational instincts, the connate principles engraven in the human soul, though they are truths acquirable and deducible by rational consequence and argumentation, yet seem to be inscribed in the very crasis and texture of the soul, antecedent to any acquisition by industry or the exercise of the discursive faculty in man.

Many conclusions of moral and intellectual truths seem, upon this account, to be congenite with us, connatural to us, and engraven in the very frame of the soul.

The main principles of reason are in themselves apparent. For to make nothing evident of itself unto man’s understanding were to take away all possibility of knowing anything.

If we consider children, we have little reason to think that they bring many ideas with them, bating, perhaps, some faint ideas of hunger and thirst.

Sometimes the mind perceives the agreement or disagreement of two ideas immediately by themselves, without the intervention of any other; and this, I think, we may call intuitive knowledge.

Intuitive knowledge needs no probation, nor can have any, this being the highest of all human certainty.

An innate light discovers the common notions of good and evil, which by cultivation and improvement may be advanced to higher and brighter discoveries.