level of the original teachers.

* * * * *




II

INTUITION


When scholarship, reason and conscience have made impossible the
acceptance of Revelation as the bedrock of morality, the
student--especially in the West--is apt next to test "Intuition" as a
probable basis for ethics. In the East, this idea has not appealed to
the thinker in the sense in which the word Intuition is used in the
West. The moralist in the East has based ethics on Revelation, or on
Evolution, or on Illumination--the last being the basis of the Mystic.
Intuition--which by moralists like Theodore Parker, Frances Power Cobb,
and many Theists, is spoken of as the "Voice of God" in the human
soul--is identified by these with "conscience," so that to base morality
on Intuition is equivalent to basing it on conscience, and making the
dictate of conscience the categorical imperative, the inner voice which
declares authoritatively "Thou shalt," or "Thou shalt not".

Now it is true that for each individual there is no better, no safer,
guide than his own conscience and that when the moralist says to the
inquirer: "Obey your conscience" he is giving him sound ethical advice.
None the less is the thinker faced with an apparently insuperable