is, indeed, a mere counsel of desperation. An intuitive Philosophy so-
called finds itself sooner or later, generally sooner, in a blind alley.
Practically, it gives rise to all kinds of crude and wasteful effort. It
is not an accident that Georges Sorel in his Reflexions sur la Violence
takes his "philosophy" from Bergson or, at least, leans on him. There
are intuitions and intuitions, as every wise man knows, as William James
once ruefully admitted after his adventures with nitrous oxide, or as
the eaters of hashish will confess. To follow all our intuitions would
lead us into the wildest dervish dance of thought and action and leave
us spent and disheartened at the end. "Agnosticism" would be too mild a
term for the result. Our intuitions have to be tried and tested; there
is a thorny and difficult path of criticism to be traversed before we
can philosophically endorse them and find peace of mind. What Hoffding
says is in a sense quite true: "When we pass into intuition we pass into
a state without problems." But that is, as Hoffding intends us to
understand, not because all problems are thereby solved, but because
they have not yet emerged. If we consent to remain at that point, we
refuse to make the acquaintance of Philosophy; if we recognize the
problems that are really latent there, we soon realize that the business
of Philosophy is yet to be transacted.

The fact is that in this part of his doctrine--and it is an important
part--the brilliant French writer, in his endeavours to make
philosophizing more concrete and practical, makes it too abstract.
Intuition is not a process over against and quite distinct from
conceptual thought. Both are moments in the total process of man's
attempt to come to terms with the universe, and too great emphasis on
either distorts and falsifies the situation in which we find ourselves
on this planet. The insistence on intuition is doubtless due, at bottom,
to Bergson's admiration for the activity in the creative artist. The