Our enjoyment of nature or of art is coloured by our temporary mood.  There are moments of exceptional mental exhilaration, when even a commonplace scene will excite an appreciable kind of admiration.  Or there may be a strong wish to find a thing beautiful begotten of another feeling.  Thus, a lover desires to find beauty in his mistress; or, having found it in her face and form, desires to find a harmonious beauty in her mind.  In these different ways temporary accidents of personal feeling and imagination enter into and determine 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.