Education Quote by Corliss Lamont

Lamont draws a tight border between two things people love to confuse: the gut feeling and the justified claim. “Intuition does not in itself amount to knowledge” is a rebuke to mystical shortcuts and armchair certainty, especially tempting in philosophy, where a well-phrased hunch can masquerade as a proof. He’s staking out a sober, almost procedural standard: knowledge requires more than immediacy. It needs reasons, checks, and some contact with the world beyond the mind’s first impressions.

Then he swivels, refusing the opposite extremism. “Yet cannot be disregarded” is the tell: intuition is not truth, but it is evidence of a kind - a datum about how humans actually think and perceive. For philosophers, it’s the raw material of concepts and ethical judgments; for psychologists, it’s a window into cognition, pattern recognition, and bias. Lamont’s subtext is pragmatic: ignore intuition and you end up with theories that are clean on paper and useless in life. Worship it and you end up with confident nonsense.

Context matters. Lamont was a prominent American humanist and naturalist, arguing for a worldview anchored in science and lived experience rather than revelation. Mid-century psychology was professionalizing, testing the mind’s machinery; analytic philosophy was interrogating “intuitions” as tools and traps. The line reads like a bridge between disciplines: intuition is neither an oracle nor an error to be purged, but a starting point that demands translation into arguments and, when possible, empirical scrutiny.