James Walker was a Unitarian minister, an editor of The Christian Examiner, a Harvard professor of religion and philosophy, and an influence on the Transcendentalists (although not really one of them). In 1834, he published in The Christian Examiner an address titled "The Philosophy of Man's Spiritual Nature in Regard to the Foundation of Faith," in which he described intuitive thought as the Transcendentalists understood it. Walker stated:
. . . On what evidence does a devout man's conviction of the existence and reality of the spiritual world depend? I answer . . . [h]e does not take the facts of his inward experience, and hold to the existence and reality of the spiritual world as a logical deduction from these facts, but as an intuitive suggestion grounded on these facts. He believes in the existence and reality of the spiritual world, just as he believes in his own existence and reality, and just as he believes in the existence and reality of the outward universe, — simply and solely because he is so constituted that with his impressions or perceptions he cannot help it.
Another clear presentation of intuition was written by Francis Bowen, a writer for The Christian Examiner and a critic of Transcendentalism, in particular a critic of the emphasis on intuition as opposed to reason. In his review of Emerson's Nature in the Examiner, Bowen characterized the concept of intuition as expressed by Emerson:
[Transcendentalism] rejects the aid of observation, and will not trust to experiment. The Baconian mode of discovery is regarded as obsolete; induction is a slow and tedious process, and the results are uncertain and imperfect. General truths are to be attained without the previous examination of particulars, and by the aid of a higher power than the understanding. . . . truths which are felt are more satisfactory and certain than those which are proved. . . . Hidden meanings, glimpses of spiritual and everlasting truth are found, where former observers sought only for natural facts. The observation of sensible phenomena can lead only to the discovery of insulated, partial, and relative laws; but the consideration of the same phenomena, in a typical point of view, may lead us to infinite and absolute truth, — to a knowledge of the reality of things. . . .
