Not Quite Yet a Hazy Limbo of Mystery: Intuition in Russell's An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry.

This article examines Bertrand Russell's 1897 work *An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry*, arguing that Russell’s concept of "forms of externality" functions as a non-intellectual source of knowledge foundational to geometry, analogous to Immanuel Kant’s "forms of intuition" in his critical philosophy. Both Russell and Kant hold that geometry concerns the composition of qualitatively identical yet numerically distinct magnitudes, which cannot be fully captured by concepts alone but require immediate, non-conceptual knowledge of bare numerical difference. The article highlights how Russell’s early neo-Kantian view preserves this foundational role of intuition-like knowledge while adapting it to accommodate nineteenth-century developments such as projective geometry. It also clarifies that although Russell’s rhetoric in this period may sound logicist, his position fundamentally differs by maintaining an irreducible, non-intellectual source of geometrical knowledge distinct from pure logic or conceptual reasoning.