Intuition is the function that tries to ascertain the possible. It is the precognitive function, more at home with will be than with is or was. 
   For a person of this type, the present is a pale shadow, the past is a mist. Warmth and sunshine, bright lights and excitement are to be found beyond the bend in the road, on the other side of the mountain. But rounding a bend only leads temporarily to a straight path. There is always another curve. The intuitive spends his life racing toward the horizon. Intuitives frequently appear to be flighty, impractical and unrealistic.
   Because what will happen is more real than what is happening, intuitives frequently suffer: they must wait for events to catch up with what is, to them, already evident. Time flows backward. The intuitive feels that if others would only accelerate their paces, they would arrive more rapidly at the tomorrow of his vision.
 
Quickness: An intuitive can work up inspiration about the future as quickly as a sensation type can initiate a project, as quickly as a thinking type can evolve a new theory, and as quickly as a feeling type can produce an emotional response. But intuitives tend to skip about rapidly from one activity to another. As soon as a new inspiration presents itself, their curiosity is piqued and they want to see how it will turn out. While others plod on, trying to catch up with the vision the intuitive has shared with them, the intuitive himself has most likely abandoned it to follow a new inspiration. For this reason, many intuitives do not benefit from their inspirations. Other individuals develop the visions that the intuitive initiated and reap the fruit of the seeds that he sowed.
   Because the thinking type gets to the future by proceeding along the time line, it is not at all difficult for him to chart the route to the intuitive's vision, providing he agrees it is valid.
   Since time in the future seems to obey different rules from time in the present, past or time line, intuitives generally find it hard to learn time. They are likely not to know what day, date or season it is; frequently they are prone to rather large error when they are asked say without looking at a watch what time it is. In those who are highly introverted, this trait is especially pronounced. From our investigations with introverted intuitives, we have developed a working hypothesis that timelessness - the sphere of nonlinear temporal existence that mystic and Taoist masters concentrated on (emphasis added) - is the normal experiential world of introverted intuitives, or to a lesser degree, those with secondary introverted intuition.
   To be aware of time, to be constrained to be punctual, to have to keep to a schedule - these are demands that intuitives find painful and bothersome.
 
   Charisma. Intuitives inspire others with a vision of the future. Herein lies their greatest talent and the source of their personal happiness. Extraverts of this type invariably have charisma that draws others to them to scale cliffs that the intuitive already has explored. Because the future is their natural home, they are more likely -- when they are intelligent, psychologically stable and truly ethical -- to be right about the future than are equally gifted other types. But they can also be unbelievably wrong, and can lead an entire movement into a future of horror, despair and death.
   An intuitive's vision of the future is very real for him. He is not terribly appreciative of others whose vision differs from his. Once he is committed to his vision of the future, he will stop at nothing to change the world so that it agrees with the picture he has of it. Three very different examples of the intuitive are Hitler, with his vision of the thousand-year-Reich; Joan of Arc, charismatic leader of the armies of France, and Timothy Leary, prophet of consciousness expansion.
   They epitomize intuitives who have attempted to change society so that it evolves in the direction of their visions. Intuitives often do not master the skills they need to accomplish their visions of the future.
 
   Shame. In B. D. Wolfe's Three Who Made A Revolution, there is a revealing anecdote about young Leon Trotsky, who was a typical extroverted intuitive: "He possessed the gift of employing, combining, displaying his smallish acquisitions in the show window so that people would get the idea that behind it was a well-stocked store. But he was capable of feelings of shame afterwards and of fierce self-deprecation when he found that there were often others who had really mastered the books he pretended to know." Trotsky was about 19 at the time of this observation.
   Another typical trait of the intuitive is illustrated in the following statement about Trotsky from the same book: "He tackled Mill's Logic.... In like fashion he dipped into Lippert's Evolution of Culture and Mignet's French Revolution, only to abandon each of them unfinished. For several weeks on end he was a follower of Jeremy Bentham, assuring all who would listen... (it) was the last word in human wisdom and the formula for all man's problems. Before he could make a single convert, he himself had abandoned Behtham for an equally brief discipleship of Chernishevski."
   Intuitives dash through ideas and theories, impatient with those that are insufficiently exciting, yet intensely devoted to something that may be completely discarded within a few weeks. Ordinarily, life proceeds at a steady pace; the intuitive finds it lethargic. Anything that accelerates this pace is welcome, sought, and latched onto. Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution can be seen as a future-oriented type's concept of heaven.

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Synopsis: Four Directions of Time