WHAT IS INTELLIGENCE AND WHO HAS IT?

By Professor LIGHTNER WITMER

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA

INTELLIGENCE is the ability to solve a new problem. An unsurmounted difficulty is a new problem so long as its solution is unknown. It is easy enough to cut the Gordian knot, or to stand an egg on end, after one has learned how these historic intelligence tests were solved. When a problem is difficult enough, or the solution sufficiently novel and important, the intelligence displayed in successful invention will be considered "genius.

Life confronts us with problems, new and old. Just to keep one's self alive is a very old one. "To live by one's wits" is to solve it by an exercise of intelligence. From the cunning of a horse trader to the genius of an Aristotle is a long step up on the scale of intellectual competency; but intelligence may appear at any intellectual level, even a low one, and is divined from what the individual makes of opportunity and resources. We ascertain how much knowledge and skill enter into a performance in order to disregard them, for the intelligence displayed in successful adventure is measured not by the resources employed, but by the risks involved and the difficulties overcome. If, for example, the Russian Soviet is in fact a weak form of government, and the Bolshevists are as entangled in ignorance, insanity and crime as would appear from the reading of our daily newspaper, then it follows that the intelligence of a Lenine or a Trotzky must be given a higher rating than the genius of statesmen who have tried in vain to sink this defective ship of state, despite the fact that they have had at their command the intellectual resources of the most cultured and efficient nations of the world. Intelligence is not to be measured by conventional standards, but by the successful outcome of performance. The discrimination of intelligence from other abilities is concerned only with the criteria that distinguish the variable and novel creations of free initiative from the more constant and familiar effects of established habits. The originality of a performance is proportional to the number of novel elements entering into its composition, and to the amount by which a successful creation of the productive imagination varies from the prevailing mode.

The really serious problems of daily life, the primeval and yet

recurrent problems of mere existence were solved long ago by our pre-human ancestors. As a consequence, we are now able to get up in the morning, cook and eat our breakfast, swallow and digest it, without an exertion of intelligence or intellect, employing for the purpose inherited habits which are physiological mechanisms called "instincts" and "reflexes." Throughout a busy day, full of varied performance, one gets on with the day's work, solving problem after problem, many of them difficult enough, some of them possibly beyond the proficiency of all but the most expert or the best informed; but rarely will a new problem emerge from the comfortable routine of a well-ordered existence.

Education is the device of civilization to keep us from encountering new problems. The method employed is showing the pupil how to solve problems instead of letting him solve them for himself. It thus makes the exercise of his intelligence unnecessary. The school presents the paradigm, and when life confronts the graduate with a new problem, he solves it by virtue of an acquired intellectual habit, and in conformity to the scholastic model.

Endow a child with intellect, let him acquire knowledge and efficiency, teach him to conform his conduct, thought and feeling to the prevailing mode, and you go far to assure him a useful life at a high intellectual level. If he has intelligence, it may facilitate the schoolmaster's task, but pupil and teacher can, and do, get along without it. They must, however, avoid an excess of stupidity. They must not try to solve new problems if every attempt brings failure. They must do what the timid do, who fear failure more than they desire success; they must check initiative, censor the imagination, suppress revolt, curb aspiration and refrain from adventure. At this task the pupil will be aided and abetted by the greater number of schoolmasters who will direct his progress from the first year of the elementary school to the commencement day, which yields the certificate of intellectual proficiency called a "diploma." To discover how much intelligence the graduate of this educational system really has, one would have to surprise him at a moment when he is confronted by some accidental obstacle in an otherwise well-ordered existence-a missing suspender button, for instance, for which he must quickly invent a substitute, or some other difficulty connected with the sempiternal problem of making both ends meet.

Competency is an aggregate of many congenital abilities, some of them specific abilities, like talking and singing; others more general, like intelligence, intellect, discernment, will and motivation. By the time a child is six years old he will ordinarily display

all his congenital competency, from which the discerning observer may estimate how much ability he has and judge if he has enough to be considered normal. Let six-year-old children of normal competency grow up without instruction in school subjects, and therefore below the point of literacy on the intellectual scale, and they will be arrested in development at the level which defines the low grade imbecile. Let them, however, grow in stature, strength and endurance, in social conformity and sexual proficiency, and they could raise and support a family, if it were not for the difficulties provided by what in our pride we call "civilization." During the war, some imbecile children in the city of Philadelphia, arrested under the compulsory education law, were earning more than the truant officer who arrested them. It is not the inherent difficulty of earning a living and raising a family which makes the task impossible for those whose mental age is not more than six years; it is the grocer, the landlord and the employer, competitors whom they must outwit in the struggle for existence, ease and comfort. Civilization implies an average intellectual level. The farther a man's intellectual level falls below the mode, the more intelligence he will need.

No one has ever devised an intelligence test that tests intelligence and nothing else. In consequence, the results of so-called intelligence tests have significance only when analyzed and interpreted in relation to a particular set of antecedent conditions and attending circumstances. The Binet intelligence quotient, for example, is a measure of proficiency, and in those making low scores it may indicate anything in the way of ability or deficiency except intelligence. We do not observe or measure intelligence-we observe performance and measure its effects. A few intelligent performances will cause us to anticipate more of the same sort, and even an intelligent look may lead us to expect intelligent behavior. Intelligence is not a fact, but an explanatory concept derived from the observation of facts. It is a diagnostic category like courage or honesty, the diagnosis being in effect the verbal expression of an expectation.

In order to test the ability to solve a new problem, an intelligence test must provide that many members of a homogeneous group will fail, and that all but a few will make many errors before they achieve success. Those who make many attempts in a given time are more likely to succeed than those who make only a few attempts. Intelligence, therefore, is directly proportional to initiative and inversely proportional to the number of errors made, provided the errors are not too few. To measure a performer's intelligence one must know the time required to achieve success, but one must

not neglect to observe the performer at work and to take into the consideration the number and kind of errors made and how he corrects them. Intelligence is displayed through the operation of trial and error. An intelligence test is adjusted to the intellectual level of a group when those who succeed do not outnumber those who fail.

At the Psychological Clinic, an eleven block formboard is employed as an intelligence test. It may be solved in eleven moves in about eleven seconds, but anyone who solves it thus displays efficiency not intelligence. This formboard is an intelligence test at or about the four year old intellectual level, because not more than 50 per cent. of four year old children are able to solve it, even with a time allowance of one hundred seconds. No two year old child has ever passed the test; about 25 per cent. of three year old children have passed it, and approximately 100 per cent. of six year olds. If I know nothing about a particular child except that he is four years old, the odds are even that he will pass the test. If he is three years old, the odds are three to one that he will fail.

Intelligence is displayed in a performance that succeeds against adverse odds; stupidity is failure despite favoring odds. At any moment a future of some sort confronts us, and often we have nothing better than a gambler's guess for guide. When the odds favor failure, we have only a gambler's chance of winning; if we plunge and win despite the adverse odds, we have had a gambler's luck. The success of an intelligent player who uses all the resources at his command to win a fortune, whether at cards or in business, has a very different diagnostic significance from the "dumb luck" of inheriting money or finding it.

Intelligence, then, is a successful leap into the dark. "A man never rises so high," said Oliver Cromwell, "as when he knows not whither he is going." Converting the words of a madman into a slogan of success, Browning thus portrays the morale of the adventurer at the critical moment when success or failure hangs upon the issue of performance:

There they stood, ranged along the hillsides, met

To view the last of me, a living frame

For one more picture! in a sheet of flame

I saw them and I knew them all. And yet

Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set

And blew, "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came.

The achievement of intelligent initiative may be a successful adventure of pioneer or conqueror, the creation of a work of art, a new idea, an invention-some performance, no matter what, so

long as it be original to the performer, the product of an imagination that outruns knowledge, of an ingenuity that outdoes skill.

If this is a novelty to the beholder, it may inspire admiration, appreciation or wonder. If it is too novel, it will arouse distaste, fear and a destroying hatred. The more shocking a product of the creative imagination, the greater the presumption that genius inspired it, provided the production is something worth while.

The American readers of Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" were too shocked to appreciate the singular novelties of thought and diction concealed beneath the innocent botanical title. When he walked the streets of Philadelphia and Camden, he was ignored by those whom a recent French critic calls his "rustic compatriots." Now that French and English writers have discovered him to be the most original of American poets, his peculiar genius is not without honor even in his own country, save only perhaps in those classic centers of intellectual conservatism-the departments of English literature in our universities.

The Declaration of American Independence started a long war; it eventuated in a form of government as new to the Europe of that day as the Russian Soviet is now; it enthused and emboldened the French Revolutionists; it brought in its train the doctrine of self-determination; it helped to promote the Russian revolution and the success of the Irish Sinn Fein; it was signed by men who felt the hangman's noose about their necks, and only the successful outcome of the adventure kept the noose from being drawn tight. Whitman says:

I am the sworn poet of every dauntless rebel the world over.

I do not know what you are for (I do not know what I am for myself, nor what anything is for),

But I will search carefully for it even in being foil'd,

In defeat, poverty, misconception, imprisonment-for they, too, are great.
Revolt! and still revolt!

American patriots, those in particular who would be considered sons or daughters of the Revolution, ought to bear tenaciously in mind that resistance to constituted authority, as well as intelligence and compromise, went into the making of our Constitution.

Intelligence, then, plays a lone hand. It is individualism rampant, and may stake livelihood, happiness, life itself against the opinions and concerted actions of a public horrified by the strangeness of its creations. It is a minor group trying to outplay the majority. It is youth and inexperience trying to outdo old age and wisdom. It is eccentricity successfully opposing the prevailing mode.

The judgments of society, like the verdicts of juries, are not always easy to predict, and are susceptible to strange and rapid