64 THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY and sane knowledge to occupy his brief periods of instruction?" No doubt the professor is free enough in some institutions to say what he wishes, but the joker is-the professor does not want to say what will subject him or his institution to hostile criticism. For this reason, university faculties do not make a brilliant display of creative intelligence in the intellectual field. Our educational system, as a whole, is distinguished by the conformity it promotes, the mental discipline it trains. This, doubtless, is as it should be, for successful living is at least ninety-nine parts in a hundred conformity and constraint; only a very small fraction of one per cent. of a man's life can, at the very best, display freedom of thought and action. In no field, however, is it so important to keep the little freedom we have as in the field of intellectual production. And yet thought is so rigidly conformed in this country to 100 per cent. patterns that American. genius is not conspicuous for intellectual originality. Some years ago I heard a professor at the University of Rome express the opinion that the development of big business in the United States was an outburst of creative energy similar to that which distinguished Italy during the Renaissance. Do not go to our universities to observe the best American intelligence in action; go out into the business world where great enterprises are successfully put over. There the atmosphere is one of freedom-even from the constraint of honesty and truth. This year the winner of the Nobel prize in literature is Anatole France, an avowed communist; another winner is Premier Branting, the leader of the dominant socialistic party in Sweden. Representative American contributions to art are movies and jazz bands, skyscrapers and railway stations. When America honors the free expression of new ideas without regard to their normalcy, intellectual originality, as well as mechanical invention, may become a conspicuous trait of American character. The meeting place of intellect and intelligence is interesting. Imagination belongs to the category of intellect, and also to the category of intelligence. Creative imagination produces order out of chaos. As soon as a little child can use the kindergarten peg board, give him one and ask him to put the pegs into the board. He puts in the first one; where shall he put the second, beside the first or at a distance? This is the critical moment. If he puts it, let us say, beside the first, it must be to the right, to the left, above or below. He is now ready to put the third peg in position. If he does what he did with the second peg, he will make a row. plan appears, a definite order is displayed. If he works without instruction he is producing an order of his own. He is doing A something that has meaning. He displays creative imagination. He is already beginning to develop an intellect. As the spider spins a web from his own body, so the human being weaves patterns of performance, establishes order, rises superior to chaos and produces standards of behavior based on knowledge. This employment of intelligence in intellectual organization is characteristically and typically human. I have tested chimpanzees and other apes, but have never known an ape to create a new order of his own. I have not seen a chimpanzee peg a straight line of his own accord, but I have observed little children doing it as soon as they could grasp the pegs and put them in place. A civilization is a social order, the average developmental level of a group, it may be large or small. It is to be measured by the number and diversity of material and intellectual resources, but its chance of survival depends on intelligence, that is to say, on its ability to change. The social order of to-morrow is the invention of the few whose intelligence operates at a high intellectual level. Change is the predominant characteristic of uterine life; stability, of the adult. At what age does the individual begin to stand pat? When does a man lose the ability to get a new idea, to change convictions or a point of view? At any age. Some, indeed, never get a new idea. They imitate in thought the prevailing modes of the social group to which they happen to belong, or to which they aspire. Fifteen, however, is an age at which a great number, perhaps the majority of those who do at least a little thinking of their own, harden into conventional patterns of thought and behavior. Others keep changing and growing intellectually up to thirty, some even up to forty-five, while just a few display to the very end that intellectual pliability which is intelligence informed by acquired knowledge. A new individual begins to exist at conception with the union of a spermatozoon and an ovum. He will change more during the nine months of uterine life than in the remaining years of his existence. At birth, it has been estimated, he will possess only two per cent. of the original energy of development. He is like a clock, wound up at conception, which keeps running down until it stops. at death. At twenty-one he comes of age, able to inherit the family property but already at six years of age he has entered into his heritage of human competency, and has begun to develop his natural resources of intellect and character, of intelligence and skill. Age advances on a very uneven front. Long before the first gray hair or the first wrinkle, some congenital abilities have hardened into particular modes of behavior. It is then difficult, if not impossible, to change old habits for new. A child, for example, VOL. XV-5 having learned one language with ease, inclines to stand pat on his accomplishment. He appears to lose some of his original pliability, offers resistance to the acquisition of another language, develops a sort of organic obstinacy, in other situations called "constitutional conservatism." From infancy on, efficiency is being acquired at the expense of general competency. Problems are solved with increasing accuracy and speed, but the ability to solve new problems is greater at the age of six years than at any later period. Youth combines the plasticity of initiative with the efficiency of acquired skill, and thus produces the successful inventions from which a new order is evolved. Old age brings wisdom, but is handicapped by a deficiency of initiative and dislike of change. The vitality of a civilization is directly proportional to the creative intelligence of its young men and young women. Observation of the behavior of children and adults leads to the conclusion that education can not make the stupid intelligent. Intelligence is a congenital though not inherited endowment, and the amount of it can not be increased by training. Genius is not a product of breeding; its appearance is in the hands of the gods, a result of the fortuitous combination of qualities possessed by the germ plasms entering into the conception of a new individual. The chief condition which appears to favor superior intelligence is the variety of race and family mixture. The more mongrel a people, the more intelligent; the purer the blood, the more stupid. Intelligence would seem to require an inner conflict of cross purposes and opposing impulses. Neither the Jew, the Anglo-Saxon, the Irish, the French, the Italian nor the American is pure-blooded, in comparison with the Prussian Junker, whose blood is purer and older than the oldest of first families in England or America. written more than In an essay on "Race and Tradition, twenty years before the great war, Darmesteter, a Frenchman, says of Germany: "The misfortune of Germany-what constitutes her momentary strength and will bring about her lasting weakness in the future-is that the element of race is better preserved there than elsewhere. Hence, narrowness of spirit, lack of proportion in her intelligence, of justice in her heart. She lacked that fruitful struggle of contrary forces that limit their excesses by complementing their energies, and that, in recognizing their mutual rights, enlarge the innate narrowness of man, with the result of producing something that has the extent and variety of Nature herself. Germany has remained, and still remains, a thing strangely powerful and painfully incomplete." 1 1 Selected Essays, translated by Helen B. Jastrow. Two hundred years ago, the author of "Robinson Crusoe" paid his respects to those who tried to mobilize the race prejudice of "true born Englishmen" against the followers of William of Orange, in words that some of our "hundred per cent. Americans" might ponder with profit: These are the heroes that despise the Dutch, Whose red haired offspring everywhere remains, Who join'd with Norman French, compound the breed, There are those who fear for civilization. Of what are they afraid? Civilization is not necessarily threatened, whether by imperialists or communists; our civilization may be the aggregate of our material and intellectual possessions. Creative intelligence, however, is indifferent to the language which transmits the intellectual fruits of man's genius-whether it be Anglo-Saxon or Prussian, Latin or Slav, indifferent even to the color of the hand that bears aloft the torch of enlightenment and progress, let it be yellow, white or black. So far as intelligence and progress are concerned, the future is a sporting proposition, and the sportsman's attitude is to let the best man win. The general aim of civilization is dominion over nature—the more efficient control of natural forces. There are doubtless some who still think that man's subjection to nature is a law of God, and that a social order once established must not be changed. Progress, however, is inevitable, though privilege and authority, timidity and prejudice will always oppose the creative advance of intelligence. To defy the spirit of progress in the name of either religion or law is superstition; the true prophet is a poet who sees in creative evolution the display of divine intelligence. What the world needs to-day is more of the optimism of the progressive and a little less of the pathological fear of the standpatter, more faith in creative evolution, more hope of reaching yet higher levels of achievement and more of that freedom from prejudice called charity, another name for love, the productive passion. UM IN SOCIAL LIFE AMONG THE INSECTS1 By Professor WILLIAM MORTON WHEELER LECTURE II. WASPS SOLITARY AND SOCIAL N the preceding lecture I gave a brief account of the rudimentary social life of certain beetles and called attention to the fact that in all or nearly all of them the male cooperates with the female parent in victualing or protecting the offspring. I endeavored to show that all these societies have their inception or raison d'être in the specialized feeding habits of the parents and that in all of them the food is of vegetable origin, abundant but not very nutritious in some of the cases (dung and rotten wood in the Scarabæidæ, Passalidæ and Phrenapates), in others highly nutritious, but obtainable only in small quantities at a time (living plant-tissues and honey-dew in the case of the Tachigalia beetles, ambrosia of the Ipida and Platypodide). The adequate exploitation of such food-supplies is necessarily time-consuming and has evidently led to a lengthening of the adult lives of the beetles. This in turn has naturally brought about an overlapping of the juvenile by the parent generation, thus enabling the parents to acquire contact and acquaintance with their young and an interest in providing them with the same kind of food as that on which they themselves habitually feed. In the insects which I shall consider in this lecture, we find a series of societies originating in a very different type of feeding and leading to much more complicated and more. definitely integrated associations. Although the wasps have attracted fewer investigators than the ants and bees, they are of even greater interest to the student who is tracing the evolution of specialized instincts and social habits. The wasp group is one of enormous size and is really made up of two great complexes, the Sphecoids and the Vespoids, together comprising more than a dozen families and some 10,000 species. Of these only about 800 are clearly social. We have more or less fragmentary behavioristic studies of scarcely 5 per cent. of all the species. Yet they cover a sufficient number of forms to enable us to establish the following generalizations: (1). The structure and behavior of the Sphecoids and Vespoids 1 Lowell Lectures. |