INTELLIGENCE IN SOCIAL FUNCTION
INTELLIGENCE AS FORESIGHT—A TENTATIVE PROCESS—A PHASE OF THE SOCIAL
PROCESS—GROUP INTELLIGENCE—INTELLIGENT PROCESS INCLUDES THE WHOLE
MIND—ITS DRAMATIC CHARACTER—RELATION TO DRAMATIC LITERATURE—MODERN
ENLARGEMENT OF INTELLIGENT PROCESS
The test of intelligence is the power to act successfully in new
situations. We judge a man to be intelligent when we see that in going
through the world he is not guided merely by routine or second-hand
ideas, but that when he meets a fresh difficulty he thinks out a fresh
line of action appropriate to it, which is justified by its success. We
value the faculty because it does succeed, because in the changing world
of human life we feel a constant need for it. In animal existence, where
situations repeat themselves day after day, and generation after
generation, with practical uniformity, a successful method of behavior
may be worked out by unintelligent adaptation, and may become fixed in
instinct or habit, but the power to deal effectively with intricate and
shifting forces belongs to intelligence alone.
It is, then, essentially a kind of foresight, a mental reaction that
anticipates the operation of the forces at work and is prepared in
advance to adjust itself to them. How is this possible when the
situation is a new one whose working cannot have been observed in the
past?
The answer is that the situation is new only as a whole, and that it
always has elements whose operation is familiar. Intelligence is the
power to anticipate how these elements will work in a novel combination:
it is a power of grasp, of synthesis, of constructive vision.[75]
It does not dispense with experience. A man who can take hold of a new
undertaking and make it go will commonly be a man who has prepared
himself by previous undertakings of a similar character: the more
pertinent experience he has had the better. If he is opening a business
agency in a strange city he will require a general acquaintance with the
business, such as he might gain at the home office, and will do well
also to learn all he can in advance about the city into which he goes.
But beyond this he will need the power to take a fresh, understanding
view of the situation as he actually finds it, the state of the market,
the people with whom he deals and the like, so as to perceive their
probable working in relation to his own designs.
Intelligence, then, is based on memories, but makes a free and
constructive use of these, as distinguished from a mechanical use. By an
act of mental synthesis it grasps the new combination as a going whole
and foresees how it must work. It apprehends life through an inner
organizing process of its own, corresponding to the outward process
which it needs to interpret, but working in advance of the latter and
anticipating the outcome.
You might say that memory supplies us with a thousand motion-picture
films showing what has happened in given sets of circumstances in the
past. Now, when a new set of circumstances occurs the unintelligent mind
picks out a film that shows something in common with it and, expecting a
repetition of that film, guides its course accordingly. The intelligent
mind, however, surveying many old films, is content with none of them,
but by a creative synthesis imagines a new film answering more closely
to the new situation, and foreshowing more nearly what will happen. It
is a work of art, depicting what never was on sea or land, yet more like
the truth than anything actually experienced.
I conceive that no mechanical theory of intelligence can be other than
illusive. It is essentially a process of dealing with the unknown, of
discovery. After its operations have taken place they may, perhaps, be
formulated; but they can be predicted in advance only by the parallel
operation of another intelligence. Behavior which can be formulated in
advance is not, in any high sense, intelligent.
Even the intelligence, however, works by a tentative method; it has to
feel its way. Its superiority lies in the fewness and effectiveness of
its experiments. Our mental staging of what is about to happen is almost
never completely true, but it approaches the truth, in proportion as we
are intelligent, so that our action comes somewhere near success, and we
can the more easily make the necessary corrections. Napoleon did not
always foresee how military operations would work out, but his prevision
was so much more nearly correct than that of other generals that his
rapid and sure experiments led to almost certain victory. In a similar
manner Darwin felt his way among observations and hypotheses, proving
all things and holding fast what was good, going slowly but surely up a
road where others could make no headway at all. It is the same, I
believe, with composers, sculptors, painters, and poets: their
occasionally rapid accomplishment is the fruit of a long discipline in
trial and error.
This selection and organization in the intelligent mind is also a
participation in the social process. As the mental and the social are
merely phases of the same life, this hardly needs proof, but an
illustration will do no harm.
Suppose, then, I am considering whether to send my son away from home to
a certain college. Here is a problem for my intelligence, and it is also
a social problem, a situation in a drama wherein my son and I and others
are characters, my aim being to understand and guide its development so
that it may issue as I wish. I bring before my mind all that I have been
able to learn about the teachers at the college, the traditions and
surrounding influences, as well as the disposition and previous history
of the boy, striving all the time to see how things will develop if I do
send him, and how this will be related to my own wishes for his welfare.
The better I can do this the more likely I am to act successfully in the
premises. The whole procedure is a staging in my mind of a scene in the
life of society.
The process that goes on in a case like this is the work not only of my
own private mind but of a social group. My information comes to me
through other people, and they share in forming my ideas. Quite probably
I discuss the matter with my friends; certainly with my wife: it may be
matter for a family council. Intelligence works through a social
process.
It is easy, then, to pass from what seems to be an act of merely private
intelligence through a series of steps by which it becomes distinctly
public or societal. The deliberations of a family council differ only in
continuity of organization from those of a wide nation, with newspapers,
legislatures, and an ancient constitution. There is nothing exclusively
individual about intelligence. It is part of our social heritage,
inseparably bound up with communication and discussion, and has always
functioned for that common life which embraces the most cogent interests
of the individual. The groups in which men have lived—the family, the
tribe, the clan, the secret society, the village community, and so on to
the multiform associations of our own time—have had a public
intelligence, working itself out through discussion and tradition, and
illuminating more or less the situations and endeavors of the group.
It is, indeed, a chief function of the institutions of society to
provide an organization on the basis of which public intelligence may
work effectively. They preserve the results of past experiment and
accumulate them about the principal lines of public endeavor, so that
intelligence working along these lines may use them. They supply also
specialized symbols, traditions, methods of discussion and decision, for
industry, science, literature, government, art, philosophy and other
departments of life. The growth of intelligence and the growth of a
differentiated social system are inseparable.
The movement of this larger or public intelligence is a social process
of somewhat the same character as the less conscious processes. It is
tentative, adaptive, has periods of conflict and of compromise, and
results in progressive organization. The difference is just that it is
more intelligent; that thinking and planning and forecasting play a
greater part in it, and that there is not so much waste and
misdirection. Its development requires a special psychological method,
including the initiation of ideas, discussion, modification, and
decision; which of course is absent on the lower plane of life.
It is essential, if we are to have a public intelligence, that
individuals should identify themselves with the public organism and
think from that point of view. If there is no consciousness of the whole
its experiments and adaptations cannot be truly intelligent, because, as
a whole, it makes no mental synthesis and prevision. A society of
“economic men,” that is, of men who regarded all questions only from the
standpoint of their individual pecuniary loss or gain, could never be an
intelligent whole. If it worked well, as economists formerly believed
that it would, this would be an unforeseen and unintended result, not a
direct work of intelligence. In fact, during the nineteenth century
England and America went largely upon the theory that a general
intelligence and control were unnecessary in the economic sphere—with
the result that all competent minds now perceive the theory to be false.
On the other hand, the act of larger intelligence need not take place
all at once or in the mind of only one individual. It is usually
co-operative and cumulative, the work of many individuals, all of them,
in some measure, thinking from the point of view of the whole and
building up their ideas and endeavors in a continuing structure.
Thus it may be said that in all modern nations the political life is
partly intelligent, because none of them, perhaps, is without a line of
patriots who, generation after generation, identify their thoughts with
the state, discuss aims and methods with one another, and maintain a
tradition of rational policy. It is so with any organism which attracts
the allegiance of a continuous group. The church, as a whole and in its
several branches, has a corporate intelligence maintained in this way,
and so have the various sciences; also, in a measure, political parties,
the fine arts, and the more enduring forms of industrial organization.
Human nature likes to merge itself in great wholes, and many a
corporation is served, better, perhaps, than it deserves, by men who
identify their spirits with it.
It would be a false conception of intelligence to regard it as something
apart from sentiment and passion. It is, rather, an organization of the
whole working of the mind, a development at the top of a process which
remains an interrelated whole. This is true of its individual aspect;
for our sentiments and passions furnish in great part the premises with
which intelligence works; they are the pigments, so to speak, with which
we paint the picture. And so with the collective aspect; discussion is
far more than an interchange of ideas; it is also an interaction of
feelings, which are sometimes conveyed by words and sometimes by
gesture, tones, glances of the eye, and by all sorts of deeds. The
obscure impulses that pass from man to man in this way have quite as
much to do with the building of the collective mind as has explicit
reasoning. The whole psychic current works itself up by complex
interaction and synthesis. And the power of collective intelligence in a
people is not to be measured by dialectic faculty alone; it rests quite
as much upon those qualities of sense and character which underlie
insight, judgment, and belief. Intelligence, in the fullest sense, is
wisdom, and wisdom draws upon every resource of the mind.
There is no way of telling whether a people is capable of intelligent
self-direction except by observing that they practise it. It may be true
that certain races or stocks do not have political capacity in
sufficient measure to meet the needs of modern organization, and will
fail to produce stable and efficient societies. It is a matter of
experiment, and our more optimistic theories may prove to be unsound.
For similar reasons no dividing-line can be drawn between what is
intelligent and what is ethical, however clearly they may be separated
in particular cases. That is, the intelligent view of situations is a
synthetic view which, if it is only synthetic enough, embracing in one
whole all the human interests at stake, tends to become an ethical view.
Righteousness is the completest intelligence in action, and we are
constantly finding that what appears intelligent to a narrow state of
mind is quite the opposite when our imaginations expand to take in a
wider range of life. There can be an unmoral kind of intelligence which
is very keen in its way, as, for that matter, there can be an
unintelligent kind of morality which is very conscientious in its way;
but the two tend to coincide as they become more complete. The question
of our higher development is all one question, of which the intellectual
and moral sides are aspects. We get on by forming intelligent ideals of
right, which are imaginative reconstructions and anticipations of life,
based upon experience. And in trying to realize these ideals we initiate
a new phase of the social process, which goes on through the usual
interactions to a fresh synthesis.
It seems that intelligence, as applied to social life, is essentially
dramatic in character. That is, it deals with men in all their human
complexity, and is required to forecast how they will act in relation to
one another and how the situation as a whole will work out. The most
intelligent man is he who can most adequately dramatize that part of the
social process with which he has to deal. If he is a social worker
dealing with a family he needs not only to sympathize with the members
individually, but to see them as a group in living interaction with one
another and with the neighbors, so that he may know how any fresh
influence he may bring to bear will actually work. If he is the
labor-manager of a factory he must have insight to see the play of
motive going on among the men, their attitude toward their work, toward
the foreman and toward the “office,” the whole group-psychology of the
situation. In the same way a business man must see a proposed
transaction as a living, moving whole, with all the parties to it in
their true human characters. I remember talking with an investigator for
one of the great commercial agencies who told me that in forming his
judgment of the reliability of a merchant he made a practice, after an
interview with him, of imagining him in various critical situations and
picturing to himself how such a man would behave—of dramatizing him. I
think that we all do this in forming our judgments of people.
Or what is the stock-market but a continuous drama, successful
participation in which depends upon the power to apprehend some phase of
it as a moving whole and foresee its tendency? And so with
statesmanship; the precise knowledge of history or statistics will
always and rightly be subordinate to the higher faculty of inspired
social imagination.
The literary drama, including fiction and whatever other forms have a
dramatic character, may be regarded as intelligence striving to
interpret the social process in art. It aims to present in
comprehensible form some phase of that cyclical movement of life which
otherwise is apt to seem unintelligible.
When the curtain rises we perceive, first of all, a number of persons,
charged with character and reciprocal tendency, each one standing for
something and all together constituting a dynamic situation. We feel
ourselves in the stress of life; conflict is implicit and expectation
aroused. The play proceeds and the forces begin to work themselves out;
there are interactions, mutual incitements and adjustments, with a
development both of persons and of the situation at large. At length the
interacting powers arrange themselves more or less distinctly about a
central question, and presently ensues that struggle for which our
expectation is strung; some decisive clash of human forces, which
satisfies our need to see the thing fought out, and releases our
excitement, to subside, perhaps, in reflection. And presently we have
the _dénouement_, a final and reconciling situation, a completer and
more stable organization of the forces that were implicit in the
beginning.
Conflict is the crisis of drama, as it is of the social process, and
there is hardly any great literature, whether dramatic in form or not,
which is not a literature of conflict. What would be left of the Bible
if you took away all that is inspired by it; from the Psalms, for
instance, all echoes of the struggles of Israel with other nations, of
upper with lower classes, or of the warring impulses within the mind of
the singer? The power of the story of Jesus centres about his faith, his
courage, his lonely struggle, his apparent failure, which is yet felt to
be a real success—the Cross. And so one might take Homer, Dante,
Shakespeare’s tragedies, Faust, as well as a thousand works of the
second order, finding conflict at the heart of all. Without this we are
not greatly moved.
Each type of society has particular forms of the drama setting forth
what it apprehends as most significant in its own life. Savages
dramatize battle and the chase, while plays of our own time depict the
conflict of industrial classes, of old ideas and conventions with new
ones, and of the individual with circumstances. The love game between
the sexes—a sort of conflict however you look at it—is of perennial
interest.
Forms like the play and the novel should be the most effective agents of
social discussion; and, in fact, the more searching, in a social and
moral sense, are the questions to be discussed, the more these forms are
in demand. In an ordinary political campaign, where there is little at
issue beyond a personal choice of candidates or some clash of pecuniary
interests, the usual appeals through newspaper editorials, interviews,
and speeches may suffice. But when people begin to be exercised about
really fundamental matters, such as the ethics of marriage, the
ascendancy of one social class over another, the contact of races or the
significance of vice and crime, they show a need to see these matters
through novels and plays. The immense vogue of literature of this sort
in recent years is good democracy; in no other way is it possible to
present such questions with so much of living truth, and yet so
simplified as to make a real impression.
In recent time there has been a great enlargement of the intelligent
process, which will doubtless continue in the future. As regards
mechanism, this is based on the extension and improvement of
communication, of printing, telegraphy, rapid travel, illustration, and
the like. These disseminate information and make a wider and quicker
discussion possible. At the same time there appears to have been an
advance in the power of organized intelligence to interpret life and
bring sound judgment to bear upon actual situations. No one would
dispute the truth of this as regards our dealings with the material
world, nor is there much doubt that it is in some degree true in the
sphere of social relations. We understand better how life works and
should be able to impress a more rational and humane character on the
whole process. At any rate this, I suppose, is what we are all striving
for.
But no achievement of this sort is likely to affect the preponderance of
the unintelligible. You might liken society to a party of men with
lanterns making their way by night through an immeasurable forest. The
light which the lanterns throw about each individual, and about the
party as a whole, showing them how to guide their immediate steps, may
increase indefinitely, illuminating more clearly a larger area; but
there will always remain, probably, the plutonian wilderness beyond.