Stephen Leacock

“ It merely has a community complex in the lobes of one of its feet. What we took to be the play of the young lamb (lambens piccolo) is simply a chemical movement of its tail under the influence of one or more stimuli.
In short, the whole mental world has been thrown into the greatest excitement. Everybody is "reacting" on everybody else. Mind waves and brain storms blow about like sand in the Sahara. Things good and bad come at us like an infection. We live in deadly fear that we may catch bolshevism, as we might a cold. Everything rushes at us in "waves." ”

“ But for persons who lack the proper training and habits of observation the intelligence test acts as a ruthless exterminator of incompetence. The point of it is, I repeat, that it is aimed not at eliciting the things which, from the very routine of our life itself, we are certain we know, but at those things which we ought to know but don't. ”

“ There is the psychology of the criminal, the psychology of the politician, and a psychology of the infant. For almost every juncture of life we now call in the services of an expert psychologist as naturally as we send for an emergency plumber. ”

“ College professors of psychology are wearing overcoats lined with fur, and riding in little coupé cars like doctors. The poor are studying the psychology of wealth, and the rich are studying the psychology of poverty. ”

“ Still more striking is the application of the intelligence test to the plain manual occupations. The worker fulfils, let us admit, his routine duty. But we have to ask, is this all that we have a right to demand from him? No. If the man is to be really competent, his mind ought to have a reach and an outlook which go beyond the mechanical operations of his job. ”

“ As a part of the new researches, it is found that psychology can be used not only for the purpose of football, but for almost everything in life. There is now not only psychology in the academic or college sense, but also a Psychology of Business, Psychology of Education, a Psychology of Salesmanship, a Psychology of Religion, a Psychology of Boxing, a Psychology of Investment, and a Psychology of Playing the Banjo. ”

“ Some of the biggest business men have failed in the intelligence test and have been ruined. A lot of our criminals turn out not to be criminals at all, but merely to have a reaction for another person's money. ”

“ One more would make seven. Seven days is a week. The inexorable logic was complete. The Hoopoo must appear once a week. The day of her first appearance had been Sunday. To-morrow she would come again.
The reader may imagine in what an agony of expectation I waited till next day. Spasms went through me when I thought of what the morrow might or might not bring. But this time I was not doomed to disappointment. Seated on my brick at the precise hour of ten, and watching the moving shadow, I became suddenly aware that the Hoopoo had appeared and was moving daintily over the dusty ground. ”

“ In other words, the man is a thinker. For such a man the intelligence test has no terrors. I questioned a man of this sort the other day. I said, "You have been in such and such an apartment building, have you not?" ”

“ People who used to be content with the humblest of plain thinking, or with none at all, now resolve themselves into "reflexes" and "complexes" and "impulses." Some of our brightest people are kleptomaniacs, paranoiacs, agoraphobists, and dolomites. A lot of our best friends turn out to be subnormal and not worth knowing. ”

“ Careful investigations of the thought-complex of the hen, the worm, and the bee have revealed to the world something of the wonderful mentality that was formerly rudely classed as "instinct' We now know that the bee could not construct her honeycomb in the particular form which she uses had she not some knowledge, however modest, of the mathematical law of the maximum cubic content. ”

“ In every direction one sees references to psycho-analysis, auto-suggestion, hypnosis, hopnoosis, psychiatry, inebriety, and things never thought of a little while ago. Will power is being openly sold by correspondence at about fifty cents a kilowatt. ”

“ It is proving itself an invaluable aid in weeding out incompetent men who have perhaps escaped detection for many years. For example, a firm in Kansas were anxious to judge of the selling power of their salesmen. ”