Intelligent person

“ Nothing is calculated to satisfy the mind of an intelligent being only to obtain principles that will preserve him in his identity, to enable him to increase in wisdom, power, knowledge, and perfection. ”

“ What Sort of Man is the Most Intelligent?—Straightway, a first serious objection suggests itself: What sort of persons are the most intelligent? Are they really those who have attained the higher academic degrees and the most eminent social positions? ”

“ Are there men of intelligence in the nations? Yes, as to the world's intelligence—as to the intelligence associated with the arts and sciences, natural philosophy, and mechanism, they are as intelligent as any that can be found, without God. ”

“ Are literary productions and the acquisition of laurels reliable tests of intelligence? Is this man a doctor because he is more intelligent, and that man a hospital attendant because he is less intelligent? ”

“ A fuller intelligence will render all the mysteries and miseries of life intelligible. For whatever is in the past, you are, with others, responsible. Now waste no more brain-substance in grief, shame or wrath, but conserve all your nervous force for your work. Assume the motherhood which you presumed upon. Your mind is crowded with artificial distinctions. A few simple principles, held to amiably, will make all your life sweet and intelligent, even now.
“You love purity. ”

“ Not only so, but he is an intelligent being, capable of reflecting and acting. We profess to know a great deal, but what of our philosophy? Who is there can tell me by what power I lift my right arm? If that cannot be told, what do we know? How far short, then, are we of that intelligence that governs the universe, and regulates all the works of nature. ”

“ Like most men with a vision, a plan, a program or a remedy, he fondly imagined people to be intelligent enough to accept a good thing when it was offered to them, which was conclusive evidence that he knew little about the human race. ”

“ But for the “Common People,” the average intelligent student, for whom Science and the pursuit of Knowledge is not a Profession, but a desire to know, and to understand, in order to be able to use wisely and well, it is of far less importance to know what others think or believe, deny or affirm, on the subject of Psychology, than to realize what are the faculties, capacities, and powers of their own souls. ”

“ The second important characteristic of intelligence is that it considers either other means of reaching a given end, or other ends, and by working out the consequences of these also has the basis for deliberation and choice. The method of "multiple working hypotheses," urged as highly important in scientific investigation, is no less essential in the moral field. To bring several ends into the field of consideration is the characteristic of the intelligent, or as we often say, the open-minded man. ”

“ We found ourselves in possession of bodies, mental faculties, and reasoning powers. In a word, we found ourselves intelligent beings, with minds capable of recalling the past and launching into the unborn future with lightning speed ”

“ But what he did was to persuade men for the future that the intelligent, patient, persevering cross-examination of things, and the thoughts about them, was the only, and was the successful road to know. ”

“ Appeal to him on any plain subject, and you find him gifted with quick perception, possessed with ready judgment, and with his mind sparkling with intelligence. Now, mix a dozen such men together, and intellect instantly begins to coagulate ”

“ I mean that, as people grow more intelligent, or more people grow intelligent at all, we shall discover other opportunities for exercising intellectual energy and for obtaining the thrill and uplift of intellectual prowess. ”

“ Do we not all of us know hundreds of practical men who are in the highest degree intelligent, but in whom the rational, analytic faculty is but little developed? Is it any injustice to the brutes to contend that their inferences are of the same order as those of these excellent practical folk? ”

“ But I raise this question merely to ask another—When the wise man brings his list of our genuine admirations, will intelligence be one of them? We might seem to be well within the old ideal of modesty if we claimed the virtue of intelligence. But before we claim the virtue, are we convinced that it is a virtue, not a peril? ”

“ CREEDS. There is a natural desire on the part of every intelligent human being to harmonize his information—to make his theories agree—in other words, to make what he knows, or thinks he knows, in one department, agree and harmonize with what he knows, or thinks he knows, in every other department of human knowledge. ”

“ I do most fully believe that some true proposition of the form ‘Intelligence is good and intelligence alone is good’ can be found; if none could be found, our definition of the good would be impossible. ”

“ Intellect is void of affection, and sees an object as it stands in the light of science, cool and disengaged. The intellect goes out of the individual, floats over its own personality, and regards it as a fact, and not as I and mine. He who is immersed in what concerns person or place cannot see the problem of existence. This the intellect always ponders. Nature shows all things formed and bound. The intellect pierces the form, overleaps the wall, detects intrinsic likeness between remote things, and reduces all things into a few principles.
The making a fact the subject of thought raises it. ”

“ No less admirable are, on the one hand, his synthetic skill and the logic of his arguments, and, on the other, his subtle and discriminating analyses, which weigh the finest shades of thought and dissect each subject with all the accuracy of science. ”

“ Now as intelligence is the very essence of personality, distinction of intelligence must be the distinction of personality. Therefore the Divine Intelligence is the Divine Person, and the human intelligence, is the human person. ”

“ Varying degrees of intelligence, then, among the Intelligences, as also varying degrees of greatness and nobility of soul and of moral quality are established; and doubtless the variation in the pre-earth existence is as great as it is in earth life.
2. The "One" More Intelligent Than All—God: When it is conceded that among Intelligences there are varying degrees of intelligence, and greatness and nobility and moral quality, then it follows that there may be One who is the most intelligent of all, greatest, noblest, best; most wise and most powerful. ”

“ But that which par excellence is termed knowledge, bears the impress of judgment and reason, in the exercise of which there will be rational cognitions alone, applying purely to objects of thought, and resulting from the bare energy of the soul. ”

“ Now, that faculty of the intellect which is dominant in man, and which has raised him immeasurably above the animal, and made him man, is the rational intelligence. If there is any such thing as a law of history or as continuity in evolution, man's future progress must depend upon his clearer vision and recognition of the perceptions of this faculty. Through it man perceives beauty, truth, and goodness, and attains knowledge of himself as a person and moral agent, and recognizes his rights and duties. ”

“ Intellect lies behind genius, which is intellect constructive. Intellect is the simple power anterior to all action or construction. Gladly would I unfold in calm degrees a natural history of the intellect, but what man has yet been able to mark the steps and boundaries of that transparent essence? The first questions are always to be asked, and the wisest doctor is gravelled by the inquisitiveness of a child. How can we speak of the action of the mind under any divisions, as of its knowledge, of its ethics, of its works, and so forth, since it melts will into perception, knowledge into act? ”

“ Yes, he is intelligent. But we must be more intelligent. We must be so intelligent that he does not suspect us of being intelligent at all.” ”

“ The moment he comes in contact with the stern and stubborn realities which frown on his entrance into practical life, he will find that power is the soul of knowledge, and character the condition of intelligence. ”

“ Intelligence turns to whichever side the light comes from, adjusting itself, in discursive, often desultory fashion, to all manner of directions and distances, comparing and measuring with unabashed slovenliness, extracting the qualities which strike it and hastening on to connect them with something it was struck by before. Being thus rapidly responsive, Intelligence may often, I admit, seem on the pounce, and more so than politeness warrants. ”

“ Those who are wise in mind have a certain attribute of nature peculiar to themselves; and they who have shown themselves capable, receive from the Supreme Wisdom a spirit of perception in double measure. ”

“ They have the foundation, and they can improve and add knowledge to knowledge, wisdom to wisdom, light to light, and intelligence to intelligence. This power to increase in wisdom and intelligence so that we can know things for ourselves is within every one of us. ”

“ From the Lord God of Hosts, and you derived your intelligence from the same source. Where did any man that exists or breathes the breath of life throughout this whole universe get any intelligence he has? ”

“ The law that human intellects will seek their own intellectual level, providing the person is sound in principle, had worked out in her case, and, once she had made her decision, she clung to it with all the steadfastness of a strong and passionate nature. ”

“ It surprises me sometimes to think how much we do know and how intelligent we are. ”

“ At every age, in every country and climate, and under every circumstance, we find that in the highest qualities of mind, of reason, judgment, genius, inventive power, capacity for acquiring and utilizing knowledge, man stands preeminent. ”

“ Verily, if you could have looked into the heart of the person he addressed, and heard him speak, you would have cried admiringly, "Knowledge is power; and this man, if as able on a larger field of action, should play no mean part in the history of his time." ”

“ Slight them by preoccupation of mind,—slight them, as you can well afford to do, by high and universal aims, and they instantly feel that you have right, and that it is in lower places that they must shine. They also feel your right; for they, with you, are open to the influx of the all-knowing spirit, which annihilates before its broad noon the little shades and gradations of intelligence in the compositions we call wiser and wisest. ”

“ He possessed an instinct so keen that it amounted almost to intuition in his understanding of men, a business ability amounting almost to genius, and a philosophic turn of mind which permitted him to apply his knowledge with almost unerring judgment. ”

“ Thus in the constant effort to acquire and elaborate ideas and preserve knowledge of things as necessary to its own preservation and higher development, the Self is working intellectually. Are we to say, then, that Intellect is the supreme function of mind, and that the Self is essentially Intellect—considering the other functions to be merely contributory? ”

“ And let the orientalists and pessimists say what they will, the thing of deepest—or, at any rate, of comparatively deepest—significance in life does seem to be its character of progress, or that strange union of reality with ideal novelty which it continues from one moment to another to present. To recognize ideal novelty is the task of what we call intelligence. Not every one's intelligence can tell which novelties are ideal. For many the ideal thing will always seem to cling still to the older more familiar good. ”

“ Are they not rife with all the useful reasoning—the philosophic intelligence—the happiness of application, that cultivated man could devise for the assistance of untutored intellect?
From the logic of the sage we learn, by a spirit of imitation natural to human beings, to quicken our own powers of reasoning. The perspicuity of arrangement and expression, so admirable in our master, becomes gradually a part of our own style. ”

“ May your bright intelligence ever be increased!
May your bright intelligence become perfect,
High and brilliant, leading to a good end!
That good end has (now) its beginning:—
The personators of your ancestors announced it in their blessing. ”

“ Yet, however noble his desires, and however intelligent and comprehensive his plans and purposes, it is only as he develops a volitional personality, or determination of character which impels toward the attainment of these noble ends through intelligent plans, that man can be said to live the truly efficient life. ”

“ You thus perceive that the question regarding our competency to attain to absolute truth resolves itself into the new question, Is there in the mind of man a universal part—that is, a part which in all intelligences is essentially of the same character? Intelligence itself seems to constrain us to answer this question in the affirmative. ”

“ Think of the mental quality of a world in which each day the thought and research of a great host of intelligences turns more and more the opaque and confused riddles of yesteryear into transparent lucidity. ”

“ The significant distinction is no longer between the knower and the world; it is between different ways of being in and of the movement of things; between a brute physical way and a purposive, intelligent way. ”

“ As our attention is most commonly attracted by those departments of knowledge which are striking and remarkable, rather than by those which are really useful, so, in estimating the character of an individual, we are prone to admire extraordinary intellectual powers and uncommon energies of thought, and to overlook that excellence which is, in truth, the most precious—his moral value. Was the subject of biography distinguished by a vast erudition? Was he conspicuous for an original genius? ”