Signals intelligence

“ In the case of the complex functions again, it is very hard to separate the actual capacities of intelligence (Intelligenzanlagen) , which it is desired to test, from the objective effects of instruction, training, etc. Thus, for example, many of the alienists' socalled tests of intelligence are really tests of information and scholastic attainment. ”

“ In other words, future consequences become transformed into a stimulus for further behavior. We are confronted here with a distinctive mode of operation, which must be properly recognized, if we are to give a consistent and intelligent account of conscious behavior. On the other hand, if we refuse to recognize the advent here of a new category, intelligence becomes an anomaly and mystery deepens into contradiction. ”

“ So is it, prior to experience, with the categories into which our experience comes to be inserted. Let us adopt then words sanctioned by usage, and give the distinction between intelligence and instinct this more precise formula: Intelligence, in so far as it is innate, is the knowledge of a form; instinct implies the knowledge of a matter. ”

“ Whether we trace mental progression through the grades of the animal kingdom, through the grades of mankind, or through the stages of individual growth; it is obvious that the advance, alike in cognitions and feelings, is, and must be, from the presentative to the more and more remotely representative. It is undeniable that intelligence ascends from those simple perceptions in which consciousness is occupied in localizing and classifying sensations, to perceptions more and more compound, to simple reasoning, to reasoning more and more complex and abstract—more and more remote from sensation. ”

“ Whether these two types are to be called intelligence and reason, as Professor Lloyd Morgan calls them, or whether both come under the head of reason, lower and higher, we need not trouble to decide. If we call them adaptive intelligence and higher or abstract reason, we are safe enough. ”

“ Are the movements and sounds governed by intelligence? At a very early stage of the inquiry, it was seen that the power producing the phenomena was not merely a blind force, but was associated with or governed by intelligence. ”

“ And this evolution of intelligent behaviour is working its way up to, though as such it cannot reach, the succeeding phase of mental evolution in which the data, supplied by intelligence, are treated with a new purpose for higher ends in the rational thought which seeks to explain the phenomena, and frame an ideal scheme of their relations and interconnections. ”

“ The signal experiment is duplicated thousands of times in the education of every human being. He learns the meaning of signs and slight indications; that is, he learns to recognize important facts by aid of signs that are of themselves unimportant. We shall have much to say on this matter in a later chapter on perception. Man learns signs more readily than such an animal as the rat, in part because the human being is naturally more responsive to visual and auditory stimuli. Yet the human being often has trouble in learning to read the signs aright. ”

“ The rill of inner life has become a swift stream, sometimes a rushing torrent. Besides perceptual inference or Intelligence—a sort of picture-logic, which some animals likewise have—there is conceptual inference—or Reason—an internal experimenting with general ideas. ”

“ By slow gradations, we find the child capable of directing its eye, of [Pg 82] listening to sounds, and of examining by the touch; and these imply the efforts of the will, which appear to be subsequent to perception. As we advance in knowledge, our perceptions, which are the sources of intelligence, are principally acquired by the agency of volition, which directs the organ to the object, but we still continue to be acted on involuntarily by forcible impressions, or striking phenomena. ”

“ Hence it is that we rightly regard the power to learn by experience, that is, to acquire more and more appropriate reactions to stimulus, as the test of a creature’s intelligence. Where there is no progressive adaptability there is no ground to assume intelligence and purpose. Hence again the impossibility of calculating beforehand with any certainty what course the behaviour of an intelligent being will take, unless you are actually aware of the purposes he is seeking to realise. ”

“ But it soon becomes obvious that while there is assuredly something a priori—that is to say, native, unlearned, original—in human experience, that something is not knowledge, but is activities made possible by means of established connexions of neurones. This empirical fact does not solve the orthodox problem ”

“ Divesting this conception of all superfluities and reducing it to its most abstract shape, we see that Life is definable as the continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations. And when we so define it, we discover that the physical and the psychial life are equally comprehended by the definition. We perceive that this which we call Intelligence, shows itself when the external relations to which the internal ones are adjusted, begin to be numerous, complex, and remote in time or space ”

“ Now, when we remember that the method of intelligence is to profit by chance experience, while the method of reason is, with foresight and intention, to adapt means to ends, we shall see that to move a straw even a quarter of an inch, or to make a bridge with particles of mould, would require rational and not merely intelligent powers. Chance experience would not supply the necessary data to be utilized by intelligence when repetition had established an association in the conscious situation. ”

“ We all leave our mark in a thousand subtle ways. No material microscope or telescope can detect, nevertheless our mark can be discovered by the powers of the human soul. From our cradle to the grave—does it stop there?—every thought, emotion, movement, and action have left their subtle traces, so that our whole life can be traced out by the psychometric expert. ”

“ For our investigation will show a bodily structure peculiarly adapted to control by a governing consciousness. It will reveal to the eye a physical mechanism peculiarly fitted for the dissemination of intelligence throughout the body. And, most of all, it will disclose the existence within the body of subordinate mental units, each capable of receiving, understanding and acting upon the intelligence thus submitted. And we shall have strongly corroborative evidence of the mind's complete control over every function of the body. ”

“ Foresight and the sense of obligation, for example, must learn to regard themselves as nothing more than an interesting indication of the way in which the neural machinery is operating before they will fit into the scheme. And similarly the progress of an argument is no way controlled or directed by the end in view, or by considerations of logical coherence, but by the impact of causation. Ideas lose their power to guide conduct by prevision of the future,254 and truth and error consequently lose their significance, save perhaps as manifestations of cerebral operations. ”

“ In our attempt to trace an evolutive series of phenomena indicating ever higher human faculty, the smallest telepathic incident,—the most trivial proof, if proof it be, of communication received without sensory intermediation from either an incarnate or a discarnate mind outweighs in importance the most complex ramifications and burgeonings of the automatist's own submerged intelligence. ”

“ For instinctive as the sounds are at the outset, by entering into the conscious situation and taking their part in the association-complex of experience, they become factors in the social life as modified and directed by intelligence. To their original instinctive value as the outcome of stimuli, and as themselves affording stimuli to responsive behavior, is added a value for consciousness in so far as they enter into those guiding situations by which intelligent behavior is determined. ”

“ But more than form and colour and that enchanting variability was the look of intelligence, which at the same time seemed complementary to and one with the all-seeing, all-hearing alertness appearing in her face; the alertness one remarks in a wild creature, even when in repose and fearing nothing; but seldom in man, never perhaps in intellectual or studious man. ”

“ They are not, in consequence, transitive vehicles of thought. Words should, from the standpoint of communication, be mere signals to action, which should attract attention only in so far as they are signals. ”

“ It has been described in the following way: there exists an effluence or force generated by, or resulting from, the molecular activity of each individual brain. These forces are constantly influencing the souls of men, encountering, overcoming, and repelling opposition, and reacting upon the conscious intelligence of the authors of their generation; or they may unite themselves into groups and operate collectively, forming a psychic stream of power. ”

“ These questions center attention upon the significance of reflective intelligence in the process of experience. The extent of an agent's capacity for inference, its power to use a given fact as a sign of something not yet given, measures the extent of its ability systematically to enlarge its control of the future.
A being which can use given and finished facts as signs of things to come; which can take given things as evidences of absent things, can, in that degree, forecast the future; it can form reasonable expectations. It is capable of achieving ideas; it is possessed of intelligence. ”

“ You have had Phrenology defined to you as the Science of Intelligence, and you naturally ask for a definition of intelligence itself.
Intelligence is the result of the radiation of magnetism from every object in the universe. Magnetism is radiated by different bodies in different degrees of intensity. Man is provided with seven distinct organs of sense, which receive and interpret these radiations. The lowest rate of vibration is received and interpreted by the sense of gender and the next stage by the sense of touch. ”

“ In a conception of inference in which both data and hypothesis are regarded as the tentative, experimental results of the processes of perception, memory, and97 constructive imagination engaged in the special task of removing conflict, ambiguity, and inhibition, and in which these processes are not conceived as the functions of a private mind nor of an equally private brain and nervous system, but as functions of interacting beings,—in such a conception there is no ground for anxiety concerning the simplicity of data, nor the objectivity of hypotheses. ”

“ It will be seen, then, how marvellously the action of certain senses may be exalted by long and careful training on the one hand, and suddenly by disease on the other. We have seen, moreover, how some persons known as sensitives are able to receive impressions by thought-transference so as to name cards, repeat words and fictitious names, both of persons and places, merely thought of but not spoken by another person known as the agent or operator, and to draw diagrams unmistakably like those formed in the mind or intently looked upon by the agent. ”

“ THE INTELLIGENCE TEST
In other words, the intelligence test has come to us as one of the first fruits of the new psychology. In practically every walk of life, this bright little device is now being introduced as a means of finding out what people don't know, and for what particular business they are specially unfitted. Many persons, it now appears, go through life without being able to distinguish colors, or to arrange equilateral triangles into a tetrahedron, or to say the alphabet backward. ”

“ Even at that familiar part by whose extent we measure the quantity of people's intelligence, even at the external ear, the problems begin. You see here a succession of helixes or spiral windings, at times very pretty, whose significance we cannot accurately state, yet for which there must certainly be some reason. ”

“ You introduce tests of various sorts, by which to get a more precise measure of the individual's performance. Further, by the use of what may be called double comparison, or "correlation", you work out the relationships of various mental (and physical) traits. For example, when many different species of animals are compared in intelligence and also in brain weight, the two are found to correspond fairly well, the more intelligent species having on the whole the heavier brains; from which we fairly conclude that the size of the brain has something to do with intelligence. ”

“ Properly applied psychological tests would pass over all or nearly all of the acquired knowledge of such individuals about their particular business and related matters, and neglect also, the bulk, at least, of the acquired knowledge of the university man, and so compare merely what might be called two naked brains, the native intelligence of each being the only thing to be measured. ”

“ There are reaches of intelligence far below and beyond the common intelligence as the microscope and the telescope have shown, and at the fourth and fifth dimension of consciousness man dispenses with all material aids and uses the adjustments of his own being. ”

“ Its evidential force is in keeping before men's view, by the example of the signal apparition, in one branch of our race, of the sense for conduct and righteousness, the reality and naturalness of that sense. Clearly, unless a sense or endowment of human nature, however in itself real and beneficent, has some signal representative among mankind, it tends to be pressed upon by other senses and endowments, to suffer from its own want of energy, and to be more and more pushed out of sight. ”

“ Coming downwards, beginning on the mental plane with Intelligence—missing the two higher ones of Existence and Love—He sends out vibrations to make the matter of the mental plane answer, and the vibrations with which that matter answers, that is, a certain range of vibrations, are called mental or intelligent. ”