180 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 



When the knowledge which he seeks is available in the words of others, 

 his intelligence and intellect will enable him more easily to understand 

 and, if necessary, to paraphrase them. If he can visualise pictures, draw 

 them (these two gifts not being necessarily interdependent), and abstract 

 their salient features into diagrams, he will more easily communicate his 

 meaning to certain readers, who in their turn may criticise, destructively 

 and constructively. In this way he may bring the general principles 

 derived from his special sphere alongside those obtained from other realms 

 to which he may not have access. From such confrontations and intelli- 

 gent comparisons he may enunciate new principles. These, by means of 

 his skill, he can test in his own world of experience. 



More suitable words than ' intellect ' may be found for the mental 

 power or group of powers described above. After much consideration 

 I think that ' intellect ' seems to do this best. Its adoption, however, 

 suggests one disquieting possibility. It might encourage those who 

 assume, tacitly or noisily, that conceptual intelligence and abstract thmking 

 cannot be appraised or tested except by the use of words and numbers. 

 Prof. W. F. Dearborn writes : 



The reason why it has been so difl&cult ' to devise tests of the 

 non-verbal or " performance " type which will bring out intellectual 

 differences much above the level of the average child of ten or a dozen 



. years, ' may be due to the fact that the verbalist and the scholastic 

 have hitherto been the ones chiefly interested in the development of 

 intelligence tests, and they have naturally chosen tests in the use of 

 which their own intellectual powers will not suffer by comparison.'"' 



He insists upon respect for the intelligence which thinks in terms of 

 things rather than with the symbols for things.'^' As an illustration he 

 quotes Prof. H. H. Turner's account of the way in which apparent changes 

 in the wind's direction, observed in a boat ' putting about ' on a river, 

 suggested to Dr. Bradley the cause of the apparent changes in the 

 direction of a star's light.^^ 



It is useful to remind readers that abstract thinking is not confined to 

 the use of auditory and visual symbols.^'' In so far as intelligence tests 

 are limited to them, so far will the intelligence of an important section of 

 the population be improperly gauged. For this reason I proj)ose, for 

 psychological purposes, the use of the word ' intellect ' in the above- 

 described way. It enables us to emphasise the fact that people who can 

 do things may or may not be able to analyse and describe their performance. 

 It would also remind the mute ones that their silence is not more golden 

 than any other silence. 



The Relation between Different Motor Abilities. 



Tests of intelligence give results which correlate highly with each other. 

 But there is no justified single concept enabling us to explain why some 



•» Op. cit., pp. 109, 110. 



'^1 Cf. Mr. Aldous Huxley on the academic mind, in Proper Studies, London, 1927. 



^^- E. Freundlich, The Foundations of Einstein's Theory of Gravitation. English 

 translation by H. L. Brose. Introduction by H. H. Turner. Cambridge, 1920, 

 pp. 11, 12. 



'■^ Cf. T. H. Pear, Remembering and Forgetting, London, p. 229. 



