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The growth of intelligence, then, is the process of replacing innate patterns of behavior by another guide, while retaining some or all of those inborn appetites and drives that impel animals to act. Meanwhile, the lineage of animals in which this transfer is slowly effected must continue uninterruptedly to run life's perilous race, for to pause is to perish. This change of command is obviously a hazardous procedure, like changing generals in the midst of a battle, or jumping from one horse to another while galloping at full speed. Begun many thousands if not millions of years ago in our ancestors, who were doubtless still more apelike than human, the transfer is today still far from complete. Unless we remember

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that the whole story of humankind, including the most recent history, covers a difficult period of readjustment, of transition from one mode of control or integration of activities to another quite different, we shall not read this story with understanding, and contemplation of the human drama, with its innumerable follies and consequent miseries, may fill us with loathing and despair, unlighted by a ray of hope.

The Gigantic Task of Nascent Intelligence

Intelligence is, above all, the ability to link ideas, and the movements they guide, in new combinations. An ape, inspired by a flash of insight, as in W. Köhler's (1927) experiments, seizes a stick and knocks down a tempting fruit that hangs above his reach. Undoubtedly he was already somewhat familiar with sticks and their properties, with fruits, and with falling bodies, and now he has combined these elements of his experience in a novel way that leads to the desired result. Let us not lose sight of the fact that this association was not possible without dissociation. If the animal and all his ancestors have instinctively climbed to reach or shake down fruit, his fresh insight will bring him no advantage unless he can break the established sequence in which sight of an edible fruit hanging overhead is followed by climbing instead of by picking up a stick. Obviously, such ability to disrupt or dissolve patterns of behavior that for generations have adequately guided one's kind is fraught with insidious dangers. But the free association of ideas is such a perilous adventure that we must give it greater attention.

Those who have studied science or philosophy, or grown up among people of good practical intelligence, have learned to associate ideas in so many profitable combinations that they seldom stop to consider that these represent only a fraction of the possible ways of associating the same elements of experience. How bewildered we would be if all our articulated series of ideas were to fly asunder, and we were confronted with the task of arranging the loose components into coherent, practically useful patterns without benefit of the accumulated experience of men and women! Of

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the many principles or schemas by which the simplest facts or ideas can be associated, some are worthless, if not positively misleading. Science is cultivated by people with trained minds, yet one who traces its history sometimes suspects that not until all possible false theories have been tried and found inadequate can the most fruitful explanation of each natural phenomenon win acceptance. The construction of a sound theory depends upon combining the pertinent facts in an order that reflects the structure of nature rather than some idiosyncracy of the investigator's mind.

If scientists and philosophers so frequently blunder in this way, how must it have been with our remote ancestors, whose dawning intelligence confronted a bewildering array of experiences that cried insistently for explanation but who had not yet developed the most elementary canons of reason or of scientific investigation? Only by a stupendous process of trial and error could the profitable combinations of ideas be discovered and the vastly greater number of worthless ones rejected. The pains, the heartaches, the frustrations, the waste of time and energy,