The Foundations of Personality [49]
persons. There is a constant duel between these two types of personalities, and since the practical usually control the power of the world, the theorists and explainers have had rather a hard time of it, though they are slowly coming into their own. Another difference between minds is this: that intelligence deals with the relations between things (this being a prime function of speech), and intelligence only becomes intellect when it is able to see the world from the standpoint of abstract ideas, such as truth, beauty, love, honor, goodness, evil, justice, race, individual, etc. The wider one can generalize correctly, the higher the intellect. The practical man rarely seeks wide generalizations because the truth of these and their value can only be demonstrated through the course of long periods of time, during which no good to the individual himself is seen. Besides which, the practical man knows that the wide generalization may be an error. Practical aims are usually immediate aims, whereas the aims of intellect are essentially remote and may project beyond the life of the thinker himself. We speak of people as original or as the reverse, with the understanding that originality is the basis of the world's progress. To be original in thought is to add new relationships to those already accepted, or to substitute new ones for the old. The original person is not easily credulous; he applies to traditional teaching and procedure the acid test of results. Thus the astronomers who rejected the theological idea that the earth was the center of the universe observed that eclipses could not be explained on such a basis, and Harvey, as he dissected bullocks' hearts and tied tourniquets around his arms, could not believe that Galen's teaching on circulation fitted what he saw of the veins and valves of his arm. The original observer refuses to slide over stubborn facts; authority has less influence with him than has an apple dropping downward. In another way the original thinker is constantly taking apart his experiences and readjusting the pieces into new combinations of beauty, usefulness and truth. This he does as artist, inventor and scientist. Most originality lies in the rejection of old ideas and methods as not consonant with results and experience; in the taking apart and the isolation of the components of experience (analysis) and in their reassemblage into new combinations (synthesis). The organizing activity of the original mind is high, and curiosity and interest are usually well maintained. Unless there is with these traits the quality called good judgment (i.e., good choice), the original is merely one of those "pests" who launch half-baked reforms and projects upon a weary world. We have spoken of intelligence as controlling and directing instinct and desire, as inhibiting emotion, as exhibiting itself in handicraftsmanship, as the builder up of abstractions and the principles of power and knowledge; we have omitted its relationship to speech. Without speech and its derivatives, man would still be a naked savage and not so well off in his struggle for existence as most of the larger animals. It is possible that we can think without words, but surely very little thinking is possible under such circumstances. One might conduct a business without definite records, but it would be a very small one. Speech is a means not only of designating things but of the manifest relations between things. It "short-cuts" thought so that we may store up a thousand experiences in one word. But its stupendous value and effects lie in this, that in words not only do we store up ourselves (could we be self-conscious without words?) and things, but we are able to interchange ourselves and our things with any one else in the world who understands our speech and writings. And we may truly converse with the dead and be profoundly changed by them. If the germ plasm is the organ of biological heredity, speech and its derivatives are the organs of social heredity! The power of expressing thought in words, of compressing experiences into spoken