To choose is a constant work of the intelligence, just as to doubt is an unavailing effort to find a choice. Choice blocked is doubt, one of the unhappiest of mental states. I shall not pretend to solve the mystery of WHO chooses,--WHAT chooses; perhaps there is a constant immortal ego; perhaps there is built up a series of permanently excited areas which give rise to ego feeling and predominate in choice; perhaps competing mechanisms, as they struggle (in Sherrington's sense) for motor pathways, give origin to the feeling of choice. At any rate, because we choose is the reason that the concept of will has arisen in the minds of both philosopher and the man in the street, and much of our feeling of worth, individuality and power--mental factors of huge importance in character--arises from the power to choose.
Choice is influenced by--or it is a net result of--the praise and blame of others, conscience, memory, knowledge of the past, plans for the future. It is the fulcrum point of conduct!
That animals have intelligence in the sense in which I have used the term is without doubt. No one who reads the work of Morgan, the Peckhams, Fabre, Hobhouse and other recent investigators of the instincts can doubt it. Whether animals think in anything like the form our thought takes is another matter. We are so largely verbal in thought that speech and the capacity to speak seem intimately related to thought. For the mechanics of thought, for the laws of the association of ideas, the reader is referred to the psychologists. That minds differ according to whether they habitually follow one type of associations or another is an old story. The most annoying individual in the world is the one whose associations are unguided by a controlling purpose, who rambles along misdirected by sound associations or by accidental resemblances in structure of words, or by remote meanings,--who starts off to tell you that she (the garrulous old lady) went to the store to get some eggs, that she has a friend in the country whose boy is in the army (aren't the Germans dreadful, she's glad she's born in this country), city life is very hard, it isn't so healthy as the country, thank God her health is good, etc., etc.," and she never arrives at the grocery store to buy the eggs. The organizing of the associations through a goal idea is part of that organizing energy of the mind and character previously spoken of. The mind tends automatically to follow the stimuli that reach it, but the organizing energy has as one of its functions the preventing of this, and controlled thinking follows associations that are, as it were, laid down by the goal.
In fatigue, in illness, in certain of the mental diseases, the failure of the organizing energy brings about failure "to concentrate" and the tyranny of casual associations annoys and angers. The stock complaint of the neurasthenic that everything distracts his attention is a reversion back to the unorganized conditions of childhood, with this essential difference: that the neurasthenic rebels against his difficulty in thinking, whereas the child has no rebellion against that which is his normal state. Minds differ primarily and hugely in their power of organizing experience, in so studying and recording the past that it becomes a guide for the, future. Basic in this is the power of resisting the irrelevant association, of checking those automatic mental activities that tend to be stirred up by each sound, each sight, smell, taste and touch. The man whose task has no appeal for him has to fight to keep his mind on it, and there are other people, the so-called absent-minded, who are so over-concentrated, so wedded to a goal in thought, that lesser matters are neither remembered nor noticed. In its excess overconcentration is a handicap, since it robs one of that alertness for new impressions, new sources of thought so necessary for growth. The fine mind is that which can pursue successfully a goal in thought but which picks en route to that goal, out of the irrelevant associations, something that enriches its conclusions.
Not often enough is mechanical skill, hand-mindedness, considered as one of the prime phases of intelligence. Intelligence, en route to the conquest of the world, made use of that marvelous instrument, the human hand, which in its opposable thumb and little finger sharply separates man from the rest of creation.
