INTELLIGENCE UNDER FIRE

Modern intelligence, a stupendous force which might change everything to the world's heart's desire, has failed to do so, charges Dickinson S. Miller in this week's New Republic, not because it lacks power, but because it is too young and afraid of itself. Well-equipped with all the raw material furnished by the scientific method, intelligence is nevertheless too cautions about thinking things to an end he says; hence there are wars, slums, crimes, stupid politics and still more stupid schemes of education.

It is undeniable that spiritually and socially the world is little Better than at any other period of history. Only in comparatively recent times has intelligence arrogated to itself a hand in the "destiny that shapes our ends." Mr. Miller accepts this attitude among modern thinkers without question, asserting only a lack of confidence keeps them from the full investigations asserting faultless logical conclusions which would consummate all the desired changes. Yet this power over the malleable future may be an unsupportable presumption, a possibility which he discounts with disdain. His thesis is that with patience and care the film that now obscures the eyesight of intelligence can be cleared away. "When People in reasoning, they do so in obvious ways by violating obvious rules," he says. But it would seem that if the errors were obvious, even an intelligence with misgivings could have perceived and avoided them.

In spite of Mr. Miller's direct imputation to the contrary, intelligence can never be sure of itself, both because it can never delve to the bottom of its facts, and because, being a human attribute, it is subject to the intermittent rule of human fallibility. To proceed on the unproved theorem that intelligence can consciously change the world is so great risk that it is justified in proceeding with the caution which Mr. Miller deplores. Until someone discovers a genuine criterion of truth, intelligence must become accustomed to what Mr. Miller calls the "infamous waste and cruel suffering that its miscarriage is constantly producing." Pilate's embarrassing question: What is truth?" is still as much of a poser to theorists as it ever was.