The intelligent individual and society
"There is something in this book to interest every literate person and, says one critic who read the manuscript, "something to offend everybody--the rugged individualists, the liberals, the collectivists"--which means that it is an intensely vital book. Professor Bridgman begins by admitting that he says "out loud all sorts of things that are perfectly obvious to anyone, but which anyone with a ghost of sense or of social instinct knows enough to keep to himself." His great desire is to lead an intelligently ordered life, and it seems to him that this longing is one of the fundamental drives of human beings. He writes: "The intelligently ordered life is for me first of all a life in which the relations, consequences and implications of the drives that make me go are apprehended with complete vividness--a life in which the fundamental drives are served with all possible intelligence, in which the bearing of every action on my fundamental purposes is apprehended with the greatest vividness, and every action is deliberately so chosen as to further this end with the greatest possible efficiency." But he says he falls far short of this ideal. "I am not able to answer any question with regard to my life, whether concerning fact or motive or chance of success, with even an approach to that clearness and completeness which I demand with regard to my scientific activities." He sees the greatest need for the application of intelligence in the solution of social problems. He is convinced that the situations in physics and society today are practically identical, that in the social sciences, as in physics, the old ways of thinking are inadequate, and that social concepts must be revised in the face of altered circumstances as the physicists have learned to revise their concepts. Detailed application of methods similar to those successfully employed by physics shows the utter inadequacy of the conventional understanding of our mental machinery, as involved in our relations to the external world, the verbalizing in terms of which we do most of our thinking, and the relation of the individual to his fellows. In the light of an analysis of mental possibilities and limitations, he takes up and presents in a new aspect such ideas as those of duty, freedom, "rights," morality, justice, race survival, service, idealism; and discusses from a fresh viewpoint such questions as the use of physical force, the way to social reform, the future of education"--Jacket. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved).
