GENERAL  INTELLIGENCE

*39

Mr.  W:  Well,  I  confess  that  I  had  something  of  the
same  opinion  from  the  beginning;  but  I  wanted  to  find  out
specially  what  you,  as  a  practical  employment  man,  and
our  more  inexperienced  and,  as  we  thought,  more  theoretlc
 al,  psychologists  thought  about  the  subject.  I  expected
to  find  some  disagreement  between  the  two  viewpoints
but  I  was  very  pleasantly  surprised.  We  began  this  discussion ­
  by  saying  that  the  one  most  important  fact  about
an  applicant  was  his  intelligence,  and  we  defined  intelligence ­
  in  general  as  the  ability  to  learn.  All  the  other
definitions  seemed  to  boil  down  to  that.  But  now  we  seem
have  agreed  that  there  is  no  such  thing  as  general
intelligence,  and  that,  if  there  were,  it  would  be  of  little  use
to  us  in  employment  work  because  we  are  interested  in
s pecific  abilities  or  kinds  of  intelligence  and  not  in  degrees
intelligence  per  se.  Is  that  a  fair  statement  of  the  argument? ­


Mr.  L:  Yes,  it  suits  me.
Mr.  W:  In  that  case  I  can  only  repeat  the  sentiment
Much  you  attributed  to  me  a  few  minutes  ago,  Mr.  Lamer
 t.  This  is  certainly  an  age  of  specialization.
Miss  N:  Yes,  Mr.  Williams;  and  that  is  just  the  point.