In the entire museum of misconstructions of intelligence-test results nothing, perhaps, is more grotesque than the inference, or assumption, that high intelligence will of course accept and profit by the motivation of industrialism in its present form. The average IQ of the financially successful is somewhat higher than that of the economically under-dog portion of the populace. In other words, the _degree_ of success is due _in some measure_ to this factor. In some measure only, for there is no evidence that all the more intelligent succeed and all the others fail; and the degree only, for in a general way intelligence connotes success in the pursuit of any end that it consents to serve, and moreover we know of particular circumstances that induce men to pursue wealth and the power that it brings. We know that the environmental influences of our time shunt men’s ambitions in particular directions. We are trained from infancy by an economic order that takes for granted the service of self rather than of others. Some persons who possess high native intelligence go in for the ends that this training promotes, and of course such persons have more than average success in getting what they want. Meantime, other possessors of the gift go in for other things--research, original production in literature and the fine arts, humanitarian service, the championship of unpopular causes, the development of a cooperative society, the promotion of religion. Moreover, we have no comparative measures of the intelligence of different types of successful men of affairs. What should we find if we compared these three sorts: Men who rely upon compulsion; men who rely upon indirection or intrigue; and men who rely upon frankness, conciliation, and moderation? We do not know which of these would exhibit the highest intelligence; but it is allowable to guess! The relation between the insight of the literary artist and that of the psychologist is sufficiently close to require a comment, finally, upon the evidential value of the literature of disillusion that was mentioned in Chapter V. Is it not the business of the imaginative writer, one may ask, to see life as it is; to be more sensitive than the common run of men to the devices and desires of the heart, and thus to reveal us to ourselves? Look in the mirror of current literature, then, and see what a rank thing your nature is! An appropriate part-reply to this would be: Why this mirror more than scores of others that literature, past and present, has held up to nature? What guarantee is there that this reflecting surface has fewer distorting curves than others that render a different image? Why accept at its own value, without analysis, the cynical “realism” of one group, or the “barbaric naturalism” of another? Their borrowings from the psychologists are mixed and partly dubious or worse, and the marks of the seer are scarcely discernible.