Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 191
From these statements thus printed I have pieced together a composite picture of Napoleon in which is shown those little personal things that made him what he was.
Anybody who wants to be a Napoleon has only to imitate these things. I admit that they are a little complicated. But even Napoleon couldn’t have learned them all at once. He must have picked them bit by bit.
In the first place the great Emperor was an early riser. The hour of three in the morning saw him in the saddle or at his desk. “Early rising,” he once said when taking a well known breakfast food, “not only peptonizes the stomach but with the aid of a simple remedy obtainable at all drug stores restores tone and vigor to the lost digestion.”
Napoleon also sat up late. He never sought his couch till three in the morning. “The later the hour,” he once said, in referring to a new patent oil lamp, “the better the brain.”
It was the practice of Napoleon to chew his food twenty minutes before swallowing it. Eating a sirloin steak took him all day. Napoleon was in the habit of eating standing up. He also ate lying down. He could even sit and eat.
While talking the great Emperor habitually held his mouth firmly shut.
Napoleon always wore wool next to his skin. He once said in an interview which he seems to have given to a well known firm of woollen manufacturers in Paterson, New Jersey, “There is nothing like wool.”
In the same way he always said, “There is nothing like a delicious cup of Ozo when exhausted from the pulpit and the platform.”
Napoleon was passionately fond of walking: also he never walked. Napoleon drank, but always with the strictest avidity.
Napoleon made little use of tobacco except in the form of snuff, or cigars or cut plug.
During his exile at St. Helena Napoleon is reported to have said,
“If I had taken a course in Personal Leadership, I should not have landed here.”
The Human Mind Up To Date
NOTE. THE DISCUSSION which follows below is intended to be merely a portion, or half portion, of a Manual of the New Mentality. The work when finished will comprise twenty instalments which may be read either singly or all at the same time. The final edition will be bound in half-calf for ordinary readers, with a university edition for scholars (complete calf), and for the rich an édition de luxe sold at an addition de luxe.
The object of the entire work — I need hardly say — will not be to make money, but to perform a service to the community. To make this certain, the word service will be stamped in gilt letters on each volume of a special or “service edition” of the book — sold to servants.
The Mind Wave
One of the most cheering things about this good, gay world in which we are at present living is the recent pleasing progress of the human mind. For ever so many centuries the human mind had lain more or less dormant. It was known that it was there. But just where it was and what it did and how it did it was a matter on which nothing, if anything, was known.
Within recent years all this has changed. A great wave of mind culture has swept over the community. People who never had any before now have little else.
It is generally admitted that the human mind was first discovered about four years ago by a brilliant writer in one of the Sunday journals. His article “Have We a Subconscious Ego?” was immediately followed by a striking discussion under the title “Are We Top Side Up?” This brought forth a whole series of popular articles and books under such titles as Willing and Being, How to Think, Existence as a Mode of Thought, The Super Self, and such special technical studies as The Mentality of the Hen and the Thought Process of the Potato.
This movement, once started, has spread in every direction. All our best magazines are now full of mind. In every direction one sees references to psychoanalysis, auto-suggestion, hypnosis, hypnoosis, psychiatry, inebriety, and things never thought of a little while ago. Will power is being openly sold by correspondence at about fifty cents a kilowatt. College professors of psychology are wearing overcoats lined with fur, and riding in little coupé cars like doctors. The poor are studying the psychology of wealth, and the rich are studying the psychology of poverty. Memory has been reduced to a system. A good memory is now sold for fifty cents.
Everybody’s mind is now analyzed. People who used to be content with the humblest of plain thinking, or with none at all, now resolve themselves into “reflexes” and “complexes” and “impulses.” Some of our brightest people are kleptomaniacs, paranoiacs, agoraphobists, and dolomites. A lot of our best friends turn out to be subnormal and not worth knowing. Some of the biggest business men have failed in the intelligence test and have been ruined. A lot of our criminals turn out not to be criminals at all, but merely to have a reaction for another person’s money.
Still more gratifying is the fact that we are now able to locate with something like certainty where the mind is. And it appears that it is away down — in fact, is sinking into a bottomless abyss. What we took for the mind is only an insignificant part of it, a poor glimmer of intelligence, a rush light floating on the surface of an unknown depth. Underneath the mind lurks the subconscious, and away down under this again, the subliminal, and under that is the primitive complex, and farther down, fifty feet in the mud, is the cosmic intelligence. This late item, cosmic intelligence, is thought by some people to be found in Buddhism, and other people say that it is seen in Walt Whitman, and in Dante at his best. It may also be connected with music.
But what is now an assured fact is that, while human beings have only just begun to learn about these things, the animals have known about them and been using them for years. It seems that the caterpillar doesn’t think at all! He gave it up long ago; he merely “reacts.” The common ant (formica americana) instead of working all the time, as we thought it did, does not work at all. It merely has a community complex in the lobes of one of its feet. What we took to be the play of the young lamb (lambens piccola) is simply a chemical movement of its tail under the influence of one or more stimuli.
In short, the whole mental world has been thrown into the greatest excitement. Everybody is “reacting” on everybody else. Mind waves and brain storms blow about like sand in the Sahara. Things good and bad come at us like an infection. We live in deadly fear that we may catch bolshevism, as we might a cold. Everything rushes at us in “waves.” A New York chauffeur chokes his employer, and it is called a “crime wave.” The man is rushed off to a rest house to have his complex removed, while the people leave the city in the flood. Then they hear that a repentant burglar has given a million dollars to Trinity Church, and that a moral wave is flooding over the city; and they come back.
In this disturbed state nobody’s mind can act alone. Everybody has to be in it with a lot of others. Family love is replaced by Big Brother Movements and Little Sister Agitations, and a grown-up man subscribes twenty-five cents and wears a pink ribbon to help him to be kind to his own mother.
The Outbreak of Psychology
Prominent among all these phenomena is the great movement which is putting psychology into the front rank of human activities. In earlier days this science was kept strictly confined to the colleges. It was taught by an ancient professor in a skull cap, with a white beard which reached to the foot of his waistcoat. It had no particular connection with anything at all, and did no visible harm to those who studied it. It explained the difference between a “sensation” and a “perception” and between an “idea” and a “notion.” As a college subject, it was principally taken as a qualification for the football team, and thus ranked side by side with architecture, religious knowledge and the Portuguese Ballad. Some of the greatest players on the Harvard and Yale teams knew little else.
All this changed. As a part of the new research, it is found that psychology can be used not only for the purpose of football, but for almost anything in life. There is now not only psychology in the academic or college sense, but also a Psychology of Business, a Psychology of Education, a Psychology of Salesmanship, a Psychology of Religion, a Psychology of Boxing, a Psychology of Investment, and a Psychology of Playing the Banjo. In sort, everybody has his. There is the psychology of the criminal, the psychology of the politician, and a psychology of the infant. For almost every juncture of life we now call in the services of an expert psychologist as naturally as we send for an emergency plumber. In all our great cities there are already, or soon will be, signs that read “Psychologist — Open Day and Night.”
The real meaning of this is found in the fact that we are now able to use psychology as a guide or test in a thousand and one practical matters. In the old days there was no way of knowing what a man could do except by trying him out. Now we don’t have to do this at all. We merely measure the shape of his head and see whether, by native intelligence he can, immediately and offhand, pronounce TH backward, or count the scales of a goldfish. This method has been applied for many years in the appointment of generals in the Chinese army, but with us it is new.
The Intelligence Test
In other words, the intelligence test has come to us as one of the first fruits of the new psychology. In practically every walk of life, this bright little device is now being introduced as a means of finding out what people don’t know, and for what particular business they are specially unfitted. Many persons, it now appears, go through life without being able to distinguish colors, or to arrange equilateral triangles into a tetrahedron, or to say the alphabet backwards. Indeed, some persons of this sort have in the past gone clear through and got away with it. They could hardly do so now. And yet incompetent persons of this kind used often to occupy positions of trust, and even to handle money.
Let us see then what the intelligence test means.
If we wish to realize how slipshod is the thinking of persons in apparently sound mental condition, we have only to ask any man of our acquaintance how much is 13 times 147. The large probability is that he doesn’t know. Or let us ask any casual acquaintance how many cubic centimeters there are in the Woolworth Building, and his estimate will be found to be absurdly incorrect. The man, in other words, lacks observation. His mind has never been trained to form an accurate judgment.
Compare with this the operation of the trained, keener mind such as is being fashioned by the new psychology. This man, or shall we say this mind, for he deserves to be called it, walks down the street with his eye alert and his brain active. He notes the cubic contents of the buildings that he sees. He can tell you if you ask him (or even if you don’t) the numbers of the taxicabs which he has passed, or overtaken, in his walk. He can tell you what proportion of red-haired men have passed him in a given time; how many steps he has taken in going a hundred yards; and how many yards he has walked in a given number of steps.
In other words, the man is a thinker. For such a man the intelligence test has no terrors. I questioned a man of this sort the other day. I said, “You have been in such and such an apartment building, have you not?” He answered, with characteristic activity of mind, “Yes.” “And did you on entering such and such a hall in the building observe such and such a goldfish in such and such a bowl?” Judge my surprise when he told me that he had not only observed it, but had counted its scales and given it a peanut. My readers, moreover, will readily believe me when I say that the man in question is the head of one of the biggest corporations in the city. No one else could have done it.
But for persons who lack the proper training and habits of observation the intelligence test acts as a ruthless exterminator of incompetence. The point of it is, I repeat, that it is aimed not at eliciting the things which, from the very routine of our life itself, we are certain we know, but at those things which we ought to know but don’t.
Here are a few little samples of what I mean, taken from the actual test questions used by one of our leading practical psychologists:
Intelligence Test for Bank Managers
1. Can you knit?
2. Name your favorite flower.
3. Which is the larger end of a safety pin?
4. How many wheels has a Pullman car?
5. If a spider wants to walk from the top corner of a room to the bottom corner farthest away, will he follow the angular diameter of the floor, or will his path be an obese tabloid?
It is the last question, I may say, which generally gets them. Already four of the principal bank managers in New York have lost their positions over it.
Let us put beside this from the same source another interesting set of questions:
Intelligence Test for Hospital Nurses
1. What is the difference between a Federal Reserve note and a Federal Reserve Bank note?
2. Suppose that a general buoyancy had led you to expand beyond what you considered prudent, and you felt that you must deflate, what would you take in first?
I may say that of seventeen trained nurses only one was able to answer these questions, especially No. 2, without wandering from the essential meaning; even the odd one hardly counted, as she turned out to be engaged to a bank teller.
Still more striking is the application of the intelligence test to the plain manual occupations. The worker fulfils, let us admit, his routine duty. But we have to ask, is this all that we have a right to demand from him? No. If the man is to be really competent, his mind ought to have a reach and an outlook which go beyond the mechanical operations of his job. I give an example:
Intelligence Test for Marine Engineers
1. Are you inclined to sympathize with Schiaparelli’s estimate of Dante’s Divina Commedia?
2. Luigi Pulci, it has been said, voices the last strains of the age of the troubadours. Do you get this?
3. Alfieri must always be regarded rather as the last of the cinquecentisti than as the first of the moderns. How do you stand on that?
Let us put beside this as an interesting parallel the following:
Intelligence Tests for Professors of Comparative
Literature
1. How much pressure per square inch of surface do you think a safe load to carry?
2. Suppose that, just as you were getting to work, you got trouble somewhere in your flow of gas, so that that set up a back-firing in your tubes, would you attribute this to a defect in your feed?
3. Suppose that you were going along late at night at moderate speed, and properly lighted up, and you saw a red light directly in front of you, would you stop or go right on?
From all of which it appears that by means of the Intelligence Test we have now an infallible means of knowing just what a man amounts to. If we want to know whether or not an applicant is suited for a job we have only to send him to the laboratory of a practicing psychologist, and we can find out in fifteen minutes all about him. How vastly superior this is to the old and cumbersome methods of inquiring into a young man’s schooling, and into his family, and reading personal letters of recommendation, can hardly be exaggerated. Let me quote as a typical example the case which I have just mentioned, that of letters of recommendation. Compare the old style and the new.
Old-fashioned Letter of Recommendation Given to a
Young Man Seeking a Position in the Milling
Business.
To Messrs. Smith, Brown & Co.
Dear Sirs,
I should like to recommend to you very cordially my young friend Mr. O’Hagan. I have known him since his boyhood, and can assure you that he is an estimable young man who has had a good schooling and is willing to work. When I add that he was raised right here in Jefferson County, and that his mother was one of the McGerrigles, I feel sure that you will look after him.
We have had an open fall here, but a good spell of cold has set in since New Year’s.
Very faithfully,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
New-Fashioned Letter of Estimation as Supplied by
a Psychological Laboratory Expert
Messrs. Smith, Brown & Co.
Dear Sirs,
This certifies that I have carefully examined Mr. O’Hagan in my laboratory for fifteen minutes and submitted him to various measurements and tests, with a view to estimating his fitness for the Milling Business. He measures 198 centimeters from end to end, of which his head represents 7.1 per cent. We regard this as too large a proportion of head for a miller. His angle of vision is 47, which is more than he will need in your business. We applied various stimuli to the lobes of his neck and got very little reaction from him. We regret to say that he does not know what 17 times 19 is; and we further found that, after being in our laboratory for fifteen minutes, he had failed to notice the number of panes in the windows.
On the whole, we think him better suited for social service or university work or for the church than for a position of responsibility.
Very truly,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
P. S. We enclose our statement of account for 17 tests at $5.00 per test.
The value of the system, however, does not stop even at this point. It is proving itself an invaluable aid in weeding out incompetent men who have perhaps escaped detection for many years. For example, a firm in Kansas were anxious to judge of the selling power of their salesmen. An intelligence test applied to their staff showed that not a single one knew how to sell anything. The firm had been misled for years by the mere fact that these men were successfully placing orders. A furniture factory in Grand Rapids submitted seventy-one of their employees to the test to see what they knew about furniture: it appeared that they knew nothing about it. One of the Kalamazoo Celery companies, anxious to develop the Psychology of Growing Celery, instituted a searching test of their gardeners. It appeared that only four of them had ever heard of psychology and only one of them could spell it. Yet here were men who had been professing to grow celery for twenty years. Instances such as these show how far from perfect is our industrial system. Nor will it ever be improved until sweeping intelligence tests and wholesale dismissals have put it on a new basis.
