Editorial August 28, 1926 Issue

Intelligence versus Intellect

Albert F. Gilmore

Mortals have long believed the brain to be the seat of intelligence, as they have conceived the heart to be the engine upon the action of which life depends. In consequence, intellect has come to be exalted as the most important attribute, the most valued possession of mankind, to be lauded, praised, and cultivated, and sometimes, it seems, even to be worshiped. So great in recent decades has become the zest for knowledge that a new impetus has been given to the homage accorded to the intellectuals, the intelligentia, of the modern world.

Christian Science is revealing to mortals the place which intellect rightly fills in human experience, and while according to intellect all the importance to which it is rightly entitled, yet refuses to worship it or pay it undue homage. Christian Science makes very clear that intelligence is a divine quality, while intellect pertains wholly to the belief so-called mortal mind and a material man.

When Mrs. Eddy revealed that "all is infinite Mind and its infinite manifestation," as she writes in "science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 468), she dealt a severe blow to the undue adulation of intellectual attainment. Her discovery disclosed that human intellect as such is not of divine origin, has no relation to God's idea, the perfect man, and consequently has no existence; that is to say, intellect as such has no entity, no place in God's infinite kingdom. Since Mind, God, is the creator, only that which emanates from God and partakes of the divine attributes and qualities can be real, can have existence and entity. Thus it is logically concluded that the so-called mortal or carnal mind, commonly associated with the human brain, is wholly a figment of that material belief which declares that the universe and man are material, a concept which Christian Science successfully controverts and disproves.

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