Editorial February 19, 1949 Issue

INTELLIGENCE VIEWED AS SELF-KNOWLEDGE

George Channing

Intelligence is definitely related to correct self-knowledge. No one who reflects upon that statement is likely to dispute it. "God is intelligence," declares Mary Baker Eddy in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 2). And she makes it clear that this intelligence, infinite Mind, God, has a primal and eternal quality which she also calls intelligence.

Moses heard the voice of God, intelligence, making Himself known by that marvelous self-description, "I AM THAT I AM" (Ex. 3:14). And Christ Jesus, bearing witness in his nature to the nature of the Mind which conceived him, declared, "I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the father, but by me" (John 14:6). No man knows God, his words may mean, except by knowing himself as including that primal and eternal quality of God, which expresses, or reflects, the infinitely self-knowing ability of his divine source.

Mrs. Eddy has emphasized the self-knowledge of God, and she was led to apply the word "intelligence" as a term for the creator. An instance of this appears in her book "Unity of Good" (p. 27), where, after describing evil as "egotistic,— boastful, but fleeing like a shadow at daybreak," she affirms that "God is egoistic, knowing only His own all-presence, all-knowledge, all-power." And she also emphasizes the power of self-knowledge when she admonishes in the Christian Science textbook (Science and Health, p. 571), "Know thyself, and God will supply the wisdom and the occasion for a victory over evil."