ABSTRACT
When Macbeth demanded of the Witches: ‘Say from whence/You owe this strange intelligence’ he was not referring to IQ scores. Shakespeare was using ‘intelligence’ in its original sense of information or knowledge; especially hot news, gossip, or secrets of war. We still find this use in ‘military intelligence’, which does not mean that the military are particularly bright, only that they have or seek information. The relatively new technical sense of ‘intelligence’, in psychology, refers to tests designed for measuring and comparing not so much actual abilities but potential abilities of children and adults. This potentiality is generally expressed with a single number, the IQ (Intelligence Quotient) score.
