The first form in which this capacity was noticed was as an unusual ability to detect the spurious, the fake, and the dishonest in personality, and, in general, to judge people correctly and efficiently. In an informal check experiment with a group of college students, a clear tendency was discerned for the more secure (the more healthy) to judge their professors more accurately than did the less secure students.

As the study progressed, it slowly became apparent that this efficiency extended to many other areas of life-indeed, all areas that were tested. In art and music, in things of the intellect, in scientific matters, in politics and public affairs, they seemed as a group to be able to see concealed or confused realities more swiftly and more correctly than others. Thus, an informal experiment indicated that their predictions of the future from whatever facts were in hand at the time seemed to be more often correct because less based upon wish, desire, anxiety, fear, or upon generalized, character-determined optimism or pessimism.

At first this was phrased as good taste or good judgment, the implication being relative and not absolute. But for many reasons (some to be detailed below), it has become progressively more clear that this had better be called perception (not taste) of something that was absolutely "there" (reality, not a set of opinions). 29 31 It is hoped that this conclusion-or hypothesis-can soon be put to the experimental test.

If this is so, thus it would be impossible to overstress the importance of the implications of this phenomenon. Recently Money-Kyrle, 27 an English psychoanalyst, has indicated that he believes it possible to call a neurotic person not only relatively but absolutely inefficient, simply because he does not perceive the real world as accurately or as efficiently as does the healthy person. The neurotic is not only emotionally sick-he is cognitively wrong! If health and neurosis are, respectively, correct and incorrect perceptions of reality, propositions of fact and propositions of value merge in this area, and, in principle, value-propositions should then be empirically demonstrable rather than merely matters of taste or exhortation. For those who have wrestled with this problem, it will be clear that we may have here a partial basis for a true science of values, and consequently of ethics, social relations, politics, religion, etc.

It is doubtful that maladjustment or even extreme neurosis would disturb perception enough to affect acuity of perception of light, or touch, or odor. But it is probable that this effect can be demonstrated in spheres of perception removed from the merely physiological, e.g., Einstellung experiments, 34 etc. It should also follow that the effects of wish, desire, prejudice upon perception, as in many recent experiments, should be very much less in healthy people than in sick. A priori considerations encourage the hypothesis that this superiority in the perception of reality eventuates in a superior ability to reason, to perceive the truth, to come to conclusions, to be logical, and to be cognitively efficient in general. l7 35

One particularly impressive and instructive aspect of this better relationship with reality has been described in another place. 23 It was found that self-actualizing people distinguished far more easily than most the fresh, concrete, and idiosyncratic from the generic, abstract, and "rubricized." The consequence is that they live more in the "real" world of nature than in the man-made set of concepts, expectations, beliefs, and stereotypes which most people confuse with the world. They are therefore far more apt to perceive what is "there" rather than their own wishes, hopes, fears, anxieties, their own theories and beliefs, or those of their cultural group.

The relationship with the unknown seems to be of exceptional promise as another bridge between academic and clinical psychology. Our healthy subjects are uniformly unthreatened and unfrightened by the unknown, being therein quite different from average men. They accept it, are comfortable with it, and often are even more attracted by it than by the known. To use Frenkel Brunswik's phrase, they can tolerate the ambiguous. 7

These latter, it is true, are the intellectuals, the researchers, and the scientists, so that perhaps the major determinant here is intellectual power. And yet we all know how many scientists with high I.Q., through timidity, conventionality, anxiety, or other character defects, occupy themselves exclusively with what is known, with polishing it, arranging and rearranging it, classifying it, and otherwise puttering with it instead of discovering, as they are supposed to do. 5 30 31

Since, for healthy people, the unknown is not frightening, they do not have to spend any time laying the ghost, whistling past the cemetery, or otherwise protecting themselves against imagined dangers. They do not neglect the unknown, or deny it, or run away from it, or try to make believe it is really known; nor do they organize, dichotomize, or rubricize it prematurely. They do not cling to the familiar (nor is their quest for truth a catastrophic need for certainty, safety, definiteness, and order, such as we see in an exaggerated form in Goldstein's brain injured ll or in the compulsive-obsessive neurotic). They can be, when the objective total situation calls for it, comfortably disorderly, anarchic, chaotic, vague, doubtful, uncertain, indefinite, approximate, inexact, or inaccurate (all at certain moments in science, art, or life in general, quite desirable).

Thus it comes about that doubt, tentativeness, uncertainty with s the consequent necessity for abeyance of decision, which is for most a torture, can be for some a pleasantly stimulating challenge, a high spot in life rather than a low.