"The intelligence of the lower forms of animal life, like a great deal of human intelligence, does not involve a self"
About this Quote
The sting is in the clause “like a great deal of human intelligence.” Mead is taking aim at the flattering myth that humans are always self-aware agents steering the ship. Much of our day-to-day cleverness runs on habit, reflex, trained response, and environmental cues. We can be brilliant in the same way a well-designed mechanism is brilliant: effective, adaptive, and largely unreflective. That’s the subtextual demotion. He’s downgrading a huge portion of “human intelligence” to the level of skill without inner narration.
Context matters. Mead, a founder of pragmatism and symbolic interactionism, built his theory of mind around communication and role-taking: the self forms when an organism can see itself from the standpoint of others, using shared symbols (language, gestures, norms). So the line functions as a wedge against Cartesian-style assumptions that mind and self are private substances. Intelligence can be individual; the self, for Mead, is relational. The quote works because it reframes selfhood as a public, social technology - and quietly suggests how often humans operate without it.
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Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Mead, George H. (2026, January 17). The intelligence of the lower forms of animal life, like a great deal of human intelligence, does not involve a self. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-intelligence-of-the-lower-forms-of-animal-47825/
Chicago Style
Mead, George H. "The intelligence of the lower forms of animal life, like a great deal of human intelligence, does not involve a self." FixQuotes. January 17, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-intelligence-of-the-lower-forms-of-animal-47825/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"The intelligence of the lower forms of animal life, like a great deal of human intelligence, does not involve a self." FixQuotes, 17 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-intelligence-of-the-lower-forms-of-animal-47825/. Accessed 18 Feb. 2026.
