This subject is inexhaustible, but we must go on to speak of the psychological isolation of these children when they drift unrecognized. The majority of children above 160 IQ play little with other children because the difficulties of social contact are almost insurmountable. Unless special facilities can be provided, these children tend to become isolates, a condition not conducive to leadership, except perhaps of a few rare sorts, later in life. Such children are ordinarily friendly and gregarious by nature, but their efforts at forming friendship tend to be defeated by the scarcity of like-minded contemporaries. The imaginary playmate as a solution of the problem of loneliness is fairly frequent, but far inferior to the real playmate, could one be found. Shaw makes Saint Joan say, "I was always alone."
This danger of becoming an isolate and a hermit is one that should be carefully studied in the interests of leadership. To combat it we must somehow supply the highly intelligent in their early years with companions, especially of their own age, who can understand what they say, and can answer. This difficulty of communication is illustrated by Voltaire's abortive attempt as an adult to get into contact with the peasants around him. In _The Ignorant Philosopher_, Voltaire says, "I discovered such a wide difference between thought and nourishment, without which I should not think that I believed that there was a substance in me that reasoned and another substance that digested. Nevertheless, by constantly endeavoring that we are two, I materially felt that I was only one: and this contradiction gave me infinite pain. I have asked some of my own likenesses, who cultivate the earth, our common mother, if they felt that they were two? If they had discovered by their philosophy that they possessed within them an immortal substance . . . acting upon their nerves without touching them, sent expressly into them six weeks after their conception? They thought that I was jesting and pursued the cultivation of their land without making me a reply."
Even so, the ten-year-old, of IQ 175, wishes to discuss with his "own likenesses" the events of medieval history, but he finds that they make him "no reply." And if he persists, they become annoyed, hurling at him the dreadful epithet, "Perfesser." If he still persists, they pull his hair, tear his shirt from his back, and hit him with a beer bottle. (I am speaking of _real_ life.)
