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262 Jean Piagel
tor. This does not mean a balance of forces in the Gestaltist sense, but self-
regulation in the biological and cybernetic sense, i.e., a factor that shows the
essential link between the intelligence and what we now know about the many
forms of homeostasis peculiar to organic life. Further, equilibration as it is
thus conceived is based on the active compensatory adjustments made by the sub-
ject in reaction to external changes, thus leading to a causal explanation of
reversibility, which otherwise would merely be a strictly logical feature of the
processes.
This equilibration factor further accounts for the sequential nature of the
stages observed in the building of structures and at the same time often a pro-
babilist interpretation of their sequence: a given stage S is not the most likely
at the beginning of the development but it becomes the mostlikely once equilib-
rium is attained at stage S- I, first of all because the acquisitions in 5’- I are
necessary to the constructions in S and, secondly, equilibrium that has been
attained affects only a limited area, is therefore incomplete and gives occasion
for new forms of disequilibrium which will account for the transition from S- I
to s.
III. As to the theory of the intelligence, all these observations seem to lead to a
number of conclusions that it is difficult to ignore. The first is that the intelli-
gence is much richer than the aspects of which the subject becomes aware, for
he is conscious only of the external findings of his intelligence, except when,
through a systematic and retroactive reflexive process, logic and mathematics
formalize, but generally without concerning themselves with their sources,
structures whose natural roots are already in the intelligence in action. As to the
average subject, he is aware of this intelligence only from its performance, for
the operative structures elude him, as moreover nearly all the mechanisms
affecting his behaviour and even more so his organism. It is therefore for the
observer to find out whether the structures do exist and to analyse them, but
the subject is unaware of them as structures and discerns only the operations
used by him (and even then not all of them, for he constantly resorts to ‘asso-
ciativity’ and ‘distributivity’ without realizing it, and the same is often the case
with commutativity).
It is therefore not surprising that structuralism should have taken so long to
establish itself, and even then as a trend whose possibilities are far from having
been fully explored. The associationist theories of the intelligence remain ato-
mistic. The trial-and-error theory seeks to explain everything as being more or
less fortuitous attempts, which are selected subsequently according to the
results, as biology did at the beginning of this century before the discovery of
the regulatory systems. German Denkpsychologie made direct use of certain
logical laws, but without perceiving the problem of overall structures from the
logico-mathematical and psychologic viewpoints. Spearman’s ‘noegenesis’
brought to light certain operations (eduction of relations and of ‘correlates’
or double relations), but without seeing the structures. Gestalt psychology
discovered structures, but wanted to reduce them to a single type characterizing
perception and the lower cognitive functions and not applying to the intelli-