Intelligence In Frankenstein

In the story of Frankenstein written by Mary Shelley, scientist Victor Frankenstein dedicates two years of his life attempting to defy the laws of nature by creating his unnatural life form. Victor Frankenstein cuts off all connection to the outside world as he spends his time collecting fresh body parts and conducting various experiments ultimately leading to the creation of the Creature. The Creature begins with a blank slate of mind and experiences all of what the world has to offer on its own. During the Creature's journey to Geneva, he develops skills of critical thinking, empathetic thinking, language/communication, imagination, creativity, as well as a human-like range of emotions. According to Arizona State University’s study of humans

The Creature’s rapidly increasing level of intelligence along with the fact that he is made almost totally of human body parts makes the Creature human.

The ability to critically learn through experience and observation is a skill that can be used to distinguish humans from other life forms on Earth. Throughout the Novel, the Creature’s intelligence allows him to learn through human experiences and later apply them to his life. This experience starts as early as the Creature's earliest seconds alive when he experienced all of his senses at once: “I saw, felt, heard, and smelt at the same time”(p.105). The Creature shows humanlike tendencies when he can learn from his overwhelming experience and learn how to control his senses: “I learned to distinguish between the operations of my various senses”(p.105). After the Creature was able to understand how each of his senses worked he was able to start gathering information about the world around him. For example, once he had left Victor’s

When the Creature first notices that the people of the cottage can communicate through different sounds of the mouth, he is displaying only surface-level thinking. As time goes on the Creature notices that different sounds and tones prompt different reactions: “Perceived that the words they spoke sometimes produced pleasure or pain, smiles, or sadness, in the minds of and countenances of the hearers”(p.115). With this observation, the Creature can figure out what different words mean by remembering the reaction it received. The Creature was able to figure out simple names of objects first like fire, bread, milk, and wood. Then he was able to learn the names of the different cottage members like Agatha and Felix. He was also able to figure out that sometimes Agatha was called sister and Felix was sometimes called brother. The Creature was then able to learn the meanings of words that portrayed feelings like good, unhappy, and dearest. The Creature was able to use this form of observation to eventually learn the language of the cottage people. Another aspect of critical thinking is the ability to use the imagination to think about events of the future and past. Once the Creature learns the language of the cottage people he can imagine different scenarios where he presents himself to the family: “I formed in my imagination a