References
[Editor’s notes are in blue.]

* The title refers to Nathaniel Branden’s lecture “The Concept of God,” from his lecture series “The Basic Principles of Objectivism.” That lecture is fully transcribed in his book The Vision of Ayn Rand: The Basic Principles of Objectivism (Gilbert, Ariz.: Cobden Press, 2009), chapter 4. Partial and perhaps complete audios seem to be available throughout the Internet, especially here. See also R.A. Childs, “The Epistemological Basis of Anarchism,” Note 19.

[12] Martin Gardner, Mathematical Carnival (Vintage, 1977), page 66.
  The ability to do arithmetic rapidly in one’s head seems to have only moderate correlation with general intelligence and even less with mathematical insight and creativity. Some of the most distinguished mathematicians have had trouble making change, and many professional “lightning calculators” (although not the best) have been dullards with respect to all other mental abilities.

[13] Eliot Hearst, “Man and machine: Chess achievements and chess thinking,” in Chess Skill in Man and Machine, ed. Peter W. Frey (Springer-Verlag, 1977), page. 182.
  Nonchessplayers commonly regard the chessmaster as a “brain” or “quiz kid” who is sure to be a success in any kind of intellectual endeavor. Of course, chessmasters like to encourage such flattering appraisals, but there is little or no evidence from psychological studies or personal observations to substantiate the belief. An admittedly crude Russian study performed with the cooperation of participants in the 1925 Moscow International Tournament failed to yield any support for the idea that chessplayers are generally more intelligent than nonchessplayers.
  [See the remainder of the article.]

[14] Find a good Einstein quote. ??? [James never seems to have gotten around to finding the quotation he wanted to use. The reader will find a discussion of Einstein’s political views on a Wikipedia page devoted to them. A quotation from his book The World As I See It may have been suitable for James’s purposes: “The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil. We see before us a huge community of producers the members of which are unceasingly striving to deprive each other of the fruits of their collective labor — not by force, but on the whole in faithful compliance with legally established rules. I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals.”]

[15] Beethoven never mastered the multiplication table. In order to calculate fourteen times two, he wrote fourteen 2s and added them up.

[16] Fischer belongs to a group which holds that the Anglo-Saxon peoples are descended from the ancient Israelites. In support of this, they derive the word “British” from the Hebrew “brit” (covenant) and “ish” (man) — hence, “man of the covenant.” Again, the Israelites were descended from Isaac, and “Isaac’s sons” yields “Saxons.” [James is referring to the Worldwide Church of God, founded by Herbert W. Armstrong.]

[17] An official who worked for the Office of Price Administration during the Second World War records somewhere that a professor of his acquaintance suggested to him, perfectly seriously, that in order to simplify commerce and avoid a multitude of regulations and complications the OPA ought to establish a price of one dollar for every item whatever, from a used car to a tube of toothpaste. This seems to me to go beyond lack of background in economic theory. And yet the author of this brainwave may have been perfectly competent or even brilliant in his own specialty. [James gives no source for this story.]

[18] Richard M. Restak, The Brain: The Last Frontier (Doubleday, 1979), pp. 200ff.
  ... males are better at manipulating three-dimensional space. When boys and girls are asked to mentally rotate or fold an object, the boys will overwhelmingly outperform girls. “I folded it in my mind” is the typical male response. Girls, when explaining how they perform the same task, are likely to produce elaborate verbal descriptions, which, because they are less appropriate to the task, result in frequent errors.
  In an attempt to understand the sex differences in spatial ability, EEG measurements have recently been made of the accompanying electrical events going on within the brain....
  In eleven subtests of the WAIS (the most widely used test of general intelligence), only two subtests (digit span and picture arrangement) reveal similar mean scores for males and females. On six of the nine remaining subtests, males scored higher than females. The three tests where the females scored highest were similarities, vocabulary, and digit-symbol substitution.
  Further support for differences in brain functioning comes from Wechsler’s experience with other subtests, which he eventually had to omit from the original WAIS battery. A cube-analysis test, for example, was excluded because, after testing thousands of subjects, a large sex bias appeared to favor males. In all, thirty tests eventually had to eliminated because they discriminated in favor of one or the other sex.
  [See also the rest of the chapter, and the book.]

[19] AS 728m (782ss).

[20] To avoid misunderstanding, I specify that I do not consider either a mutation or the result of spinning a roulette wheel to be a causeless event. I mean simply that, given our present knowledge, one guess is as good as another as to which number will come up on the next spin, although we can make all sorts of statistical predictions with considerable confidence and accuracy — and similarly for mutations.

[21] ??? typewriter arrangement. [I have no idea what James wanted to say here. If it was just a matter of his not being able to recall what the arrangement is called at the moment he was preparing the dot-matrix printout, the word is “querty.”]

[22] A. Rand, “Intro. to Obj. Epistemology” 5/10/2e [References of this form refer to The Objectivist Newsletter, so that volume 5, number 10 would be October 1966. After volume 4, the name of the publication was The Objectivist. The page numbers for the latter are those of the original format, not those in the bound volume.] & IOE 53. [Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, the monograph published by The Objectivist, Inc., 1967, page 40; the Expanded Second edition published by New American Library in 1990, page 41.]

[23] Someone will point out that there are invented languages, not just hints as in the novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs, or the far more ambitious constructions of J.R.R. Tolkien, but full-fledged languages. I reply that either, like Esperanto, they are closely related to existing languages or, like Resol [also known as Solresol; see the Wikipedia article], they are so completely artificial that not even their most enthusiastic advocates can actually converse in them. Volapuk [also known as Volpük; see the Wikipedia article] is both.

[24] Brand Blanshard, The Nature of Thought (Macmillan, 1939); pages 336–37, apud N. Branden, PSE 8. [The Psychology of Self-Esteem (New York: Bantam, 1971), page 8].
  We speak of an idea as clear or confused, as apposite or inapposite, as witty or dull. Are such term s intelligible when applied to those motions of electrons, atoms, molecules, or muscles, which for [the reductive materialist] are all there is to consciousness? Can a motion be clear, or cogent, or witty? What exactly would clear motion be like? What sort of thing is a germane or cogent reflex? Or a witty muscular reaction? These adjectives are perfectly in order when applied to ideas; they become at once absurd when applied to movements in muscle or nerve....
  On the other hand, movements have attributes which are unthinkable as applied to ideas. Movements have velocity; but what is the average velocity of one’s ideas on a protective tariff? Movements have direction; would there be any sense in talking of the north-easterly direction of one’s thoughts on teh morality of revenge?

R. [Robert] Efron, “Biology Without Consciousness — and Its Consequences,” 7/2/12c-13e [February 1968] & PBM vol. 11 (1967) p. 15. [Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, vol. II, no. 1, Autumn 1967, page 15. James’s “vol.11” is a typographical error.]
  This evasion become massive when the reductionist attempts to deal with the one phenomeon encountered in living organisms which does not remotely resemble anything found in the inanimate world — the phenomenon of consciousness.

[25] N. Branden, “IAD: Are certain things unknowable?” 2/1/3 [January 1963; the title James has used is the title that appears in the table of contents for The Objectivist Newsletter. The item itself carries the title “Is there any validity to the claim that certain things are unknowable?”].