Divine Fury (40 page)

Binet, it should be emphasized, was never comfortable with the hard hereditarian position advocated by Galton (still less so with eugenics), and in the years before his premature death in 1911 he showed himself acutely aware of the possibility that his research might be abused. The man most responsible for refining his work and putting it into practice, however, showed fewer such compunctions. Also a professor of psychology, Lewis Terman hailed from a Midwestern farming family in the United States, the twelfth of fourteen children. In a delicious irony, he
later attributed his lifelong interest in intelligence to the early visit of an itinerant phrenologist, who felt the bumps on the young boy’s head and concluded that a big brain lay below. Whether or not the bumps played any part in the process, Terman did manage to overcome his immediate circumstances. He attended college and then graduate school, earning a PhD from Clark University in 1905. Several years later, he took up a position at Stanford, where he spent the remainder of his long career. It was there in 1916 that he published the Stanford Revision of the Binet-Simon Scale, which he continued to refine throughout his life. Significantly updated, the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales remain a paradigm to this day, a primary tool for measuring IQ.

Terman was ideally placed to appreciate Binet’s contribution, the value of which, he judged, “can hardly be overestimated,” even if it had not received “the attention that it deserved.” As a graduate student, Terman had studied intelligence testing in children, publishing the findings of his dissertation research in 1906 as
Genius and Stupidity: A Study of Some of the Intellectual Processes of Seven “Bright” and Seven “Stupid” Boys
. The title alone is revealing, pointing to the trademark fascination with deviation from the norm. Like his geniological predecessors, Terman marveled at the vast gulf that separated the best and the brightest from the dim and the dull. Such differences, he concluded, could never be explained by environmental factors, but must be based in heredity. It was of the utmost importance, as a consequence, that educators be equipped with the means to identify genius at an early age, so that they might nurture it accordingly. In Terman’s view, nothing less than the future of civilization was at stake. As he stressed in his guidelines for administering his revision of the Binet-Simon exam, “whether civilization moves on and up depends most on the advances made by creative thinkers and leaders in science, politics, art, morality, and religion. Moderate ability can follow or imitate, but genius must show the way.”
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Terman’s vision of the heroic natural genius leading the way of humanity is reminiscent of Galton’s own perorations to those “grand human animals” destined to be “kings of men.” The similarity is no coincidence. For although Terman admired Binet, he admired Galton even more. “The publication of Galton’s
Hereditary Genius
, in 1869, marks the beginning of a new era,” he declared. In his own landmark work,
Genetic Studies of Genius
, he sought to realize Galton’s dream of identifying genius in the flesh. The work, the first volume of which was published in 1925, summarized the initial findings of a vast human experiment begun in 1911 and made feasible by “the entirely new situation” created
by Binet. “It was at last possible to determine with some degree of proximation the brightness of a given child,” Terman recalled. Armed with their instruments and scales, he and his assistants set about scouring the school districts around Stanford and San Francisco to locate little geniuses. In succeeding years, the study was formalized and expanded, permitting Terman’s team, with the aid of a sizable grant from the Commonwealth Fund for the study of “genius in the making,” to administer the Stanford-Binet test to a large number of children. The result was the identification of some 1,000 gifted boys and girls (“Termites”), defined as those with an IQ of over 140, who were then followed in regular intervals throughout the course of their lives.
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A longitudinal study of this ambition and scope necessarily pointed toward the future. As Terman emphasized in the opening lines of the study’s initial volume, “It should go without saying that a nation’s resources of intellectual talent are among the most precious it will ever have. The origins of genius, the natural laws of its development, and the environmental influences by which it may be affected for good or ill are scientific problems of almost unequaled importance for human welfare.” The study undoubtedly gestured toward a brave new world, already getting under way, in which governments as far afield as South America, Europe, Russia, and Japan would pursue the hunt for national genius (and the attendant filtering of the intellectually undesirable) in standardized tests like those that Terman helped to develop for widespread consumption in the United States. Terman himself played a key role in helping to design the notorious battery of mental tests administered to 1.75 million recruits to the US Army in World War I, sorting “morons” from the fit. Meanwhile, racist popularizers, such as H. H. Goddard, brought Terman’s methods to Ellis Island and the schools, using the Stanford-Binet scale to call attention to the danger that “feeble-minded” immigrants and blacks would poison the pool of American genius and so weaken the “natural aristocracy” fit by birth to lead. That said, Terman’s own study undoubtedly furnished a wealth of data that has continued to yield useful information, paying dividends long after his Termites had grown and left the nest. Yet his instruments proved less successful as a means of detecting genius. Not only did comparatively few of the Termites go on to national or international renown, but the study famously failed to detect two men—Luis Alvarez and William Shockley—who would later be awarded Nobel Prizes in Physics. Their tested IQs failed to meet the cut-off of 140, and they were weeded out and discarded accordingly.
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Such oversights pale in significance alongside those of the countless men and women who were wrongly classified at an early age as genetically inferior and tracked accordingly. The result was a tragic waste of human resources, and in many cases worse. Yet they do serve nicely to highlight the question of just what it was that Terman and his IQ exam were really measuring. The stated aim, of course, was to isolate genius, but what Terman’s instruments were really designed to detect was something else: intelligence. The word was an old one, having long been used in theological parlance to distinguish between the material and immaterial realms. “Intelligences” belonged primarily to the latter along the scale of the Great Chain of Being: they were angels, souls,
genii
, minds. Gradually, beginning in the eighteenth century, intelligence was extended to animals in a number of taxonomic schemes, which were used to distinguish hierarchically between creatures said to have more of it, and those who had less or none at all. In a further extension, nineteenth-century anthropologists expropriated this zoological category, using it as a principle of difference to distinguish between “lower” and “higher” races. Intelligence, in the crude conceptions of craniometrists, was supposed to reside in greater quantity in bigger and whiter brains than in smaller brains or the brains of people of color. The term was applied in other ways as well, but the point is that prior to Binet, it was seldom used outside of anthropology as a criterion to evaluate genius or to distinguish individuals or groups.
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The adoption of the category of intelligence by Binet and Terman thus marks an important shift of emphasis. Downplaying the vital, pathological, and even creative elements of genius in favor of something apparently more rational and stable, Binet and Terman hoped to identify an attribute that would be more useful in meeting the demands of complex societies, in which the general capacity to acquire knowledge was of immense value. Tellingly, Terman gradually abandoned the word “genius” in his public comments on his work after 1945. And although that development reflected the changed circumstances of the postwar discussion, it also reflected Terman’s tacit acknowledgment—based on the less-than-spectacular findings of his study—that intelligence and the elusive thing called “genius” were not the same thing. As Terman confessed in the fourth volume of
Genetic Studies of Genius
, published in 1947, “we have seen that intellect and achievement are far from perfectly correlated.”
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Be that as it may, Terman’s entire enterprise was heir to the centuries-long search to isolate genius in the flesh, and that search continued to shape his findings, beginning with the category of “intelligence” itself.
For Terman’s intelligence was, in truth, “general intelligence,” a notion that had been developed independently by the British psychologist and statistician Charles Spearman—another of Galton’s admirers—at the beginning of the twentieth century. Using a complex statistical technique known as factor analysis, Spearman had concluded that a single factor—he called it
g
(general intelligence)—must govern an individual’s scores in different sections of exams, like those administered by Binet, that measured different mental abilities (spatial analysis, abstract reasoning, verbal ability, and so forth) in a single sitting. Rather than conceive of intelligence as multiple and varied—as critics of Spearman, including L. L. Thurstone, did at the time, and as more recent observers, such as Howard Gardner, do still—Spearman, and with him Terman, thought of general intelligence in the same way that geniologists thought of genius, as a single, unitary, measurable “thing” given at birth, rooted in biological nature, and constant over a lifetime, though protean in its powers.
G
was the mental energy that governed performance where matters of the intellect were concerned.
G
was the “mental power” (on the analogy of horsepower) that ran the machine. What Goethe had said of genius—whether a man distinguished himself in science, war, statecraft, or music, “it all comes to the same thing”—was said by Spearman and Terman of general intelligence. The category continued to belie its past.
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The same was true of other aspects of Terman’s findings, which gave, he claimed, “considerable support to Galton’s theory as to the hereditary nature of genius.” Terman noted the “very great deficiency of Latin and negro ancestry” among his gifted subjects, for example, and the “100 per cent excess of Jewish blood.” Women scored highly on his exam, it is true, and he even called attention to the injustice of denying them fuller access to professional life. But that didn’t prevent him from asserting that women still fell behind men at the very highest levels. Terman noted that “the facts we have presented are in harmony with the hypothesis that exceptionally superior intelligence occurs with greater frequency among boys than among girls.” And in another nod to Galton, and in a challenge to those inclined to link genius to madness and degeneration, Terman took pains to point out that his exceptional subjects were, on the whole, healthier, more robust, and better adjusted psychologically than were average individuals.
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In all of these ways, Terman’s research reflected the concerns, and frequently the conclusions, of his predecessors. His greatest debt to the past, however, was more explicit. The entire second volume of
Genetic Studies of Genius
was devoted to measuring the IQs not of the living, but of the dead. Terman’s assistant, Catharine Morris Cox, served as the
primary author of the study, but it was Terman who oversaw the work and developed the method by which it was carried out. In a 1917 paper, he had attempted to estimate the IQ of none other than Francis Galton. Administering an exam to a corpse, it might be thought, would be even trickier than locating clues of incipient pathology in the dead or taking the measure of the brains of the departed. Terman was undeterred, confident that reports of Galton’s childhood activities, pastimes, and accomplishments could furnish the necessary information. “From the evidence given,” he observed, “one is justified in concluding that between the ages of three and eight years . . . Francis Galton must have had an intelligence quotient not far from 200.” As he hastened to point out, none of the children encountered in his study at Stanford could approach such a number, with the best among them topping out at 170. Galton, it followed, was no ordinary genius.
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Cox proceeded along similar lines, starting from a list of 1,000 eminent individuals, based on entries in biographical dictionaries compiled by the American psychologist James McKeen Cattell, yet another acolyte of Galton. Cox winnowed the list down according to the availability of information on each candidate’s childhood, excluding for this reason all individuals who lived prior to the mid-fifteenth century. The remaining 301 people on the list were drawn almost exclusively from Europe and America and included notable figures in the sciences, arts, letters, statecraft, and military professions up to 1850. John Stuart Mill topped the charts, with an estimated IQ of 190, and Goethe, the mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and the Dutch political theorist Hugo Grotius followed closely at 185. Voltaire recorded a respectable 170, whereas Newton (130), Napoleon (135), and Beethoven (135) were given less impressive marks. Napoleon’s great general André Massena claimed the lowest recorded entry, a measly 100 IQ, making it something of a miracle that French armies held out as long as they did.
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The Cox study is still described by reputable psychologists as a “classic work,” which “has been cited more frequently perhaps than any other book on genius.” As an attempt to apply a new method to an old problem, it was undoubtedly innovative, even if its conclusions were in many cases laughably speculative. And yet, it is striking how much it shared with earlier efforts to isolate, quantify, and calculate this thing called genius. Cox herself grounded the study in this age-old effort, noting in her opening line that “the factors which determine the appearance and development of geniuses have presented a persistent problem ever since man, in his earliest study of man, began to take account of individual differences.” But the similarities were most striking with respect to the
history of the preceding 150 years. Whereas Lavater, Gall, and Broca had searched in vain for the stigmata of genius above the neck; whereas Moreau and Lombroso had hunted for telltale signs of incipient pathology in the case histories of the dead; and whereas Galton had looked to eminence as an indicator that the best men were best, Cox crunched the numbers of IQ in search of a single revealing sign of the presence of the ghost that had been sighted long before she even began. Genius looked like genius. Except when it didn’t. But precisely what genius looked like remained difficult to say.
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