“Pure Intelligence: On Intelligence Testing, Puritanism, and the Methods and Burdens of History”, Journal of the History of Biology, Volume 41, Issue 1, pp. 167-202, 2008 By Oren Harman Intelligence, Destiny and Education. The ideological Roots of Intelligence Testing by John White, (London and New York: Routledge) 2006. ISBN: 0-45-36892-8, 172 pp. I. At the dawn of the 1960s, the English historian of Soviet Russia E.H. Carr was anything but a non-controversial man. Known to some as ‘the Red Professor of Printing House Square’ on account of his pro-Stalinist columns for The Times during the Second World War, and already disliked by many others for his approval of appeasement during the 1930s, Carr was about to attract even more opposition on account of his views on the purpose of writing history in the first place. “If Mr. Carr’s remaining volumes equal this impressive opening,” Isaiah Berlin had written a decade earlier in a review of Carr’s first installment of his The Bolshevik Revolution, “they will constitute the most monumental challenge of our time to that idea of impartiality and objective truth and even-handed justice in the writing of history which is most deeply embedded in the European liberal tradition.” Now, in what would become his classic book from 1961 What Is History? Carr wrote simply: “the study of history is a study of causes.” Carr famously posited the following scenario: Suppose a Mr. Jones ran over a Mr. Robinson on a blind corner, driving a car with defective brakes. Suppose Mr. Robinson had just come out of a party in which he had consumed an excessive amount of alcohol. Suppose further that he has nipped out of the bash to buy a pack of cigarettes. What must we judge as the cause of the accident: was Robinson killed because of the blind corner? Was his death due rather to the faultiness of Mr. Jones’ brakes? Was it the alcohol that was ultimately responsible for Robinson’s grim fate? Or can one perhaps adduce that were it not for his filthy smoking habit, Robinson would still be alive today, rendering the cigarettes the real cause behind the poor man’s tragic demise? The job of the historian, Carr wanted to claim, was the job of disentangling such issues, painfully and carefully, with the help of logic, good sense and investigation so as to paint a true picture of the events, that is - a true hierarchy of causes. Every effect must have a cause, Carr argued, and it was the toil of judicious matchmaking between the two that was the ultimate burden of the historian. Doing good history was hard work; Oscar Wilde was on to something, after all, when he jibed that any fool can make history but it takes a genius to write it. That Carr should have engendered the fury that he did is probably more a sign of the times (post-war East-West, Left-Right sensitivities) than a sign of a pure, disinterested intellectual debate. Nevertheless, his claim about history remains one that historians enjoy to argue over, often times bitterly. Fundamentally, it goes to the heart of our thoughts about thinking. When we study the past and, come to think of it, the present (“All history is contemporary history” Benedetto Croce famously quipped); in fact, when we think about anything at all, we tend to think in terms of cause and effect. Kant thought causal thinking was an innate function of human cognition – a ‘category of understanding’ as he called it - producing a necessary way of seeing the world. More recently, evolutionary psychologists have offered reasons why this should be so. But there are, of course, two kinds of causal thinking, one correlational (that is, probabilistic), the other analogical (that is, symbolic). The first of these has become central to the scientific method; the second, central to the method of the humanities. We shall return to this distinction. Whether or not humans necessarily think in causal terms, why should historians aim to ask ‘why’ in the first place? Is not ascertaining the facts of the matter as far as they exist, or categorizing, or contextualizing good enough? Is ‘why’ some kind of necessary requisite for making the past relevant to the present or even the future? Is it a rationale for writing history in the first place? Must historians see themselves as explainers rather than describers? Must their work necessarily be relevant to their times? Once again, we shall return to these grand questions a bit later. For now, let’s focus on a particular test case that might shed some light on the actual workings of historical scholarship: the story of intelligence testing in the twentieth century and the men who championed its cause. II. In a recent book entitled Intelligence, Destiny and Education: The Ideological Roots of Intelligence Testing, the philosopher of education John White bravely sets out to argue a grand and provocative thesis which goes something like this: A particular set of assumptions about intelligence – that it is innate, intellectual, general, and limited – lay behind the development of intelligence testing in Britain and in the United States in the twentieth century. These assumptions have been paralleled by, and incorporated into, school curriculum planning over the same period, focusing it on discrete, traditional subjects such as Maths, English and Science, and on examinations. Since the assumptions themselves cannot be justified by any logical or empirical standard, one must move from justification to explanation in order to account for this history. This leads one to discover that the vast majority of leading pioneers in the intelligence testing movement came from one form or another of Puritan, Dissenter stock. Upon further examination of the parallels between their thought and the ideology of Puritanism, going back to the 16th century, it is possible to conclude that the ideological roots of intelligence testing and of school curriculum planning lay in a distinctly Puritan tradition with its own distinctive assumptions about man’s soul, God’s mind, and the meaning of ‘the good life.’ Today, the promise of salvation no longer motivates a largely secular world view, but the assumptions of the Puritan worldview persist in intelligence testing and educational curricula around the world nevertheless. By recognizing the roots of our assumptions about intelligence and understanding the gap between such roots and our own, less religiously motivated worldview, we can move to eschew those assumptions that we continue to hold and for which little justification exists, re-adjusting and re-formulating the educational and moral consequences that they necessarily engender. Let us take a closer look at this chain of argument. When Alfred Binet was asked in 1905 by the French government to devise a test for identifying children with special educational needs, he warned about adopting an hereditarian, or innatist, view of intelligence. Binet’s warning was not headed by those men who adopted his test – the IQ Test; rather, based on an explicitly determinist and innatist view, they expanded the mandate of the test for general use in the military, educational system, immigration office, and the work place. This grim history is well known, and stands as a reminder of the facile and egregious manner in which immoral biases of the social, cultural and racial kind sometimes masquerade as “science.” At the turn of the twentieth century, Robert Morant was a central figure in the Board of Education in England, and the influential and longstanding reforms he introduced in 1904 to the elementary and state secondary school systems, in which a sharp divide was constructed between ‘education for leadership’ and ‘education for followship,’ were buttressed by the newly instituted and newly interpreted IQ Test. Some forty years later, it was the educational psychologist Cyril Burt who helped to ensconce the tripartite, streaming system of state education whereby children are funneled at the age of eleven to academic and vocational tracks. Despite attempts to equalize opportunity if not ability, this system – squarely built on intelligence testing and its curricular analogues - had the effect of perpetuating the sharp divides between the working and middle and upper classes in Britain. Across the Atlantic, Henry Goddard became a leading advocate of the use of intelligence testing in the 1910s and 1920s. His work on the intelligence of immigrants to the Unites States was cited prominently in the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924. Goddard was also a leading eugenicist and a vocal advocate of the creation of segregated colonies for feebleminded defectives where procreation could be halted by surgical and other means. Lewis Terman was another American eugenicist at the time, who argued that only through the use of such discriminatory devises as intelligence tests could the educational system, and, by implication, the United States itself, truly become democratic. Terman was instrumental in making the Stanford-Binet test a hallmark of American education. What these men and the movements they led on both sides of the Atlantic had in common, White re-tells us, was the adoption of a distinct perspective on heredity and intelligence first proposed by Francis Galton in a magazine article from 1865 titled ‘Hereditary Talent and Character.’ Galton’s conception of intelligence was that it is intellectual, general, innate and limited, and is in White’s judgment not only unfounded, but to a large degree responsible for many of the educational ills of the twentieth century. Why, according to White, is the Galtonian view on intelligence so outrageous? That aptitude in maths and language should be considered a better measure of intelligence than, say, aptitude in solving plumbing problems or relationship woes is not a necessary conclusion, and yet it is pervasive in the Galtonian tradition. If intelligence is some measure of the ability to flexibly match ones means to ones goals, then why is Einstein habitually judged smarter than Bjorn Borg, the scientist cleverer than the artist, or the cook, or the seriously dedicated friend? Why has intelligence been so narrowly circumscribed to the academic, or intellectual realm? Why, for that matter, if intelligence is about flexibility in matching means to ends, are people considered either intelligent or not? Are we not all better at some things and not as good at others? And if we are blessed with a number of talents, does that not necessarily mean that each is specific? As for innateness, while some kind of innate ability to acquire and process information must surely reside in our biology, is it not the case that skill, any kind of skill, depends on learning, training and experience – i.e. on factors that are clearly not innate? Moreover, is not the claim that we each have a mental ceiling demonstrably un-demonstrable? How can it be falsified? How can it therefore stand as scientific? These are White’s claims, and clearly each has, is, and can be debated. I will not do so here, because it is irrelevant for the purposes of this discussion. What is more germane is White’s astonishment at the fact of the adoption of hereditarian views on intelligence by Galton and his followers. Intelligence can be defined in so many ways, and by so many parameters, yet Galtonians chose a particular and peculiar set of attributes. Why? And how can it be that Galton’s followers adopted the very same attributes Galton had suggested if these were so obviously unfounded? Since White judges that there is no logical answer, he assumes that there must be an historical one: “where justification is lacking,” he writes, “we must turn to explanation.” Strict interpretations of the Galtonian tradition have indeed done a disservice to our views on intelligence, and have indeed had a major impact on education planning in the Western world. However, it is nevertheless the case that many others in the past (and still others today) do not entirely hold this view, and it is therefore slightly a-historical to judge Burt’s and Goddard’s and Terman’s Galtonianism incomprehensible and wacky. The historian must be careful not to use his own assumptions to explain the actions and thoughts of men who clearly operated on assumptions of a very different kind. There is, after all, evidence that points in the direction of innate, general and limited intelligence, even if you or I (or White) do not accept it as either valid or powerful. In any event, such evidence is not considered by White, even if only to ridicule it. Had the Galtonians’ reading of such evidence been considered, there might have been less of a case for the main thesis of White’s book, which we shall now proceed to address. III. White’s theory is that in order to explain the views of Galton and his followers in the intelligence testing and curriculum planning movements, one needs to trace the Puritan roots of their ideologies. What is the evidence that White presents to argue the point? “The official doctrine of intelligence,” White wrote in 1969, “is a modern re-edition of an older Puritanism. Nature has replaced God; an elite, the elect; Mensa the community of the saved; and intelligence testers, the Puritan high priests.” The American columnist Walter Lippman had apparently noticed this connection back in 1922, in a series of articles he wrote for The New Republic in which he attacked Terman’s intelligence tests enterprise, warning that its determinism was tantamount to ‘infant damnation’ and castigating its de facto ‘revival’ of the doctrine of predestination. Neither Lippman in 1922 nor White in 1969 offered an historical thesis to back up their common intuition, but now White revisits the connections, and begins by offering a number of intellectual and moral parallels between the Puritan and Galtonian worldview. First, the Puritan doctrine of predestination resonates in the notion that one is born with certain abilities (that can be tested and delimited) to which little change can be wrought through intervention of any kind. Second, the puritan preoccupation with salvation is mirrored by the intelligence testing movement’s preoccupation with ‘eminence,’ ‘reputation,’ ‘giftedness,’ and, indeed, the ‘rescuing’ of bright working class pupils from the throws of mediocrity and worse by means of IQ tests and the scholarship system. Here, the ‘bright working class children’ correspond to the ‘godly poor.’ Just as in the Puritan tradition, where only and elect few are saved, so too in the intelligence test tradition are a minority celebrated. In both traditions, the moral worth of one’s life is determined by a ‘critical analysis’ of one’s character performed by one’s contemporaries and by posterity. In this vein, both traditions exalt the competitive work ethic which views idleness and lack of drive as moral, as well as an intellectual, deficits; in this parallel, the reprobate and those of low IQ are bundled together. Both in the psychological and theological doctrines, what is innately provided must be accompanied by habits of industry if it is to be affected. Both traditions, further, see the family unit as the crucial organization for the transmission of the desired feature from one generation to the next – a presumption of salvation in the first tradition and a presumption of intelligence in the second. Both traditions thought the elect should undergo a rigorous intellectual education. Finally, both tended to view white, and especially Nordic, peoples as superior to others. Having established these parallels, resonances, correspondences, White wonders whether they are serendipitous or rather a reflection of a strong, contiguous bond of an historical nature. To answer this question, he turns to the biographies of the leading intelligence testers, probing their religious family backgrounds. All the leading pioneers in the intelligence testing movement, it turns out, had Puritan roots. “Although more and more people,” White concedes, “including many of the psychologists of intelligence, came to find religious belief unacceptable, the increasingly secular thought-world within which they lived and worked was still permeated by ideas, or shadows of ideas, from the older religious culture. The new faith in mental science appears to be one such shadow.” To back this up, White provides a number of quotations, such as the following late Galton statement from 1907: “Man has already furthered evolution very considerably, half unconsciously, and for his own personal advantage, but he has not yet risen to the conviction that it is his religious duty to do so deliberately and systematically.” All this connectivity seems to White to be incredibly suggestive. But is the empirical case really that strong, even before we dig deeper to examine the assumptions about historical causality upon which it rests? With regard to the claim that all leading early intelligence testers and psychologists were of dissenter stock, White himself admits there exist telling exceptions. Charles Spearman, the originator of factor analysis and of the concept of general intelligence (g), is one, having emanated from a background of establishment Anglicanism. Lewis Terman, who as a teenager renounced all interest in organized religion, is another. (White still finds it instructive, nevertheless, to mention that the fact that Terman’s paternal grandfather came from a Scotch-Irish family “strongly suggests Ulster Presbyterianism.”) Galton, too, come to think of it, was surely more inflicted by scientism than by religious ardor, as a counter-quote White himself provides, clearly shows. Galton’s father, in fact, as White once again offers himself, had actually left the Quakers in order to become eligible for an Oxbridge degree, and, indeed, as White himself again admits, Galton’s notion that man’s innate intelligence is inherited through his ancestry clashed with the Puritan notion that it was put in place by a benevolent God – an incongruity picked up on by Galton’s own religious contemporaries. On the other hand, there were Puritans who somehow escaped the supposed determinism their dissenter background imposed on their worldview. John Dewey, another student of Hall’s and a leading figure in the ‘New Psychology’ at the turn of the century, was an outspoken critic of the Galtonian tradition, and yet he had been reared in New England to a strict Congregationalist family. The prominent behaviorist J.B. Watson is another example of a scion of a fundamentalist Calvinist family who shunned the hereditarian view of things, becoming in the process the champion of an equally dogmatic environmentalism. There are many further examples of this sort. One of White’s themes is the analogy between the Elect in Puritan traditions and the Genius or the gifted associated with the intelligence test movement. His claim is that the second tradition directly adopted from the first not only the adoration of the select few, but also the more noxious neglect of all those who were not considered to be select. This is an interesting thesis, but how does it square with the fact, admitted by White, that, beginning in the eighteenth century, Quakers and other dissenters famously devoted themselves to humanitarian causes and to social reform? White sweeps aside this challenging caveat with the rather historically odd comment that “older, more socially indifferent, attitudes still prevailed.” In fact, as White once again admits himself, Quakers were Salvationists, but actually broke with other dissenting groups over predestination, advocating an ‘inner light’ to which men and women can willfully respond in place of the Calvinist notion of God’s predestined choice, as the true road to salvation. White provides a bit of acrobatic theological exegesis to get around this problem, but it somehow remains difficult to get behind a predestination/biological determinism analogy in the context of his argument when one of the major dissenting groups of which White speaks was actually not predestinarian at all. Another argument that White offers is that the Puritan notion of life as a “continuous examination” parallels the focus of the intelligence testing movement on, well, examinations. But there is nothing particularly unique about this Puritan worldview. In both the Jewish and Muslim traditions the stringent limits associated with Halacha and Shari’a (the respective codes of law) are interpreted as ongoing tests of one’s belief and religious resolve. And what about the more general claim, that Britain and America were prime candidates to become leaders of the intelligence testing movement due to the strong Puritan roots of both countries? White admits that, here too, negative exceptions exist, the Netherlands being an especially telling one (intelligence testing never became a major tool or issue in this strongly Puritan based country.) Negative exceptions do not mean that the positive claim is wrong; they do, however, beckon more positive evidence if the thesis is to be accepted. One favored form of evidence in White’s book for the connection between Puritanism and intelligence testing is linguistic. White argues that the fact that the terms ‘vocation,’ ‘talent’ and ‘gift’ that are often used in the lingo of intelligence testing all have religious origins serves as evidence for his causal claim. That Terman is quoted as saying: “If we are to be saved from chaos it can only be by increasing the tempo of man’s social and moral evolution” seems to White a clear allusion to the Puritan notion of salvation (remember that Terman himself completely renounced religion as a teenager, but never mind!). White enjoys these word games and seems to attach importance to them. But what about “sanction” or “office” or “mercy”? What about “sanctuary” or “hierarchy”? These are all words of religious origin, yet it is doubtful that those who use them are always or even sometimes thinking religiously. Some time ago many of our ancestors led religious lives. We inherited their language but not necessarily their beliefs. When most people speak of “passion” to their beloved they are not necessarily thinking about Christ’s body on the cross. To be fair, White is admirably honest about the limitations of his thesis. “This book,” he writes, “has suggested that roots of both psychology of intelligence and the subject-based school curriculum are located in the same place – the world of puritanism and its descendents. ‘Roots’, not ‘the root’”(p. 158). Still, his book is entitled “Intelligence, Destiny and Education: The Ideological Roots of Intelligence Testing.” Not since Darwin’s The Descent of Man has there appeared a title so starkly juxtaposed in its confidence to the apologetic tone of its content. (Darwin famously wrote: “many of the views which have been advanced are highly speculative…False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for everyone takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness” – not exactly a great promo for his book!). White’s many hedgings conspicuously litter the book: “None of the arguments have been clinching”; “it is patently not enough to clinch…”; “the considerations presented may be no more than coincidences”; “clinching evidence is still lacking”; “there is no hard evidence…” Indeed, the book’s entire line of reasoning is based on a kind of argument from disbelief: “It is hard to believe,” White writes of Galton, “that his background had no effect on his view of the world.” Clearly, this must be in some sense true, but that does not make it convincing history. Alongside parallels, analogies, and arguments from disbelief backed by tenuous linguistic plays on words – more or less convincing – White employs sweeping historical claims across centuries with little or no evidence. The sixteenth-century French scholar Pierre de la Ramée, knows as Ramus, advanced a system of logic that White claims was adopted by the Dissenting Academies, and, through them, percolated down to Galton and his followers in the curriculum planning movement (whatever that may be). White admits that the thesis that the Dissenting Academies were major catalysts for the curricular revolution in Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is highly contested by historians of education. If this is the case, then the line between Ramus and Galton (who never studied in a Dissenting Academy anyway) seems to be compromised. The argument may be true to a greater or lesser degree; the reader, in any event, will have little purchase over the facts to make an enlightened judgment. Good history writing is the kind of writing that always considers alternative explanations. It is in some, nebulous sense plausible that the logical theology of a sixteenth century French philosopher that Galton and Terman and Morant and Goddard almost assuredly never heard of may have exercised an influence over their views on the testing of children and the nature of the best curricular systems to implement. It is equally, if not more convincingly, plausible to imagine that a free market mentality associated with the throws of modernism in Britain and the United States had something to do with it. Perhaps a newfound ethos of competitiveness associated with urbanization and the rise of the middle class played a role. Or what about the scientism of the second half of the nineteenth century espoused by August Compte and his positivist followers, the one responsible both for great successes and for some of the more egregious attempts to marshal “scientific” thinking to solve difficult social and political problems of the day, such as the status of women, or the relative worth of races? Just as the legal profession, the civil service, medicine, and indeed the sciences themselves were coming under the influence of more rigorously defined scientific standards and the worldview that such standards represented and reflected, so too did the psychology of mind and educational thinking find themselves infused with the same spirit. This complex and more nuanced social and intellectual backdrop undoubtedly played more of a role in Galton’s thinking than did a specific strain of Puritan theology, but the reader is given little material with which to make a judgment. White, unfortunately, does not mention the alternatives. Here is another example. White wants to know why, in the subject-based educational curriculum and the IQ Test, abstract thought was and is prized above other kinds of thought. This is a very good question, and, for pragmatic as well as intellectual reasons, in need of a good answer. But White’s answer is much less satisfying: this is a consequence, he claims, of the Puritan view on the Soul. A good number of pages are spent explaining this connection, but never does White stop to consider that, in fact, almost all peoples at all times have judged mathematicians and philosophers to be particularly clever members of the group. Jews have no notion of the Soul even remotely reminiscent of the Puritan view, but it would be unfair to say that the Talmudic tradition looks down on abstract thought, to say the least, nor did the Muslims of the Golden Age judge Al Khwarizmi and Avicenna the same as they judged good cooks, or men and women with special talents for friendship, or the local annual discus hurling champion. Why humans have always prized a certain kind of intelligence is a fascinating question; putting it down to a particular sixteenth century Puritan take on the Soul seems a bit facile. Finally, the fact that humans never settle for just good but strive for the best, White argues, - a bias that is reflected in the competitive ethos of the intelligence test and the motivation to get the “fullest” potential out of the student rather than simply something that is good - “…goes back to Salvationist thinking. Being nearly saved can never be good enough: success and failure are absolute categories.” In truth, recent studies from animal behavior that show that capuchin monkeys sometimes prefer waiting for the best kind of food (grapes) rather than settling for the available good kind of food (cucumbers) might offer a more convincing explanation. Once again, White does not consider this naturalistic nor other, alternative explanations. But if we have been critical of White’s thesis, it is not because it is altogether wrong or wrongheaded. Credit should be given to the author for taking a stab at a brave thesis, for acknowledging that his case is far from airtight, and for encouraging others to pursue the threads. His questions are excellent: Why, for goodness sakes, have certain and not other definitions of intelligence won the day in the educational systems of the West? How does the adoption of such a stance reflect our goals and ideals as individuals and societies, and is it not time that we scrutinize such ideals and goals more closely? White’s concerns are important and he has done a truly admirable job in raising them. While his history may be incomplete and not always convincing, it remains the case that parts of the thesis can be further studied and may, in the end, be corroborated. The more important reflection, however, is what a consideration of White’s causal logic and motivation can teach us about the writing of history. It is to this issue that we finally turn. IV. The Dorze of Africa have always believed that leopards are Christians, and that for that reason, it is not necessary to guard one’s flocks against them on fast days of the Church. (Actually, the Dorze do guard their flocks on all days, but they nevertheless hold this belief steadfastly). The anthropologist Dan Sperber believes that the Dorze make sense of their own belief by forming the analogy: ‘Leopards are to hyenas as the Dorze are to their neighbors.’ It works like this: leopards and hyenas are the two large carnivores in the area; unlike the hyenas, the leopards kill all that they eat, and only eat fresh flesh; the Dorze differ from their neighbors in that they only eat freshly-killed meat; the Dorze, unlike their neighbors, are Christians; hence, by stating that leopards are Christians, something is being said about the relation of the Dorze themselves to their neighbors. Whether or not this interpretation is correct is not the issue. What is important is the assumptions behind it, which are: a) Humans attempt to make sense of ‘stories’ which they know to be untrue in a literal sense, b) the method adopted to accomplish this is to seek analogies between the story and something that is already known, c) the ‘truth’ so acquired is moral or aesthetic rather than strictly literal. The formation of structural analogies between things has served as a means to understand both myth and reality; symbolic thought functions to transform noise into information. In his book, White effectively employs such symbolic thinking, interpreting historical events in terms of causal analogies. These are - predestination: hereditarianism; Nature: God; an elite: the elect; Mensa: the community of the saved; salvation: high IQ Test scores; intelligence testers: the Puritan high priests. Instructively, he begins with such structural analogies, and only then returns to history, as it were, in search of evidence that will serve to justify them further. That Terman forsook religion in his teens, for example, becomes a mere detail once it has established that he came from dissenter stock, since, fundamentally the causal reasoning is based on the structural analogies rather than on any real history. That Galton’s grandparents were Quakers (even though his father had quit the Society of Friends) is a sufficient historical thread to justify the primary analogy, even though it is not well established that Galton was either religiously educated or religiously inclined. That the intelligence test movement stemmed directly from a 16th century Puritan theology is meant to convey some kind of truth about the essence of each tradition, whether or not the connection between the two is really one of historical causation. White, in short, is writing history somewhat like the Dorze are interpreting nature. This kind of analogical or symbolic causative thinking differs from another kind of causal thinking: correlational or probabilistic. Correlational thinking, like analogical thinking, aims to transform noise into information, but it does so by establishing statistical connections between independent events and measuring the strength of such connections in order to establish a hierarchy of connectivity between the events: if event A has a stronger correlation to event B than event C has to B then event A is interpreted as being more causally related to B. Correlation seems to establish a path for inferences about causality, but this can be a slippery slope, since the vast majority of correlations are not causative: the number of traffic lights in downtown Mogadishu and the height of grass in Central Park may both rise in a given period of time but there is no causal link between the two; inference of cause must come from somewhere else than the mere fact of statistical correlation. Similarly, the nature of a cause can seldom be established simply by correlation: that there exists a high correlation between a group of individual children and the amount of marshmallows each eats may be due to differences in age or size between the children, differences in eating habits between the children imbibed through the home, or innate differences in appetite. The correlation itself tells us nothing of the cause. The physical, biological and social worlds are such complex places, that more often than not there are many variables playing a role in any given phenomena. In order to make sense of this complexity, a statistical technique called factor analysis was developed that helps to reduce the great number of correlations into fewer dimensions - once again, to transform noise into information. Fundamentally, symbolic thinking is incompatible with probability, since it assumes that every event has a cause, whereas probability makes no sense without the assumption of randomness. The biologist John Maynard Smith once suggested that the relatively slow development of the mathematical theory of probability and its applications was due to the all-pervasiveness of symbolic thought in humans and its incompatibility with probabilistic thought. Not until the mid nineteenth century, after all, were scientific theories formulated in which the concept of probability was central, and it is a squeeze to interpret this late-coming as the result of intrinsic mathematical difficulties, or by the absence of an external demand for the theory. Correlational thinking is relevant to our discussion, of course, because it underpins the Galtonian tradition of intelligence testing. In studies of intelligence, factor analysis was and is applied to matrices of correlation among mental tests. Charles Spearman (one of the exceptions to White’s thesis) invented this technique in 1904 as a way to infer causes from correlation matrices of mental tests. It was this technique which allowed him to postulate the existence of a general intelligence (g) in humans. As Stephen Jay Gould showed in The Mismeasure of Man, the major flaw in Spearman and his followers’ logic was to argue that because there was an apparent correlation between mental tests, there must exist one, reified “thing” responsible for that correlation in the brain. Spearman thought he had found a unitary quality underlying all cognitive mental activity – a quality that could be expressed in a single intelligence quotient, or IQ number. As Gould showed, the simple existence of g can be theoretically interpreted both in purely hereditarian and purely environmentalist ways; historically, as we know all too well, correlations between mental tests have usually buttressed the hereditarian view of things, influencing educational thinking in the restrictive and exclusionary ways White describes in his book. That inferences from factor analysis applied to intelligence testing may suffer from certain logical, if not technical, flaws does not mean that correlational thinking should be thrown out the window. Due to the complexity of physical and biological phenomena, it is one of the central tools of science, without which we would be much less informed about our world. When correlations are established, they can serve as scaffolds for actual studies of mechanism, and this is very valuable indeed. Similarly, symbolic thinking, while it may sometimes depart from literal truth, remains a valuable tool in conveying certain essences of a problem that may be more difficult to convey in more unembroidered, factual ways. Clearly, both kinds of thought must be used with caution to render their use valuable. What is particularly interesting about these two different kinds of thinking is that they are both intended to be causal. Both comprise a single Kantian ‘category of understanding’ that constrains our view of the world. In science, so long as causal mechanisms remain illusive, correlations can help us find our way in a sea of confusing events, and, ultimately, bring us closer to true causal understanding. In history, on the other hand, the automatic use of causal thinking may not be as straightforward. The German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey already perceived this back in the late nineteenth century. How was the study of history, of man and his psychology, Dilthey wanted to know, different from the study of the physical and biological world? Dilthey answered with what became a famous distinction between explanation (Erklärung) an understanding (Verstehen). The natural world, described by science, can be made lawful, and thus explained. The subject matter of the humanities, on the other hand, was never lawful but rather always particular and contingent; the best that could be hoped for with things human would be some form of understanding short of scientific explanation. The English historian A.J. P. Taylor, a contemporary of E.H. Carr, used to delight in poking fun at more sober historians by positing tiny causes for momentous events. World War I, for example, was in his view caused by railway timetables because this locked the warring parties into a sequence of troop mobilizations and war declarations from which they could not escape. This was in the vein of Pascal, who wrote in his Pensées that had Cleopatra’s nose been less perfect, Octavius would not have founded the Roman Empire. Indeed, writing in 1976, the historian of France Theodore Zeldin rejected causal history altogether, advocating instead a ‘pointilliste’ method which would compose a picture out of unconnected dots between which the reader could make “what links he thinks fit for himself.” “Causation,’ Zeldin observed, “has been almost as merciless a tyrant to historians as chronology.” The real opportunity of White’s book, then, is that it invites a reflection on the necessity, or value of causal thinking in the writing of history. Why, we might ask, do historians almost always tend to want to explain (causally) rather than – a la Dilthey - settling for a form of understanding such as contextualization, or categorization, or even “merely” description? After all, history is hardly less complicated than physics; the great theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli understood this when he explained that he decided on a scientific path instead of following a more natural inclination towards the humanities since he judged sociology too hard a nut to crack. The answer to this question may perhaps become available by looking closely once again at the logic of White’s argument. White argues that the Salvationist worldview of the early Puritans served as the rationale for an elitist ethic that encouraged intellectual competitiveness and ‘the elect’ who excelled in it. Today, he claims, the Salvationist worldview is largely defunct, and yet the assumptions it spawned persist in our own, modern views on intelligence and education. Therefore – and this is the important point - if we understand the causal link between the Puritan ethic and the intelligence testing and subject- and test-based educational curriculum movements we can finally detach ourselves from assumptions for which there clearly does not exist any kind of logical or empirical justification, and move ahead to create better educational systems that will be more fulfilling and beneficial for all. White’s ends are admirable, even if the historical means he employs to get at them are somewhat less than rigorous. What is of particular interest, however, is the feeling that White’s argumentation betrays a certain bias shared by many historians: cause, it would seem, is usually advocated so as to make history relevant, for without a causal narrative, the past seems to wallow in, well, the past, offering no directives or lessons for the future. The reason historians seek to explain is because, devoid of any explanation, the past loses all interest; like a scientific problem that cannot yet be approached for lack of necessary tools, it is rendered unworthy of treatment. But when causality is introduced into the story, the past can once again be worthy of the present. White seems to feel that he needs a hard and fast causal thesis to make his story relevant to his educational agenda. Why this should so often be the case in the humanities is not entirely clear, especially if one reads Dilthey with care. The bias may, ultimately, be due to Kant’s three hundred year old insight. Just as abstract intelligence seems to be prized by people in places and times the world over, so too, for whatever reason (evolutionary or otherwise) is causal thinking judged in some sense superior, or a more exalted goal, or of the ability to become more relevant than just “plain old description.” And historians, just like scientists, want to do as best a job as they can. While causal thinking in history clearly has its dangers, I wouldn’t go as far as Zeldin. However Rube Goldbergeque the twisting paths of history, there is no justification to throw up one’s hands in despair. “Irreducible complexity” may be a strategy good for advocates of Intelligent Design, but it should not serve as a beacon for the serious historian. That there exist good arguments against the over-determination of historical events, and for the importance of the role of chance, need not sway us from looking, just as we do in the physical and biological realms, for complex causal routes between events and thoughts both in social and intellectual history. In this respect, White’s book can serve as something of a warning signal against overly-simplified causal thinking; positing monocausal arguments in history is even less likely to get us any closer to some coveted, illusive truth than will the positing of monocausal entities and mechanisms in science. White is rightfully adamant about the tomfoolery of exaggerated hereditarian determinism, but unfortunately falls into the very same pit when it comes to his own historical determinism. The agent responsible for the slip is symbolic, or analogical causal thinking. But White’s effort has clearly also been far from made in vain. Just like the Dorze with their leopards, we can look at and learn from the analogies, and, as White so wisely beckons, strive to become smarter about smarts.