Divine Fury (39 page)

Like Quételet before him, then, Galton concluded that there was such a thing as an “average man.” But whereas the Belgian tended to think of averages in positive terms, as nature’s ideal and mean, Galton conceived of it disparagingly as “mediocrity.” Impressed by the “enormous” range of mental powers between the “greatest and least of intellects,” Galton was drawn to the upper end of the scale. He focused his attention on those “grand human animals, of natures preeminently noble, born to be kings of men.” These were the exceedingly rare “prodigies of genius,” the “illustrious men” on whose thoughts depended the course of human events. “Scattered throughout the whole historical period of human existence, their number does not amount to more than 400,” Galton judged at one point. The somewhat less exalted number he arrived at elsewhere is more familiar: geniuses, he calculated, were “like one to a million.”
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This was, ironically, the very same ratio cited by Lavater, who maintained that the “the proportion of genius to the vulgar is like one to a million.” There is no indication that Galton took his calculations from his Swiss predecessor. And yet, far from instilling confidence, the coincidence suggests that the number reflected more than just the iron law of statistics. Nor is that the only similarity between Galton’s science of genius and that of earlier practitioners. Indeed, just as physiognomists and craniometrists had detected the presence of genius only in bodies already classified as such, Galton derived his conclusions about genius’s origins in reference to opinions long conferred. He was, to be sure, straightforward about his method, calling attention to his central assumption that “high reputation is a pretty accurate test of high ability.” Genius, he reasoned, would always “out,” disclosing itself in a record of achieved distinction that could be evaluated statistically. By looking at indicators of public and professional esteem—entries in dictionaries of national biography, references in newspapers, the conferral of prizes and awards—Galton believed he could arrive at an accurate portrait of the geniuses of an age. Built into his definition of genius, in fact, was the assumption not only of ability, but of an “inherent stimulus [to] climb the path that leads to eminence, [and] the strength to reach the summit.” This was what Galton described as the “concrete triple event”—ability, zeal, and a capacity for hard labor—that was the necessary precondition of a type who, far from being an outcast or a degenerate, was conceived as the fittest of the species, robust in body as well as in mind. However much Romantics might piffle on about undiscovered genius, a man who didn’t produce, and through that production achieve a place of eminence in society, leaving behind a clear record of distinction, simply wasn’t a genius.
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Despite Galton’s overly facile assumption regarding the direct correspondence between achievement and recognition, there is undoubtedly something to his method; indeed, it continues to serve as the basis of an ongoing branch of psychological investigation known as “historimetrics.” But what made the assumption particularly problematic was Galton’s further insistence that reputation reflected
hereditary
genius. His use of indices of achievement, in other words, was not meant to suggest that fame played a part in creating genius; fame, in Galton’s view, reflected what was already there. Genius was inherent, the product of natural gifts. And although many since the eighteenth century have shared that view, Galton rightly claimed to be the first to treat the subject statistically. Marshaling an impressive array of data, he provided statistics on a vast range of outstanding individuals, from musicians, poets,
and scientists to judges, statesmen, and even wrestlers and rowers. In doing so, he emphasized time and again how often these high performers were related by ancestry and birth. The conclusion to be drawn, Galton stressed, was that “natural abilities,” like anything else in the organic world, were derived from inheritance. Nature trumped nurture. Genes alone, as we would say, were the source of genius.
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Few today would doubt that inheritance plays some role in shaping human capacities, although whether it should be treated as the dominant factor remains a hotly contested point. Galton assumed that it was the dominant factor, but his data did not prove it, and the reasons should be clear. To treat reputation alone as the sign of genius was to completely ignore those structures of power that conferred it, evaluating success and dictating admission to the competition in the first place. Should the absence of women on Galton’s lists, or the virtual lack of all save white Europeans, be taken as a sign of their natural inferiority? Of course not, though Galton himself concluded as much. And should the interrelatedness of Galton’s families of English genius be read first and foremost as the predictable consequence of a system that confined privilege and opportunity to very small circles? Of course, though the thought seems not to have occurred to him, or if it did, Galton dismissed it as unimportant.

The thought did, however, occur to others. In an explicit response to Galton, the eminent Swiss botanist Alphonse de Candolle, for example (who himself showed up in Galton’s detailed family trees), took pains to press the importance of environmental factors in influencing achievement in his 1873 study,
Histoire des sciences et savants depuis deux siècles
. Others responded similarly, keeping alive an argument that had been cultivated (if only in the minority) since the eighteenth century, when the likes of William Sharpe and Claude Adrien Helvétius had made a concerted case for nurture over nature in the production of genius. But although the reception of Galton’s work was by no means uniformly positive, generating among religious observers, especially, a strongly negative response, it did enjoy extensive support, particularly in those quarters of the scientific community where the prestige of Darwin had already rendered many amenable to arguments based on the laws of inheritance. Darwin himself wrote to his cousin after the publication of his work in strongly congratulatory terms, and he later reaffirmed his endorsement in print on numerous occasions, noting in one such instance that “some writers have doubted whether those complex mental attributes, on which genius and talent depend, are inherited. . . . But he
who will study Mr. Galton’s able work on ‘Hereditary Genius’ will have his doubts allayed.”
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Yet the success of Galton’s work owed to much more than Darwin’s stamp of approval, or even to the force of its own arguments. Equally important was the fact that Galton said what students of genius were prepared to hear. Since the eighteenth century, they had been told repeatedly that genius was born, not made. Philosophers and poets, no less than anatomists and criminologists, shared that assumption, and by the second half of the nineteenth century it had become a default assumption. It is revealing that even the self-help author Samuel Smiles, who was committed to the proposition that individuals could pull themselves up by their bootstraps by dint of hard work, conceded that genius was another matter. “It is not, however, through the preparatory efforts of labour and talent, however persevering,” he said, “that [the greatest works] are conceived and perfected, but through the influence of what we call Genius.” Galton provided yet another scientific iteration of a well-established claim. His numbers dazzled. His statistics impressed. And they put into quantifiable terms the belief that genius was genuinely precious, one in a million. His work inspired a range of ambitious studies modeled on his methods, including Havelock Ellis’s
A Study of British Genius
(1904) and James McKeen Cattell’s
American Men of Science
(1906). But what such studies could not do was test for the presence of the very thing they claimed to reveal.
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Galton was aware of this shortcoming—aware, that is, that his statistical studies of past achievement could no more detect genius in our midst than could the craniometrical studies of the dead and departed. At the very best, his statistical methods confirmed the presence of what was known to have been there already. Like the studies by craniometrists, moreover, Galton’s investigations dealt only with the past, not with living geniuses. Investigation of the dead was insufficient. For as Galton suggested in
Hereditary Genius
, and then advocated more boldly as his interest in eugenics increased, if one could identify genius in living human beings, singling out the one in a million, then, “just as a new race” could be obtained in animals and plants by selective breeding, so “a race of gifted men might be obtained, under exactly similar conditions.” It was for this reason that Galton was drawn to anthropomorphic studies focusing on living subjects. He measured heads, like Gladstone’s, which were still attached. And he gathered data on a range of indicators—from reaction time to the strength of the handshake to the color sense—hoping to discover some characteristic that would indicate the presence of genius
among the living. Such faltering attempts on Galton’s part, however, ended in failure. And so it was left to two of his great admirers—one French, the other American—to complete his work, devising a test that could be used to reveal genius in the flesh.
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T
HE STORY OF THE GENESIS
of the “intelligence quotient,” commonly known as “IQ,” is a story that has been told often and well. And yet part of that story has received insufficient emphasis: the degree to which the IQ exam emerged directly out of—and intersected directly with—the “geniological” investigations examined in this chapter, the long search for a science of genius that captivated researchers throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Alfred Binet, it is true, first developed the initial version of the exam in order to screen for the presence, not of genius, but of mental retardation. A professor of psychology at the Sorbonne, he had been asked by the French government in 1904 to devise a reliable means to assess students suffering from mental disabilities, so-called
anormaux
. Together with his colleague Théodore Simon, Binet produced a diagnostic tool the following year that aimed to do just that, seeking to classify subjects on a scale descending from “normalcy” to “idiocy,” “imbecility,” and
débilité
(moronity), in the brutal categorical language of the time. Prescribing a series of tests designed to calculate the mental age of the subject in relation to his or her actual age, the exam worked by assigning groups of tasks that in theory a normal child of a given age could perform with ease. All normal seven-year-olds, Binet reckoned, would be able to distinguish between a butterfly and a fly, a piece of a wood and a piece of glass, and paper and cardboard, distinctions that would be less apparent to normal five-year-olds. Organized accordingly, the exam as a whole was conceived as a series of barriers of increasing difficulty that could be used to classify subjects in relation to what was deemed “normal” for any given stage of development. The immediate goal was to classify those falling below normalcy, but it was readily apparent that an exam of this sort could be used to do the opposite, too—identifying and ranking individuals whose mental ages were above average.
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Binet, in fact, like Galton before him, had long been intrigued by individuals who departed from the mean at the other end of the Gaussian curve, pointing out that “people of talent or genius serve better than average examples for making us understand the laws of character, because they present more extreme traits.” Over the course of two years, he had studied the case of Jacques Inaudi, a young man from Piedmont who could perform extraordinary feats of mathematical calculation in
his head. Chess players and other “great calculators” drew Binet’s attention, along with subjects of prodigious memory, whom he examined with clinical methods not unlike those employed by Edouard Toulouse, the physician who had investigated the neurotic genius of Émile Zola.
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Nor was that his only debt to an earlier form of research devoted to the study of genius. At the same time that he was pursuing case studies of extraordinary minds, Binet was aggressively pursuing craniometric research along the lines laid out by Paul Broca, taking calipers to the heads of subjects both living and dead. In 1898, with his colleague Nicolas Vaschide, Binet published an extensive historical review of the literature on craniometric and brain research, paying close attention to the work of Gall, Broca, and a host of others. And in the following six years he published close to a dozen more articles on craniometric themes, searching, like Galton, for evidence of a physical sign that could be used to identify genius within. By 1904, Binet had grown increasingly skeptical of craniometry’s ability to provide actionable results, but he refused to abandon the search for some kind of objective indicator. The potential benefits were enormous. As Vaschide explained in 1904, “if it were possible to recognize from infancy, by means of special signs, those of superior intelligence, one could push their education much further, prepare them specially for high culture, to the end that, on becoming adults, they would be an intellectual elite capable of advancing society in all branches of its activity.”
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It should come as no surprise, then, that an exam initially intended to identify
anormaux
on one end of the scale was quickly applied to those on the other—conceived as a powerful means to identify individuals of extraordinary ability. A revised 1908 version of Binet’s scale provided explicitly for this possibility. And when, in 1912, the German psychologist William Stern proposed that mental age be divided by actual age, and then multiplied by a 100, to yield an intelligence
quotient
, IQ, in much the form that we know it today, was born. With it came the tantalizing prospect that the living sign for which Galton and others had searched was now within science’s grasp.