THE HEREDITARIA N THEORY OF IQ^181succeed by means of rote learning" (1905, p. 42). "It is a specially
interesting feature of these tests that they permit us, when neces-
sary, to free a beautiful native intelligence from the trammels of
the school" (1908, p. 259).
Yet, beyond this obvious desire to remove the superficial effects
of clearly acquired knowledge, Binet declined to define and spec-
ulate upon the meaning of the score he assigned to each child.
Intelligence, Binet proclaimed, is too complex to capture with a
single number. This number, later called IQ, is only a rough,
empirical guide constructed for a limited, practical purpose:
The scale, properly speaking, does not permit the measure of the intel-
ligence, because intellectual qualities are not superposable, and therefore
cannot be measured as linear surfaces are measured (1905, p. 40).
Moreover, the number is only an average of many perfor-
mances, not an entity unto itself. Intelligence, Binet reminds us, is
not a single, scalable thing like height. "We feel it necessary to insist
on this fact," Binet (1911) cautions, "because later, for the sake of
simplicity of statement, we will speak of a child of 8 years having
the intelligence of a child of 7 or 9 years; these expressions, if
accepted arbitrarily, may give place to illusions." Binet was too
good a theoretician to fall into the logical error that John Stuart
Mill had identified—"to believe that whatever received a name
must be an entity or being, having an independent existence of its
own."
Binet also had a social motive for his reticence. He greatly
feared that his practical device, if reified as an entity, could be
perverted and used as an indelible label, rather than as a guide for
identifying children who needed help. He worried that schoolmas-
ters with "exaggerated zeal" might use IQ as a convenient excuse:
"They seem to reason in the following way: 'Here is an excellent
opportunity for getting rid of all the children who trouble us,' and
without the true critical spirit, they designate all who are unruly, or
disinterested in the school" (1905, p. 169). But he feared even
more what has since been called the "self-fulfilling prophesy." A
rigid label may set a teacher's attitude and eventually divert a
child's behavior into a predicted path:
h is really too easy to discover signs of backwardness in an individual
er> one is forewarned. This would be to operate as the graphologists did