THE REAL ERROR OF CYRIL BURT 32 IOne needn't, from these examples, infer Burt's belief in a lit-
eral, higher reality: perhaps he thought of these idealized general
factors as mere principles of classification to aid human under-
standing. But, in a factor analysis of aesthetic judgment, Burt
explicitly expressed his conviction that real standards of beauty
exist, independent of the presence of human beings to appreciate
them. Burt selected fifty postcards with illustrations ranging from
the great masters down to "the crudest and most flashy birthday
card that I could find at a paper shop in the slums." He asked a
group of subjects to rank the cards in order of beauty and per-
formed a factor analysis of correlations among the ranks. Again,
he discerned an underlying general factor on the first principal
component, declared it to be a universal standard of beauty, and
expressed a personal contempt for Victorian ceremonial statuary
in identifying this higher reality:
We see beauty because it is there to be seen. ... I am tempted to con-
tend that aesthetic relations, like logical relations, have an independent,
objective existence: the Venus of Milo would remain more lovely than
Queen Victoria's statue in the Mall, the Taj Mahal than the Albert Mem-
orial, though every man and woman in the world were killed by a passing
comet's gas.In analyses of intelligence, Burt often claimed (1939, 1940,
1949, for example) that each level of his hierarchical, four-factor
theory corresponded with a recognized category in "the traditional
logic of classes" (1939, p. 85)—the general factor to the genus,
group factors to species, specific factors to the proprium, and acci-
dental factors to the accidens. He seemed to regard these categories
as more than conveniences for human ordering of the world's com-
plexity, but as necessary ways of parsing a hierarchically structured
reality.
Burt certainly believed in realms of existence beyond the mate-
rial reality of everyday objects. He accepted much of the data of
parapsychology and postulated an oversoul or psychon—"a kind of
group mind formed by the subconscious telepathic interaction of
the minds of certain persons now living, together perhaps with the
psychic reservoir out of which the minds of individuals now
deceased were formed, and into which they were reabsorbed on
the death of their bodies" (Burt quoted in Hearnshaw, 1979, p.
225). In this higher realm of psychic reality, the "factors of the