3* 8 THE MISMEASURE OF MAN
Moreover, Burt accepted and greatly elaborated Spearman's
views on the differential innateness of levels. Spearman had
regarded g as inherited, 5 as a function of training. Burt agreed,
but promoted the influence of education to his group factors as
well. He retained the distinction between an inherited and ineluct-
able g, and a set of more specialized abilities amenable to improve-
ment by education:
Although defect in general intelligence inevitably places a definite limit
to educational progress, defect in special intellectual abilities rarely does
so (1937, p. 537).Burt also declared, with his usual intensity and persistence, that
the primary importance of factor analysis lay in its capacity for
identifying inherited, permanent qualities:
From the very outset of my educational work it has seemed essential,
not merely to show that a general factor underlies the cognitive group of
mental activities, but also that this general factor (or some important com-
ponent of it) is innate or permanent (1940, p. 57).
The search for factors thus becomes, to a great extent, an attempt to
discover inborn potentialities, such as will permanently aid or limit the
individual's behavior later on (1940, p. 230).Burt on the reification of factors
Burt's view on reification, as Hearnshaw has noted with frustra-
tion (1979, p. 166), are inconsistent and even contradictory (some-
times within the same publication).* Often, Burt branded
reification of factors as a temptation to be avoided:
No doubt, this causal language, which we all to some extent favor,
arises partly from the irrepressible disposition of the human mind to reify
and even to personify whatever it can—to picture inferred reasons as real-
ities and to endow those realities with an active force (1940, p. 66).
* Other scholars often complained of Burt's tendency to obfuscate, temporize, and
argue both sides as his own when treating difficult and controversial issues. D. F.
Vincent wrote of his correspondence with Burt about the history of factor analysis
(in Hearnshaw, 1979, pp. 177-178): "I should not get a simple answer to a simple
question. I should get half a dozen foolscap sheets of typescript, all very polite and
very cordial, raising half a dozen subsidiary issues in which I was not particularly
interested, and to which out of politeness I should have to reply ... I should then
get more foolscap pages of typescript raising more extraneous issues.... After the
first letter my problem has been how to terminate the correspondence without being
discourteous."