320 THE MISMEASURE OF MAN
Lest one be tempted to regard these later statements as a shift
in belief from the caution of a scholar in 1940 to the poor judgment
of a man mired in the frauds of his later years, I note that Burt
presented the same arguments for reification in 1940, right along-
side the warnings against it:
Now, although I do not identify the general factor g with any form of
energy, I should be ready to grant it quite as much "real existence" as
physical energy can justifiably claim (1940, p. 214). Intelligence I regard
not indeed as designating a special form of energy, but rather as specifying
certain individual differences in the structure of the central nervous sys-
tem—differences whose concrete nature could be described in histological
terms (1940, pp. 216-217).Burt even went so far as to suggest that the all-or-none character
of neural discharge "supports the demand for an ultimate analysis
into independent or 'orthogonal' factors" (1940, p. 222).
But perhaps the best indication of Burt's hope for reification
lies in the very title he chose for his major book of 1940. He called
it The Factors of the Mind.
Burt followed Spearman in trying to find a physical location in
the brain for mathematical factors extracted from the correlation
matrix of mental tests. But Burt also went further, and established
himself as a reifier in a domain that Spearman himself would never
have dared to enter. Burt could not be satisfied with something so
vulgar and material as a bit of neural tissue for the residence of
factors. He had a wider vision that evoked the spirit of Plato him-
self. Material objects on earth are immediate and imperfect repre-
sentations of higher essences in an ideal world beyond our ken.
Burt subjected many kinds of data to factor analysis during his
long career. His interpretations of factors display a Platonic belief
in a higher reality, embodied imperfectly by material objects, but
discernible in them through an idealization of their essential,
underlying properties on principal component factors. He ana-
lyzed a suite of emotional traits (1940, pp. 406-408) and identified
his first principal component as a factor of "general emotionality."
(He also found two bipolar factors for extrovert-introvert and
euphoric-sorrowful.) He discovered "a general paranormal factor'
in a study of ESP data (in Hearnshaw, 1979, p. 222). He analyzed
human anatomy and interpreted the first principal component as
an ideal type for humanity (1940, p. 113).