326 THE MISMEASURE OF MAN
were not included in his plan for the preservation of British great-
ness. Of them, he wrote (1959, p. 123):
It should be an essential part of the child's education to teach him how
to face a possible beating on the 11+ (or any other examination), just as
he should learn to take a beating in a half-mile race, or in a bout with
boxing gloves, or a football match with a rival school.
Could Burt feel the pain of hopes dashed by biological proclama-
tion if he was willing seriously to compare a permanent brand of
intellectual inferiority with the loss of a single footrace?
L. L. Thurstone and the vectors of mind
Thurstone's critique and reconstruction
L. L. Thurstone was born (1887) and bred in Chicago (Ph.D.,
University of Chicago, 1917, professor of psychology at his alma
mater from 1924 to his death in 1955). Perhaps it is not surprising
that a man who wrote his major work from the heart of America
during the Great Depression should have been the exterminating
angel of Spearman's g. One could easily construct a moral fable in
the heroic mold: Thurstone, free from the blinding dogmas of
class bias, sees through the error of reification and hereditarian
assumptions to unmask g as logically fallacious, scientifically worth-
less, and morally ambiguous. But our complex world grants valid-
ity to few such tales, and this one is as false and empty as most in
its genre. Thurstone did undo g for some of the reasons cited
above, but not because he acknowledged the deeper conceptual
errors that had engendered it. In fact, Thurstone disliked g
because he felt that it was not real enough!
Thurstone did not doubt that factor analysis should seek, as its
primary objective, to identify real aspects of mind that could be
linked to definite causes. Cyril Burt named his major book The Fac-
tors of the Mind, Thurstone, who invented the geometrical depiction
of tests and factors as vectors (Figs. 6.6, 6.7), called his major work
(1935) The Vectors of Mind. "The object of factor analysis," Thur-
stone wrote (1935, p. 53), "is to discover the mental faculties."
Thurstone argued that Spearman and Burt's method of prin-
cipal components had failed to identify true vectors of mind
because it placed factor axes in the wrong geometrical positions.
