Report of the Consultative Committee on psychological tests of educable capacity and their possible use in the public system of education.

  • Great Britain. Board of Education. Consultative Committee.
Date:
1924
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Report of the Consultative Committee on psychological tests of educable capacity and their possible use in the public system of education. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    heredity and environment were themselves discovered to be rich in interest. And thus at last an independent branch of mental science ‘differential’? or ‘individual psychology,” was founded and named!. II.—PHYSICAL METHODS OF DIAGNOSIS. 2. In previous centuries, it is true, some crude and curious attempts had been made upon empirical lines to draw up brief rules for the estimation of individual capacity and character. Most of these efforts, however, relied upon external and physical signs, a tendency which to-day, though obsolescent, is not extinct. In the eighteenth century, Lavater, bringing together many traditional precepts, and adding several shrewd observations of his own, published a treatise on physiognomy; a man’s disposition and abilities were to be inferred, according to ingenious principles, from the features and expression of his face*. Thirty years later Gall propounded his system of phrenology, localising some twenty-six complex propensities in various areas or “ organs”’ of the brain, and deducing their develop- ment from the relative prominence of the overlying regions of the skull®. 3. Anatomical Stigmata. Of all such attempts at inferring psychical qualities from physical signs the most recent and the most widespread is the doctrine of anatomical stigmata. This doctrine received its most thorough-going application in the 1 The problems, principles and development of individual psychology may be traced (down to the date of publication) in W. Stern’s Differentielle Psychologie (1911), which contains a classified bibliography of over 1,500 references. 2 ‘The many teachers who are interested in the possibility of physiognomical diagnosis may be referred, not only to Lavater’s quaint Essay on Physiognomy destined to make man known and loved (1772), but also to Bell’s Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression (1806 ; 3rd ed. (posthumous) 1872), Darwin’s Expres- ston of the ‘Emotions of Man and Animals (2nd ed. 1889), Mantegazza’s Physiognomy and Expression (1904), and, for recent statistical studies, Child Study, June, 1919, ‘‘ Facial Expression as an index of Mentality,’ and Langfeld, ‘‘ Judgments of Emo- tions from Facial Expression.’”’ j. Abn, Psych. xiii., 172; cf. also Psych. Rev., xxv., 488.) 3 Gall and Spurzheim. Anatomie et Physiologie du Systéme Nerveux en Général et du Cerveau en Particulier avec des obser- vations sur la possibilité de veconnattre plusieurs dispositions intellectuelles et morales de Vhomme et des animaux par la configura- tion de leurs tétes. (1810.)