t the subject is led to expect, the test is less
a test of memory than of ability to comprehend the drift of an abstract
passage. A subject who fully grasps the meaning of the selection as it
is read is not likely to fail because of poor memory. Mere verbal memory
improves but little after the age of 14 or 15 years, as is shown by the
fact that our adults do little better than eighth-grade children in
repeating sentences of twenty-eight syllables. On the other hand, adult
intelligence is vastly superior in the comprehension and retention of a
logically presented group of abstract ideas.

There is nothing in which stupid persons cut a poorer figure than in
grappling with the abstract. Their thinking clings tenaciously to the
concrete; their concepts are vague or inaccurate; the interrelations
among their concepts are scanty in the extreme; and such poor mental
stores as they have are little available for ready use.

A few critics have objected to the use of tests demanding abstract
thinking, on the ground that abstract thought is a very special aspect
of intelligence and that facility in it depends almost entirely on
occupational habits and the accidents of education. Some have even gone
so far as to say that we are not justified, on the basis of any number
of such tests, in pronouncing a subject backward or defective. It is
supposed that a subject who has no capacity in the use of abstract ideas
may nevertheless have excellent intelligence "along other lines." In
such cases, it is said, we should not penalize the subject for his
failures in handling abstractions, but substitute, instead, tests
requiring motor cooerdination and the manipulation of things, tests in
which the supposedly dull child often succeeds fairly well.

From the psychological point of view, such a proposal is naively
unpsychological. It is in the very essence of the higher thought
processes to be conceptual and abstract. What the above proposal amounts
to is, that if the subject is not capable of the more complex and
strictly human type of thinking, we should ignore this fact and estimate
his intelligence entirely on the ability he displays to carry on mental
operations of a more simple and primitive kind. This would be like
asking the physician to ignore the diseased parts of his patient's body
and to base his diagnosis on an examination of the organs which are
sound!

The present test throws light in an interesting way on the integrity of
the c