The abilities of man : their nature and measurement / by C. Spearman.

  • Charles Spearman
Date:
1927
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The abilities of man : their nature and measurement / by C. Spearman. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    65/474 page 53
    constancy and trustworthiness. These again are just such qualities as might with fair show of reason be derived from superior mental persistency and therefore stability. Yet another prominent feature in the literature on types is the way in which the perseverating, secondarily function¬ ing, subjective, introverted, systematizing and excessively scrupulous person is portrayed as tending furthermore to¬ wards being melancholic. This view finds perhaps its sharpest expression in the writings of Gross, Heymans, Wiersma, and Jaensch, these being fundamentally inspired by the contrast between melancholia on the one hand and mania on the other. Even for this additional trait an ex¬ planation is easily enough forthcoming, if recourse be allowed to some current (but highly speculative) physiology ; for both the perseveration and the melancholy admit of being attributed to one and the same feature in the bodily metabolism, i.e. a predominance of dissimilation over assimilation, of breaking down over building up. The old difficulty, correlation. So far, the doctrine of types would seem to go as merrily as marriage bells. But there remains one very grave obstacle still to be encoun¬ tered ; it is no other than that which baffled both the doc¬ trines considered in the earlier chapters. Such a name as lag, perseveration, secondary function, or introversion only serves in the first place to bring together an indefinitely large class of mental tendencies. -It does not (pending further evidence) indicate that all the tendencies falling within this class will vary proportionately in any individual. Yet such correlation it is that we need, if the whole class of tendencies is to be treated as a single-behaviour unit and measured, or even described, for this individual by a single value or statement. As an illustration of this difficulty, take the report made by Muller that he himself, after experimenting with syllables, was plagued by their involuntary return to consciousness, whereas his wife—who had done quite similar experiments —had no such trouble. Now, nothing that we are told here
    No text description is available for this image
    No text description is available for this image
    No text description is available for this image