LXI—"MEASURE YOUR MIND"
"Measure Your Mind" by M.R. Traube and Frank Parker Stockbridge, is apt to be a very discouraging book if you have any doubt at all about your own mental capacity. From a hasty glance through the various tests I figure it out that I would be classified in Group B, indicating "Low Average Ability," reserved usually for those just learning to speak the English language and preparing for a career of holding a spike while another man hits it. If they ever adopt the "menti-meter tests" on this journal I shall last just about forty-five minutes.
And the trouble is that each test starts off so easily. You begin to think that you are so good that no one has ever appreciated you. There is for instance, a series of twenty-four pictures (very badly drawn too, Mr. Frank Parker Stockbridge. You think you are so smart, picking flaws with people's intelligence. If I couldn't draw a better head than the one on page 131 I would throw up the whole business). At any rate, in each one of [pg 299]these pictures there is something wrong (wholly apart from the drawing). You are supposed to pick out the incongruous feature, and you have 180 seconds in which to tear the twenty-four pictures to pieces.
The first one is easy. The rabbit has one human ear. In the second one the woman's eye is in her hair. Pretty soft, you say to yourself. In the third the bird has three legs. It looks like a cinch. Following in quick succession come a man with his mouth in his forehead, a horse with cow's horns, a mouse with rabbit's ears, etc. You will have time for a handspring before your 180 seconds are up.
But then they get tricky. There is a post-card with a stamp upside down. Well, what's wrong with that? Certainly there is no affront to nature in a stamp upside down. Neither is there in a man's looking through the large end of a telescope if he wants to. You can't arbitrarily say at the top of the page, "Mark the thing that is wrong," and then have a picture of a house with one window larger than all the others and expect any one to agree with you that it is necessarily wrong. It may look queer, but so does the whole picture. You can't tell; the big window may open from a room that needs a big window. I am not going to stultify [pg 300]myself by making things wrong about which I know none of the facts. Who am I that I should condemn a man for looking through the large end of a telescope? Personally, I like to look through the large end of a telescope. It only shows the state of personal liberty in this country when a picture of a man looking at a ship through the large end of a telescope is held before the young and branded as "wrong."
Arguing these points with yourself takes up quite a bit of time and you get so out of patience with the man that made up the examination that you lose all heart in it.
Then come some pictures about which I am frankly in the dark. There is a Ford car with a rather funny-looking mud-guard, but who can pick out any one feature of a Ford and say that it is wrong? It may look wrong but I'll bet that the car in this picture as it stands could pass many a big car on a hill.
Then there is a boy holding a bat, and while his position isn't all that a coach could ask, the only radically wrong thing that I can detect about the picture is that he is evidently playing baseball in a clean white shirt with a necktie and a rather natty cap set perfectly straight on his head. It is true [pg 301]he has his right thumb laid along the edge of the bat, but maybe he likes to bunt that way. There is something in the picture that I don't get, I am afraid, just as there is in the picture of two men playing golf. One is about to putt. Aside from the fact that his putter seems just a trifle long, I should have to give up my guess and take my defeat like a man.
But I do refuse to concede anything on Picture No. 22. Here a baby is shown sitting on the floor. He appears to be about a year and a half old. Incidentally, he is a very plain baby. Strewn about him on the floor are the toys that he has been playing with. There are a ball, a rattle, a ring, a doll, a bell and a pair of roller-skates. Evidently, the candidate is supposed to be aghast at the roller-skates in the possession of such a small child.
The man who drew that picture had evidently never furnished playthings for a small child. I can imagine nothing that would delight a child of a year and a half more than a pair of roller-skates to chew and spin and hit himself in the face with. They could also be dropped on Daddy when Daddy was lying on the floor in an attempt to be sociable. Of all the toys arranged before the child, the roller-skates are the most logical. I suppose that the author of this test would insist on calling a picture [pg 302]wrong which showed a baby with a safety-razor in his hand or an overshoe on his head, and yet a photograph of the Public Library could not be more true to life.
That is my great trouble in taking tests and examinations of any kind. I always want to argue with the examiner, because the examiner is always so obviously wrong.[pg 303]