Vision is tested for its distance ability. The farther off one can distinguish objects or marks, the higher one’s rating. Civilized man reads—normally—at 14 inches. He works with sharp knives, with machines that are exact; he is surrounded by things made with such exact machines; he handles thin paper and filmy fabrics. His women sew and embroider with the sharpest of needles, the finest of thread. Everything about us tends toward close accuracy and away from the haziness of distant observation. The savage, on the other hand, the half-civilized person even, inspects the horizon, watches for game or its dim tracks, tries to peer to the bottom of streams for fish. He does not read, his needles are blunt, his thread is cord, his carving without precision even though decorative, the lines he makes are free-hand and far-apart. He is trained, as it were, for the usual vision tests. If the psychologist reversed his experiment and sought the degree of power to see fine differences at close range, it is possible that the savage might prove inferior because untrained by his experience. Such tests seem not to have been made. Until they are, and again show uncivilized man superior, there is no real proof that innate racial differences of serious moment exist.
The whole act of vision in fact involves more than we ordinarily think. After all, seeing is done with the mind as well as with the eye. There is the retinal image, but there is also the interpretation of this image. A sailor descries the distant shore, whereas the landsman sees only a haze on the horizon. To the city dweller a horse and a cow a mile off are indistinguishable. Not so to the rancher. There is something almost imperceptible about the profile of the feeding end of the animal, about its movement, that promptly and surely classes it. At still longer ranges, where the individual animals have wholly faded from sight, a herd of cattle may perhaps be told from one of horses, by the plainsman, through the different clouds of dust which they kick up, or the rate of motion of the cloud. An hour later when the herd is reached and proves to be as said, the astonished traveler from the metropolis is likely to credit his guide’s eyes with an intrinsic power greater than his field glasses—forgetting the influence of experience and training.
In keenness of hearing, on the contrary, one should expect the civilized white to come out ahead, as in fact he does; not because he is Caucasian but because he is civilized and because the instruments of experimentation, be they tuning forks or ticking watches or balls dropped on metal plates, are implements of civilization. Make the test the howl of a distant wolf, or the snapping of a twig as the boughs bend in the wind, and the college student’s hearing might prove duller than that of the Indian or Ainu. There is a story of a woodsman on a busy thoroughfare, amid the roar of traffic and multifarious noise of a great city, hearing a cricket chirp, which was actually discovered in a near-by open cellar. Extolled for his miraculous keenness of audition, the man in the fur cap dropped a small coin on the pavement: at the clink, passers-by across the street stopped and looked around.
As to the pain sense, an introspective, interpretative element necessarily enters into experiments. What constitutes pain? When the trial becomes disagreeable? When it hurts? When it is excruciating? The savage may physiologically feel with his nerve ends precisely as we do. But being reared to a life of chronic slight discomforts, he is likely to think nothing of the sensation until it hurts sharply; whereas we signal as soon as we are sure that the experience is becoming perceptibly unpleasant.
In short, until there shall have been more numerous, balanced, and searching tests made, it must be considered that nothing positive has been established as to the respective sensory faculties of the several human races. The experiments performed are tests not so much of race as of the average experience and habits of groups of different culture.
42. Intelligence Tests
If this is true as regards the sense faculties, it might be expected to hold to a greater degree of those higher mental faculties which we call intelligence; and such is the case. Intelligence tests have been gradually evolved and improved, the best known being the Binet-Simon series. These are arranged to determine the mental age of the subject. Their most important function accordingly has been the detection of defective adults or backward children. During the World War, psychological examinations were introduced on a scale unheard of before. The purpose of these examinations was to assign men to the tasks best commensurate with their true abilities; especially to prevent the unfit from being entrusted with responsibility under which they would break down and bring failure on larger undertakings. Men subject to dizziness were to be kept from flying; those unable to understand orders, out of active line service. The tests throughout were practical. They tried to decide whether a given man was fit or unfit. They did not pretend to go into the causes of his fitness or unfitness. This is an important point. Whatever illumination the army intelligence tests shed on the problem of race intelligence is therefore indirect. Different racial or national groups represented in the examinations attain different capacity ratings, but there is nothing in the results themselves to show whether they are due to racial or environmental factors. Evidence on this point, if it can be derived at all from the tests, has to be “analyzed out.”
In general, examinees in the United States were rated by being assigned, on the basis of their scores, to grades which were lettered from A to E, with plus and minus subgrades. The most comprehensive presentation of results is to express the percentage of individuals in each group that made the middle grade C, better than C, and worse than C. On this basis we find:
| Group and Number of Individuals | Below C | C | Above C |
|---|---|---|---|
| Englishmen, 411 | 9 | 71 | 20 |
| White draft generally, 93,973 | 24 | 64 | 12 |
| Italians, 4,007 | 63 | 36 | 1 |
| Poles, 382 | 70 | 30 | (.5) |
| Negroes generally, 18,891 | 79 | 20 | 1 |
These figures at face value seem to show deep group differences in intelligence; and these face values have been widely accepted. The reason is that they flatter national and race egotism. To be sure, the Englishmen in the American draft make a better showing than the drafted men at large; but this has been complacently explained by saying that the English represent in comparative purity the Anglo-Saxon or Nordic stock which is also the dominant strain among Americans, but which has been somewhat contaminated in their case by the immigration of Latins and Slavs, who rate much lower, as shown by the Italians and Poles tested. Lowest of all, as might be expected, is the Negro. So runs the superficial but satisfying interpretation of the figures—satisfying if one happens to be of North European ancestry.