C. F. Goodey
The Open University
Although this is an overview of sorts, it is not intended to be comprehensive. I limit
myself to natural accounts of human intellectual ability, or to those with a self-
acknowledged claim to science of some kind, and I highlight certain periods which
attach a clearer value to speed than others. Nor could I possibly interrogate every
passing apparition that claims the title of “intellectual ability”. I begin by look-
ing for a framework that might accommodate its historically contingent character.
There follows the chronological account, then a synchronic reworking of it. Finally,
I examine the challenges thus posed to conventional ways of periodizing the history
of psychology.
THE CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK
I have used the term “intellectual ability” (not forgetting “disability”) to travel across
periods partly because it is not so closely tied to current professional practice as
“intelligence” or “cognitive ability”. Even so, “intellectual ability” turns out to be a
tool for comparing unlike with unlike. Behavioural scientists with an operationalist
mind-set do not regard its philosophical incoherence as problematic.1 Its historical
instability should therefore be even less so: at best the problems may be merely his-
torical, and therefore an irrelevance. And although there have been many critics of
psychometric intelligence, they tend to leave intact the broader notions of intellectual
ability which subsume it. I use “intellectual ability” not only because it seems to
point to something more firmly rooted than “intelligence” but precisely because the
root is what I want to get at. The particular importance of speed to this critique will
be clear in due course.
First, some terminological continuities and discontinuities. The word that would
eventually become “ability” was, in Greek philosophy, dynamis. It had a metaphysical
significance which meant that it could easily be associated with psyche, the principle
of growth and movement in living beings.2 Dynamis thus belongs to the “nature” of
a being in this very broad sense; likewise, each natural constituent of a creature’s
life can have its own “ability” or potentiality. There is nevertheless a watertight cat-
egory boundary between ability and actuality. The ability as such is not the ability as
exercised.3 On the grounds that they belong to different genera, Aristotle explicitly
denies that the actuality of human “understanding” (episteme) can be classified as
an ability (dynamis).4 Galen maintains this metaphysical distinction in the particular
field of medicine. Here, dynamis is that which “rules” the body’s chief organs (liver,
heart, and head). Any deficiency is a deficiency in the actuality of matter; there can
be no weakness of dynamis, the more fundamental category.5
In scholastic and Renaissance medicine, ability (facultas, potentia) becomes a
“quality” or secondary characteristic of these bodily organs. Intellect takes over the
role previously allotted to psyche.6 “Ability” is both an aspect of this general intel-
lective soul and an indicator of the health of the organic soul in individual brains.
This makes possible an erosion of the category distinction between ability and actu-
ality, which is now preserved only in the philosophy of mind. Modern psychology
is conditional upon its abolition, and intellectual (dis)ability is coterminous with
performance. This general intelligence, g, was clearly viewed by its inventor Charles
Spearman as a personal possession.7 In a broader, quotidian sense his view is prob-
ably shared today not only by psychologists and psychometricians but by educated
people in general, even perhaps off-duty critical historians.
The terminological history, then, is broken as one might expect by semantic leaps.
What happens if we reverse the perspective and ask what place, if any, was occupied
in the past by the individualized intellectual abilities and disabilities which psychol-
ogy recognizes today?
Take the specific content of cognitive ability tests as an example. We can see
that they have undergone regular short-term modifications, in response to criticism
which most psychometricians have seen as an ideological intrusion, motivated by
egalitarianism. Developmental testing in particular has moved away from culturally
relative tasks towards more abstract ones claiming greater universality. But the very
act of responding to criticism is necessarily a collusion with the ideology deemed
to be behind the original critique. And the fact that modification takes place at all
belies, from the historian’s standpoint, any claim to exact-science status that might
be made for intellectual ability as such. History undermines not just the claim that
it is possible to measure intellectual ability but also the claim that ability itself has
the long-term stability of content which any exact science might expect from its
object of study.8 It is true that changes which look like leaps are often steps. When
Binet invented the world’s “first” intelligence test, at the request of a republican,
anti-clerical government in France which sought criteria for excluding intellectually
disabled children from its newly established state schools, his method was simply a
secular mutation of the catechism in the church schools which they replaced.9 The
catechism, with its IQ-like format of brief questions and answers, had long been the
framework within which literacy teaching and formal testing occurred in schools,
and its religious character meant that its content was subject, like the developmental
or cognitive ability test, to ideological modification in pursuit of universality.10 In
England, the secular curriculum in mass education came largely from the dissenting
academies, suggesting a similar process. Psychological testing of schoolchildren
was an organic development from these existing methods of everyday classroom
assessment.11 Intellectual (dis)ability is, in this functionalist sense, an adaptation
going as far back as the early church, with its fear of holy rites’ being polluted by
incompetent catechumens. However, this methodological continuity in testing and
segregation, with step changes from catechisms to CATs, has been accompanied by
a radical discontinuity in their actual content.
At the same time certain longer-term psychological discourses have persisted, with
a weightier claim to historical stability and indeed to scientific status that comes from
their tendency to define the place of the human species in natural history. The first of
these defining abilities is logical reasoning. A subjective aspect, a precise location in
the human intellect, was first ascribed to it in medieval philosophy, as we shall see
below, though it was Binet’s pupil Piaget who found a formal place for “mental logic”
in modern conceptualizations of intellectual ability.12 The second ability, now closely
identified with logic but with quite distinct historical origins, is abstract thought. The
abstraction of universals from particulars is first systematically described by Arab
philosophers such as Ibn Sina [Avicenna] and their scholastic descendants.13 Now
definitive of what it is to be human, but then a secondary characteristic indicating
differential social and religious status, abstraction has remained an extremely stable
and important ingredient of applied psychologies (cognitive, developmental, educa-
tional, clinical). The third long-term ability, which can be found even earlier, is the
storage and retrieval, or receipt and processing, of information. This is not quite of
the same order as the first two, since it has never been clear whether this was intel-
lectual ability per se, one particular ability, or a mere mechanism facilitating such
abilities. Classical authors use it in this last sense, the narrower instrumental one,
whereas today it often defines our humanity, in which sense it has begun to subsume
the other two. Modern psychology says all these abilities are permanent: they are
natural and constitute membership of the human species. Histories of psychology
based on this standpoint suggest, in addition, that the belief that this is the case is
itself permanent (and thus natural), at least from the Greeks onwards.14
Moving on from intellectual ability as such to concepts of speed, we might expect
these to have a stronger transtemporal identity. However, if we ask basic questions
— what is moving faster? what causes it? — discontinuities emerge. Classical and
Renaissance authors are scarcely interested in measuring anything, let alone intel-
lect. Today, speed is one of psychology’s main preoccupations. The measurable
speed of immaterial “mental processes” is tied to that of material entities. Hence,
for example, research into “the cortical glucose metabolic rate correlates of abstract
reasoning”.15 In Galenist medicine, mental processes (and the very phrase is anach-
ronistic) had been explained by “elements”, “humours” and “animal spirits” whose
material existence, albeit invisible, was beyond question: no mental process could
be anything other than an organic facet of the composition and movement of mate-
rial phenomena. The identification and measurement of separate mental processes,
however, has the Cartesian divide as its precondition: if machine-like bodies can be
measured, so too can minds. Now measuring metabolic rates in the brain is in princi-
ple an uncomplicated task, at least from the biochemist’s own particular perspective.
But asking what “abstract thought” is, even without sceptical intent, is a question of
greater complexity than asking what cortical glucose is. So does this mean that the
speed of such an intangible cannot be measured in a similarly uncomplicated way, by
the psychometrician? The claim that intellectual ability, considered separately from
time, is a suitable case for measurement has been conclusively refuted from within
psychometrics itself, by Michell.16 However, time itself has problems. Post-Kantian
psychology assumed as self-evident that mental processes exist in time and therefore
can be measured. Reaction times may bear this out experimentally. But the validity of
applying measurement to what I shall call ability time, the element of speed within
complex cognitive abilities, remains unquestioned.
Turning now to the relationship itself, between speed and intellectual ability, we
can see that there have always been at least three ways of conceptualizing it. Each
comes with inseparable cultural baggage: one way is better than another.
In the first model, the operational speed of intellectual ability is an absolute value:
fast is good. This way of conceiving the relationship, the particular focus of the present
article, is a minority strand in Renaissance and early modern psychology. It seems
to be a habit that got attached to the routine discussion of just a couple of ancient
texts. But these same Renaissance texts are precisely, if not exclusively, where we
can also find the lineaments of a specifically human “intellectual ability” anticipating
our own. In the modern, psychometric version of this model, a positive answer to the
question “Can the speed of intellectual abilities be measured?” has, buried within it,
a positive answer to the quite separate question, “Does quicker mean better?”. Only
occasionally do we find this tempered by the realization that speed and accuracy
may be in conflict with each other.
The second model, axiomatic in classical and Renaissance texts, is one of balance.
In the Hippocratic corpus, for example, a healthy intellect (phronesis) is a correct
“blend” between fire and water, the basic stuffs of the universe which constitute a
quasi-materialist psyche.17 Excess fire makes the intellect too quick (and thus inef-
fective), excess water too slow. Balance informs almost everything Galen and later
Galenists have to say about intellectual functions, the particular texts discussed below
being exceptions. In any case, the Galenists’ concern is not a detachable intellectual
ability but intellectual impairment as a sign in acute bodily diseases (the brain being
simply another organ of the body). Through to the eighteenth century European
doctors described brain health as a mean between mania (fast) and various forms
of melancholy (slow), phrenitis (fast) and lethargy (slow), or some similar pairing,
where “too much Stupid, or Stirr’d” seamlessly describes both external behaviour
and internal (material) mechanisms such as the animal spirits.18 The actual content
of the fast/slow template varies, because it does not exist in a cultural vacuum. Late
seventeenth-century norms of religious moderation, for example, identified it as
a mean between antinomian enthusiasm (fast, mad) and Romanist idolatry (slow,
idiotic). Nineteenth-century bureaucrats and administrators sought to distinguish
madness (fast) from idiotism (slow). In modern times balance survives, for example,
in the movement of neuronal signals, which may be hyper- or hypo-, between con-
trasting psychopathological conditions or within the same one. The mean, however,
is no longer a balance between different elemental qualities but quantitative, the
average value of a single parameter. And the clearly ethical subtext of the ancient
model has gone.
The third model is the retrograde of the first. Here slowness is an absolute value,
as in some non-Western accounts of understanding.19 There is also the Western tra-
dition of “learned ignorance”.20 Rational mental processes slow down to the point
of non-existence: knowledge is reached by evacuating them from the mind. Fast
and slow models meet at their respective extremes in a state of immediacy; in Arab
natural philosophy it is often difficult to know which of the two models is meant,
for precisely that reason.21 The fool who is void of rational thought and thus open
to divine truths, and the “prophet” who can intuit them without laboriously working
through syllogisms, are alike inasmuch as knowledge arrives in zero time. But the
two models, fast and slow, are not fully symmetrical. In my ability to slow down my
intellect until my mind is empty, a semantic distinction at least is clear: I have the
ability to empty my mind of all other abilities apart from that one. In the fast model,
the category distinction between ability and actual performance (the speed at which
ability operates) tends to disappear.
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