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Now I propose to put aside entirely all that Mr. Terman's common observation and natural expectations teach him. I should like only to examine his argument that if home environment counted much its effect ought to become more and more marked as the child grew older.

It is difficult to see why Mr. Terman should expect this to happen. To the infant the home environment is the whole environment. When the child goes to school the influences of the home are merged in the larger environment of school and playground. Gradually the child's environment expands until it takes in a city, and the larger invisible environment of books and talk and movies and newspapers. Surely Mr. Terman is making a very strange assumption when he argues that as the child spends less and less time at home the influence of home environment ought to become more and more marked. His figures, showing that the correlation between social status and intelligence declines from .43 before eight years of age to .29 at twelve years of age, are hardly an argument for hereditary differences in the endowment of social classes. They are a rather strong argument on the contrary for the traditional American theory that the public school is an agency for equalizing the opportunities of the privileged and the unprivileged.

But Mr. Terman could by a shrewder use of his own data have made a better case. It was not necessary for him to use an argument which comes down to saying that the less contact the child has with the home the more influential the home ought to be. That is simply the gross logical fallacy of expecting increasing effects from a diminishing cause. Mr. Terman would have made a more interesting point if he had asked why the influence of social status on intelligence persists so long after the parents and the home have usually ceased to play a significant part in the child's intellectual development. Instead of being surprised that the correlation has declined from .43 at eight to .29 at twelve, he should have asked why there is any correlation left at twelve. That would have posed a question which the traditional eulogist of the little red schoolhouse could not answer offhand. If the question had been put that way, no one could dogmatically have denied that differences of heredity in social classes may be a contributing factor. But curiously, it is the mental tester himself who incidentally furnishes the most powerful defence of the orthodox belief that in the mass differences of ability are the result of education rather than of heredity.

The intelligence tester has found that the rate of mental growth declines as the child matures. It is faster in infancy than in adolescence, and the adult intelligence is supposed to be fully developed somewhere between sixteen and nineteen years of age. The growth of intelligence slows up gradually until it stops entirely. I do not know whether this is true or not, but the intelligence testers believe it. From this belief it follows that there is "a decreasing significance of a given amount of retardation in the upper years." (5) Bluet, in fact, suggested the rough rule that under ten years of age a retardation of two years usually means feeble-mindedness, while for older children feeblemindedness is not indicated unless there is a retardation of at least three years.

This being the case the earlier the influence the more potent it would be, the later the influence the less significant. The influences which bore upon , the child when his intelligence was making its greatest growth would leave a profounder impression than those which bore upon him when his growth was more nearly completed. Now in early childhood you have both the period of the greatest growth and the most inclusive and direct influence of the home environment. Is it surprising that the effects of superior and inferior environments persist, though in diminishing degree, as the child emerges from the home?

It is possible, of course, to deny that the early environment has any important influence on the growth of intelligence. Men like Stoddard and McDougall do deny it, and so does Mr. Terman. But on the basis of the mental tests they have no right to an opinion. Mr. Terman's observations begin at four years of age. He publishes no data on infancy and he is, therefore, generalizing about the hereditary factor after four years of immensely significant development have already taken place. On his own showing as to the high importance of the earlier years, he is hardly justified in ignoring them. He cannot simply lump together the net result of natural endowment and infantile education and ascribe it to the germplasm.

In doing just that he is obeying the will to believe, not the methods of science. How far he is carried may be judged from this instance which Mr. Terman cites (6) as showing the negligible influence of environment. He tested twenty children in an orphanage and found only three who were fully normal. "The orphanage in question," he then remarks, "is a reasonably good one and affords an environment which is about as stimulating to normal mental development as average home life among the middle classes." Think of it. Mr. Terman first discovers what a "normal mental development" is by testing children who have grown up in an adult environment of parents, aunts and uncles. He then applies this footrule to children who are growing up in the abnormal environment of an institution and finds that they are not normal. He then puts the blame for abnormality on the germplasm of the orphans.