PAPERS ON PSYCHOLOGY AND EDUCATION 483 



have known no other language than English". In this 

 conclusion a number of the factors here discussed are 

 confused. A mental age without the vocabulary test is 

 still almost as largely a test of vocabulary knowledge. 

 However, one of the factors involved in a mental age 

 rating is that of the innate qualities of intelligence, in- 

 cluding thinking or reasoning ability. The child from a 

 cultured environment, with opportunities for learning 

 language expressions, who makes a certain low score may 

 not be at all comparable with the child from an illiterate 

 environment who makes the same score. Only an analy- 

 sis of the tests and the relation of this analysis to cer- 

 tain qualities of reaction not taken account of in the 

 standards set for scoring, and these in turn to environ- 

 mental factors, can be of help in the diagnosis of the 

 essential differences of these two types. 



Another factor of mental development which needs to 

 be taken into account at times is the effect of disuse of 

 the mental faculties in certain ways upon test reactions. 

 This problem is related especially to the negro child who 

 has attended school not at all or but very little. His life, 

 except for the farm work required of him, has been one 

 which has been organized with reference to impulse alone, 

 and not at all with reference to the set requirements of 

 school with its attendant mental disciplines. One is im- 

 pressed with the fact that these children seem to have 

 no consciousness of their inner mental processes or of 

 methods of their control. Their mental life is objective. 

 An example of this difference may be found in the pro- 

 cess of counting backward when compared with count- 

 ing a row of objects. The child of four or five counts 

 objects, but has not arrived at that state of mental de- 

 velopment which enables him to make the counting series 

 a matter of conscious control of certain mental processes 

 with no outside objective relation. It is possible that 

 this factor was involved in the cases of well-to-do farm- 

 ers and business men reported by Wallin, who made 

 scores which would technically justify a diagnosis of 

 feeblemindedness. The question presented is, Is this 

 ability of conscious subjective control of mental pro- 



