THE METHOD OP AGE GRADATION 93 



himself with the method, is an instance of the first 

 type. He complains that the tests have too seldom 

 a direct relation to practical intelligence, that they 

 principally concern such things as fluent use of lan- 

 guage, memory span, response to problem questions 

 that are quite foreign to real life, and also in part 

 attainments that are to a great degree dependent 

 on instruction and on influences of the home environ- 

 ment, and also work with abstract concepts some- 

 thing, he says, with which only philosophers have to 

 deal ( !), whereas they do not touch the ability to get 

 on with the activities of life; he wants more "doing 

 tests" introduced. Although Ayres' criticism is jus- 

 tified in many respects, yet he seems to have over- 

 looked the fundamental fact that intelligence is a 

 formal activity, and that of necessity it is operative 

 also in tasks whose content is not such as appears in 

 real life. Indeed, problems of this sort have the 

 methodological advantage that there is certainly no 

 uncontrollable influence of training in them. 



More important are the criticisms that proceed 

 from the empirical retrial of the tests. It has been 

 shown that, as a matter of fact, there is too inti- 

 mate dependence with school and environmental in- 

 fluences in many of the tests ; others could not be as- 

 signed positively to a specific age-level or showed 

 no clear differences in the performances of children 

 of unmistakably different intelligence. Again, objec- 

 tion is to be raised to those tests in which there is a 

 strong probability that the right answer may be a 

 matter of mere chance, like the tests: "Show me 

 your right hand, your left ear" and "Is it forenoon 

 or afternoon?" 



