VARIOUS USES OF FACTORS        55
work at a secondary school of the usual type ; he might
reduce these to a short list of non-overlapping c funda-
mental traits' or c factors' —memory, perhaps, and reason-
ing, verbal fluency, numerical accuracy, and no doubt
certain moral and social characteristics that scarcely lend
themselves to testing ; he might then compile a number of
tests to measure the more important intellectual factors in
due proportion. Such a set of tests, or something very like
it, is in fact comprised in the Binet-Simon scale and in many
published booklets for the testing of ' educable capacity.'
These compilations, however, were for the most part drawn
up quite empirically. In actual practice I doubt whether
any psychologist would first undertake a double factoriza-
tion of the scholarship examination, on the one hand, and
then of the Binet tests, on the other, and base his predictions
on the agreement between the two sets of factors. He
correlates performance at the Binet tests or at the group
industrial usefulness, solely on the ground of sucli indirect statistical in-
ferences. Similarly, the writers of the two papers quoted below protest
that the " interposed factors " introduce dubious and unnecessary com-
plications into the educationist's deductions. Dr. Reed, for example, refers
to my early Z.C.C. Memorandum on Junior County Scholarships, and asks:
" Does not Dr. Hurt's whole argument break down if, with some psycho-
logists, we doubt the very existence of special faculties or factors ? " He
advanced similar objections against the introduction of * vocational guidance
in the schools,' contending that ' vocational psychologists seem to be faculty
psychologists without knowing it.' In reply I should like to draw my critic's
attention to the e Statistical Note' appended to the Report he quotes: he
will there find a formal algebraic proof that " statistical inferences, mediated
by hypothetical factors, cannot be more safe, and usually are less safe, than the
determination of direct correlations" ; for this reason, in the body of the
report, " inferences with factors as middle terms " were employed only
where no data existed for direct deduction. As for vocational guidance, I
have always admitted that " vocational psychologists are perhaps too ready to
assume what are variously called, according to the fashion of the moment,
1 faculties,' ' specific capacities,' or c factors,' " and have argued for a direct
empirical procedure wherever possible rather than an indirect or analytic
(* Principles of Vocational Guidance,' Brit. J. PsycM., XIV, 1924, p. 351).
Finally, may I say that Dr. Hill's article does not give a fair reflection of the
factorist's views ? Thus his main conclusion I myself should willingly
accept. Indeed, the peroration of his article (last four lines of p. 270) is
almost a verbatim reproduction, metaphor and all, of the concluding
sentences of my own Report (reprinted in The Subnormal Mind, p. 134).