Over the past two centuries, the concept of human mental ability has undergone three important transformations: from a concept referring to a general faculty to one primarily referring to an individual attribute; from a focus on talents in the plural to one on intelligence in the singular; and from a position of relatively limited cultural significance to one of considerable weight within the United States and, to a lesser extent, within various European countries. These shifts in meaning and emphasis have rendered intelligence a tool available to government, business, and the “helping professions” for the purpose of sorting, classifying, diagnosing, and justifying. Starting in the early part of the twentieth century, determinations of degree of intelligence have been used as aids in the placement of army recruits, in determing the kind of schooling a child will receive, in the hiring of job applicants, and in the decision to allow a person legal immigration. This chapter explores how intelligence has come to play these various social roles. It focuses especially on how experts in the human sciences have both created new meanings for the concept of intelligence and developed technologies that could make those meanings available and useful to a wider public.

FROM TALENTS TO INTELLIGENCE

During much of the nineteenth century, two distinct languages flourished in scientific and intellectual circles to describe the operations of the human mind. Mental philosophers and others interested primarily in what would later be called the “normal” employed a language of character and talents, emphasizing the diversity of the mental faculties and the operation of the individual mind.