Mathematics and Psychology

Psychology has been described as the science which tells us what everyone knows, in language that no one can understand. It has a fatal attraction for those whose paucity of ideas is concealed by an exuberance of rocablilary The leading authorities not only ignore each others’ conclusions, but even refuse to use words in the same sense. “When I use a word”, said Humpty Dumpty, “it means just what I choose it to mean-neither more nor less.” The discussion of such a point as the nature of intelligence, sufficiently difficult in itself, becomes hopeless when everyone attaches a different meaning to that term. It is the object of this article to show how, by the application of mathematical methods, Professor C. Spearman has found a way of escape from this jungle of verbal entanglements. As a preliminary we shall require some account of the idea of correlation .