Huarte de San Juan, Examen de ingenios para las ciencias (Madrid, 1668 printing of the author's revised text)
A physician's proposal, addressed to Philip II, that the state appoint deputies to test every child's aptitude and assign him the science he is fit for. Huarte grounds ability in the temperament of the brain, argues no one can master two arts at once, and asks for examiners of ingenio alongside the existing examiners of Latin. The same pages carry what the proposal costs: the child is to be made to study "por fuerça", and women's brains are declared incapable of much wisdom.
Why this wins its question: Huarte reaches English readers, when he reaches them at all, as a line in a history of psychology calling him a forerunner of aptitude testing, with no text behind it and usually no edition named. This object quotes the proposal from a digitised printing opened page by page — the law he asks Philip II to establish, the deputies who were to read each child's ingenio, the examiners of ingenio he wanted set beside the examiners of Latin, and the four questions he says nobody had yet answered — and, from the same sheets, the two things the forerunner story leaves out: that the child was to be made to study by force and denied the choice, and that the book's physiology is used to declare women's brains incapable of much wisdom. It also states which version of the text it is reading, and what it therefore cannot say.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The printing read here is a late reissue of the author's own second version, not the first setting. Its title page reads "EXAMEN DE INGENIOS PARA LAS CIENCIAS, EN EL QVAL EL LECTOR [hallará la] manera de su ingenio, para escoger la ciencia que mas ha de aprouechar: y la diferencia de habilidades que ay en los hombres, y el genero de letras, y artes que a cada vno responde en particular. COMPUESTO POR EL DOCTOR Iuan Huarte de San Iuan. Agora nueuamente e[men]dado por el mismo Autor, y añadidas m[uch]as cosas curiosas, y prouechosas… Con licencia en Madrid por Melchor Sanchez. Año de 1668. A costa de Gabriel de Leon, Mercader de Libros."
The same title page dedicates the book to a reader in the Americas: "DIRIGIDO AL CAPITAN DON IVAN de Valladares, vezino de la Ciudad de los Reyes del Peru", and the dedication that follows addresses him as a gentleman of Galicia resident in Lima, calling him a fine crucible in which men's qualities are assayed.
The proposal is made in the first proemio, headed "A LA MAGESTAD DEL REY DON FELIPE Nuestro Señor". So that craftsmen's work should have the perfection the republic needs, Huarte writes, "me pareció (Catolica Real Magestad) que se avia de establecer vna ley. Que el Carpintero no hiziesse obra tocante al oficio del labrador, ni el texedor, del Architecto, ni Iurisperito curasse, ni el Medico abogasse: sino que cada vno exercitasse solo aquel arte para la que tenia talento natural, y dexasse las demàs."
He asks for a standing public office to do the selecting: "avia de auer Diputados en la Republica, hombres de gran prudencia, y saber, que en la tierna edad descubriessen à cada vno su ingenio". The argument for it is that human ingenio is short and limited, fit for one thing and no more, and that no one can know two arts to perfection without failing in one; from joining art to nature, he tells the king, would follow in his realms "los mayores artifices del mundo, y las obras de mayor perfeccion".
The compulsion is in the sentence, not read into it. The deputies were to discover the boy's ingenio "haziendole estudiar por fuerça la ciencia que le convenia, y no dexarlo a su eleccion". Huarte wanted the same rule in the universities of the realm, which he notes already forbid a student to move to another faculty without finishing his course.
He specifies the examination itself as an addition to the entrance test that already existed. Beside the examiners who certified that a candidate was "en la lengua latina perito", he writes, "tuuieran tambien examinadores, para saber si el que quiere estudiar Dialectica, Philosophia, Medicina, Theologia, ò Leyes, tiene el ingenio que cada vna de estas ciencias ha menester". The harm of not doing it is named without softening: those who lacked the ingenio for theology "han destruido la Christiana Religion", those unfit for medicine "echan a perder la salud de los hombres", and jurisprudence lacks the perfection it might have had.
Huarte states his own novelty claim precisely, and it is a claim about a gap rather than about a discovery: the ancient philosophers found by experience that where nature has not disposed a man to learn, working at the rules of the art is wasted, "pero ninguno ha dicho con distinción, ni claridad, que naturaleza es la que haze al hombre habil para vna ciencia, y para otra incapaz", nor how many differences of ingenio there are in the human species, nor which arts answer to each, nor by what signs they may be known. Those four questions are the book's programme.
The physiology under the programme is a doctrine of the soul's dependence on the body: "qualquiera anima està sugeta al temperamento, y compostura del cuerpo, como forma substancial", and when God formed Adam and Eve, before filling them with wisdom, "les organizò el celebro, de tal manera, que la pudiessen recibir con suauidad". Ability, on this account, is a property of the organisation of the brain, and the science of the book is the science of reading it.
The same doctrine is used, on the same page, to rank women below men: Huarte concludes from Eve that less wisdom fell to her than to Adam, cites theologians who say the devil dared to deceive her and not the man for fear of his much wisdom, and states as a thing he will prove later that "la compostura natural que la muger tiene en el celebro, no es capaz de muchos ingenios, ni de mucha sabiduria". The book that asks for every person to be matched to their calling excludes half of them from most callings by construction, and that exclusion is argued from its own physiology rather than added to it.
Two limits are set by the copy itself. First, this is the emended text: the 1668 sheets announce that the author revised and enlarged it but say nothing about what was removed or why, and no full-view copy of the 1575 first setting was reachable from here, so nothing is asserted in this object about the differences between the two versions or about the book's censorship history. Second, only the title page, the dedication and the two proemios were read; the chapters that work out the doctrine of the temperaments and its application to the individual sciences are not summarised here.