The above passage is from The Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879), George Eliot’s final work. It is a collection of brief essays on diverse subjects, all purportedly from the pen of an embittered minor scholar. Theophrastus Such’s critique of the impulse to measure ‘intellectual power’ clearly springs in part from personal failure, but it is nonetheless striking: like several other of his ‘impressions’, it has an untimeliness that can disorient the twenty-first-century reader.Such writes as if he were living after the demise of the IQ test, rather than two decades before its rise; he dismisses the notion of a general, measurable intelligence as if it were a discredited fetish of the Enlightenment, rather than a brave new idea.Eliot’s implicit target is Galton, who first aired his theory of general, innate mental ability in 1865, and who treated social ‘eminence’ as a proxy measurement for it (Eliot’s choice of Galton’s keyword – ‘eminence’ – is surely barbed).As noted in the Introduction, Galton’s 1869 book Hereditary Genius was initially met with widespread scepticism, and it is unsurprising that Eliot failed to predict the cultural authority that his theory would come to command in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She clearly felt confident that her own conception of intelligence as a protean, immeasurable phenomenon, inextricable from emotion and from social context, was aligned with the direction of modern science.