ABSTRACT
The Reformation’s insistence on the privacy of faith and its exposure of Christianity’s public, worldly failures brought the problem of intellectual curiosity to the forefront of discussion. “Wit’s pilgrimage” – the satirical title of John Davies of Hereford’s 1605 poem attacking just such tendencies – now became the central preoccupation, in all seriousness. This turned reasoning into something temporal, a series of moves from a to b to c, etc., out of which came what modern psychology calls developmental (dis)ability: “growth of grace” or “growth in grace,” to use the terms of the era. In the “exercise” of grace we find one of the deep roots of the modern psychology of intelligence. Much of the early state education curriculum in England has its origins in models provided by the Dissenting Academies, which provided men such as Watts and Priestley with their schooling.
