30 SOME RECENT MISINTERPRETATIONS OF THE 



that from a knowledge of Gallon's writings alone apart 

 from many intimate talks and much correspondence I may safely 

 assert that the very basis of his lift.-- work was the conception that 

 nature for man is more important than nurture, that this principle 

 can be established quantitatively, and that only when it is fully 

 K alix-d will humanity be able to raise itself in the scale of nn ntal 

 and physical fitness. Did I not feel certain that this was his funda- 

 mental doctrine, and that this was the new pathway he hewed for 

 human progress through the jungle of undemonstrated human opinion, 

 I could not hold the post I do. 



Gallon's "transvaluation of all values" was not a rapid or easy 

 one; he trod his own path as a solitary adventurer. He threw off 

 some of the fetters of ancient opinion when he came in his journeyings 

 of 1845-6 through Egypt, the Soudan and Syria into contact with 

 another faith, which he saw, or believed he saw, was more efficient 

 than his own in the control of conduct among oriental races. He 

 then grasped for the first time the relativity of religious belief, its 

 geographical, racial and environmental associations. But it was not 

 till the publication in 1859 f Charles Darwin's Origin of Species that 

 Gallon attained to a positive creed, and to that book he attributed 

 his own actual freedom 1 . Henceforth he was a pioneer, if he led but 

 a corps of guides and scouts. 



But Gallon differed essentially from Darwin, for his first idea was 

 the application of the doctrine of evolution to the conscious uplifting 

 of man by man himself. He desired above all things to accelerate by 

 his own work the ascent of man, and the first problems which fascinated 

 him were problems of human modifications due to environment, the 

 possibility of the inheritance of acquired characters, the continuity of 

 the germ plasm, the stirp theory, and generally all those problems 

 which are fundamental in their bearing on the relative influence of 

 nature and nurture. I well remember a conversation I had with him 

 shortly before his death on this very subject. We were discussing 

 the very bitter feeling that the papers by the staff of the Eugenics 



1 "I always think of you in the same way as converts from barbarism think of 

 the teacher who first relieved them from the intolerable burden of their superstition. 

 I used to be wretched under the weight of the old fashioned 'arguments from design/ 

 of which I felt, though I was unable to prove to myself, the worthlessness. Conse- 

 quently the appearance of your Origin of Species formed a real crisis in my life ; your 

 book drove away the constraint of my old superstition, as if it had been a nightmare, 

 and was the first to give me freedom of thought." Letter of Francis Galton to 

 Charles Darwin, Dec. 24, 1869. 



