June 2, 1887] 



NATURE 



lOI 



accompany it." I know very well what you mean. But only 

 ask yourself what mental step you have made, and you will see 

 you stand on words ; more or less perfect and appropriate, true ; 

 but nevertheless, always words. You blame me for having 

 ignored your labours, which were intended to show that the 

 minds of everyone are not like one's own. You know that I 

 took a great deal of interest in your researches. They repre- 

 sented to me what I should venture to call the dialectology 

 of thought. But dialects of thought do not affect the funda- 

 mental principles of thinking ; and the identity of language and 

 reason can hardly be treated as a matter of idiosyncrasy. 



You also blame me for not having read a recent book by 

 Monsieur Binet. Dear Mr. Galton, as I grow older I find it 

 the most difficult problem in the world, what new books we may 

 safely leave unread. Think. of the number of old books which it 

 is not safe to leave unread ; and yet, when I tell my friends that 

 in order to speak the lingua franca of philosophy, they ought 

 at least to read Kant, they shrug their shoulders, and say 

 they have no time, or, horribile dictu, that Kant is obso- 

 lete. I have, however, ordered Binet, and shall hereafter 

 quote him as an authority. But who is an authority in 

 these days of anarchy ? I quoted the two greatest authorities 

 in Germany and England in support of my statement that the 

 genealogical descent of man from any other known animal was 

 as yet unproven, and I am told by my reviewer in the Academy 

 that such statements "deserve to be passed over in respect- 

 ful silence." If such descent were proved, it would make no 

 difference whatever to the science of thought. Man would 

 remain to me what he always_has been, the perfect animal ; the 

 animal would remain the stunted man. But why waste our 

 thoughts on things that may be or may not be ? One fact 

 remains, animals have no language. If, then, man cannot think, or, 

 better, cannot reason, without language, I think we are right in 

 contending that animals do not reason as man reasons ; — though, 

 for all we know, they may be all the better for it. 

 Yours very truly, 



F. Max Muller. 



Francis Galton, Esq., F.R.S. 



42 Rutland Gate, S. W., May 18, 1887. 



Dear Professor, — Thank you much for your full letter. I 

 have not yet sent it on to Nature because it would have been 

 too late for this week's issue, and more especially because I 

 thought you might like to reserve your reply, not only until you 

 had seen my own answer to what you have said in it, but also 

 until others should have written, and possibly also until you had 

 looked at Binet, and some of the writers he quotes. So I 

 send you very briefly my answer, but the letter shall go to 

 Nature if you send me a post-card to send it. 



In my reply, or in any future amplification of what is already 

 written, I should emphasize what was said about fencing, &c., 

 " with the head," distinguishing it from intuitive actions (due, as 

 I and others hold, to inherited or personal habit). 



The inhibition of words in the cases mentioned was, I should 

 explain, 'analogous to this : — There are streets improvements in 

 progress hereabouts. I set myself to think, by mental picture 

 only, whether the pulling down of a certain tobacconist s shop 

 {i.e. its subtraction from the row of houses in which it stands) 

 would afford a good opening for a needed thoroughfare. Now, 

 on first perceiving the image, it was associated with a mental 

 perception of the smell of the shop. I inhibited that mental 

 smell because it had nothing to do with what I wanted to think 

 out. So words often arise in my own mind merely through asso- 

 ciation with what I am thinking about ; they are not the things 

 that my mind is dealing with ; they are superfluous and they are 

 embarrassments, so I inhibit them. 



I have not yet inquired, but will do so, whether deaf-mutes 

 who had never learnt words or any symbols for them, had ever 

 been taught dominoes, or possibly even chess. I myself cannot 

 conceive that the names — king, queen, Sec. — are of any help in 

 calculating a single move in advance. For the effect of many 

 moves I use them mentally to record the steps gained, but for 

 nothing else. I have reason to believe that not a few first-rate 

 chess-players calculate by their mental eye only. 



In speaking of modern mental literature, pray do not think me 

 so conceited as to refer to my own writings only. I value 

 modern above ancient literature on this subject, even if the 

 modern writers are far smaller men than the older ones, because 

 they have two engines of research which the others wanted : — 



(l) Inductive inquiry, ethnological and other. The older . 



authorities had no vivid conception of the different qualities of 

 men's minds. They thought that a careful examination of their 

 own minds sufficed for laying down laws that were generally 

 applicable to humanity. 



(2) They had no adequate notion of the importance of mental 

 pathology. When by a blow, or by a disease, or, as they now 

 say, by hypnotism, a whole province of mental faculties can be 

 abolished, and the working of what remains can be carefully 

 studied, it is now found that as good a clue to the anatomy of 

 the mind may be obtained as men who study mangled limbs, or 

 who systematically dissect, may obtain of the anatomy of the 

 body. 



I add nothing about the advantage to modem inquirers due to 

 their possession of Darwinian facts and theories, because we do 

 not rate them in the same way. 



Very truly yours, 



Francis Galton. 



Professor Max Midler. 



Oxford, May 19, 1887. 



My dear Mr. Galton, — If you think my letter worth pub- 

 lishing in Nature, I have no objection, though it contains 

 no more than what anybody may read in my " Science of 

 Thought." 



Nothing proves to my mind the dependence of thought on 

 language so much as the difficulty we have in making others 

 understand our thoughts by means of words. Take the instance 

 you mention of a shop being pulled down in your street, and 

 suggesting to you the desirability of opening a new street. 

 There are races, or, at all events, there have been, who had no 

 name or concept of shop. Still, if they saw your shop, they 

 would call it a house, a building, a cave, a hole, or, as you 

 suggest, a chamber of smells and horrors, but at all events a 

 thing. Now, all these are names. Even " thing " is a name. 

 Take away these names, and all definite thought goes ; take 

 away the name thing, and thought goes altogether. When I say 

 word, I do not mean flatus vocis, I always mean word as in- 

 separable from concept, thought-word or word-thought. 



It is quite possible that you may teach deaf-and-dumb people 

 dominoes ; but deaf-and-dumb people, left to themselves, do not 

 invent dominoes, and that makes a great difference. Even so 

 simple a game as dominoes, would be impossible without names 

 and their underlying concepts. Dominoes are not mere blocks 

 of wood ; they signify something. This becomes much clearer 

 in chess. You cannot move king, or queen, or knight as mere 

 dolls. In chess, each one of these figures can be moved accord- 

 ing to its name and concept only. Otherwise chess would be 

 a chaotic scramble, not an intelligent game. If you once see 

 what I mean by names, namely that by which a thing becomes 

 notum or known, I expect you will say, " Of course we all 

 admit that without a name we cannot really know anything." 



I wonder you do not see that in all my writings I have been 

 an evolutionist or Darwinian pur sang. What is langua;je but 

 a constant becoming ? What is thought but an Ewiges Werden ? 



Everything in language begins by a personal habit, and then 

 becomes inherited ; but what we students of language try to 

 discover is the first beginning of each personal habit, the origin 

 of every thought, and the origin of every word. For that pur- 

 pose ethnological researches are of the highest importance to us, 

 and you will find that Kant, the cleverest dissector of abstract 

 thought, was at the same time the most careful student of ethno- 

 logy, the most accurate observer of concrete thought in its endless 

 variety. With all my admiration for modern writers, I am in 

 this sense also a Darwinian that I prefer the rudimentary stages 

 of philosophic thought to its later developments, not to say its 

 decadence. I have learnt more from Plato than from Comte. But 

 I have ordered Binet all the same, and when I have read him I 

 shall tell you what I think of him. 



Yours very truly, 



F. Max Muller. 



A Use of Flowers by Birds. 



Some years ago you allowed me to describe in Nature the 

 pretty doings of a pair of goldfinches, who, having built their 

 nest on a bough overhanging a garden path, proceeded to make 

 it more like the sky above, and therefore less visible from below, 

 by hanging it round with wreaths of forget-me-nols. 



This year, in the same garden, some sparrows have shown 

 equal ingenuity. They began a nest in a Pyrus japonica against 



