Foreivord 3 



he was eighty. How then shall one, who knew him — however inti- 

 mately- — only in the last years of life portray the mental evolution 

 which was proceeding stage by stage for fifty years before friendship 

 began ? A very slight introspection tells each one of us how complex 

 was the scaffolding by which the structure of our own intellectual 

 opinions has been reared ; how many attempts, how many failures, 

 how many moulding men and things have contributed their part ! 

 How little of this do even our life-long intimates know, how little 

 finds its expression in diaries, letters or the printed word ! Could 

 such things enable one to understand the whole nature of a man, the 

 present writer, owing to the extreme kindness of the relatives and 

 friends of Francis Galton, would have small need to lament the failure 

 of his task. But the sense of failure has grown as these pages took 

 form. The man of strength and character, who knew what he wished 

 to accomplish and carried it through ; the leader who inspired us is 

 there — even as we read him in Furse's portrait — but the evolution 

 of the man — the story of the mental growth, which should be the aim 

 of every genuine biographei- — is seen but darkly and from afar ; it is 

 but faintly shadowed in the written word and screened to dimness by 

 those barriers of which the author has spoken. For reasons such as 

 these he can only hope to place before his readers some phases of Francis 

 Galton's life and some aspects of his scientific work. The real story of 

 that life, the steep ascents, leading to wider horizons, won as all victorious 

 minds have won them by struggle with earlier opinions and with a less 

 developed self, the arduous final acceptance of new ideas as triumphant 

 certitudes ; these things the writer can but trace as they appear in- 

 distinctly to him ; others will and must interpret in their own way, 

 and will doubtless reach different view-points. 



Galton of all men would not have desired this biography to be a 

 panegyric. To be of service it must be, as he would have wished it, 

 the life of a real man, of a man who makes mistakes, who has wandered 

 from the path, or stumbled, who has striven after the wholly dlusory, 

 or towards things beyond his individual i-each. The difference between 

 the ordinary mortal and the one of subtler mind is not that the former 

 strays, and the latter does not, but that the deviations in the one case 

 leave no permanent impress, while in the other they are coined into a 

 golden experience, which forms the wisdom marking the riper life. 

 Hundreds of men have failed to reach distinction or gain immediate 



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