62 Life and Letters of Francis Galtun 



of which lasted throup^h many years of a long life. But Galton, while he 

 maintikintHl a keen interest in these topics, at leitst till I'JOU, j^new less and 

 lees actively pi-otluctive. A new and wider aspect of the cosmos was opening 

 up for him, and evidence of an entirely different intellectnal influence be- 

 comes ammrent even in the 'sixties. His thoughts had l)egun to turn from 

 the stuay of physical environment to the study of the organic contents of 

 that envinitiiiient. or in a narrower sense from cosin()gra[)liy to hiology — 

 from geogruj)hy and meteorology to anthropology and psychology. There can 

 be little doubt that the incentive in these directions came from his growing 

 friendship with Charles Darwin, and the appearance of Herbert Spencer ana 

 Hii\lt\ ill the cinlc of his acquaiiit.iiiccs. 



V. SPIRITUALISM AND JOURNALISM 



I have attemptetl in this chapter to give a more or le.ss complete account 

 of those labours of Galt<:)n which deal with the physical and the mechanical 

 rather than the human side of his studies. In case some of my readers may 

 have found this account tedious, for not everyone can have understanding 

 and sympathy for the Catholicism of Galton 's pursuit of knowledge, I will 

 conclude this chapter with brief accounts of two other matters of more 

 general interest, which occupied a gootl deal of Galton's time in the period 

 under discussion; The man of science, who with the history of the world 

 before him finds it impossible to accept a primitive folk's account of man's 

 creation and its purpose, is tempted to consider whether the methods in 

 which he puts his trust for solvmg problems of the phenomenal universe 

 may not be adequate as instruments of research in the unknown vast of the 

 hyper-phenomenal '. Such a man of science, possibly owing to a lack of epi- 

 stemological study, forgets that his senses have been developed to grasp 

 physical phenomena, that his concepts are deductions from his sensuous 

 perceptions, and that neither his sensuous nor mental outfits are adapted for 

 sensating, perceiving and conceptualising the hyper-phenomenal. Some men 

 grasp this truth by the logic of reasoning, others by the logic of experi- 

 ence, others by a healthy instinctive appreciation, and some never grasp it 

 at all. To the first group we may, perhaps, say Huxley Ix^loiiged, to the 

 second Galton, to the third Darwin, and to the fourtii Crookes and Alfred 

 Russel Wallace. 



Galton at any rate thought in 1872 that that branch of the 'supernatural' 

 which we term spiritualism wjis at lesist worthy of inquiry. He endeavoured 

 in a series of lettera to interest Charles Darwin in his inquiries, and the 

 latter appears to have been willing to give the matter a trial, but I have not 

 been able to trace his letters; one at any rate went to Crookes, and another 

 to Home, but in a letter of Darwin's son George to Galton there is a report 

 of his father's incredulity as to the doings of Miss F.' It seems clear from 

 the letters that Home had no great inclination to exhibit his powers to 



' The good word 'supernatural' has become vulgarised until it signifies little more than 

 something of which the user has inadequate previous experience occurring as a phenomenon, i.e. 

 in the 'natural' world. * See above, p. 53. 



