108 Life and Letters of Franc'ix GaUon 



ti-agetliea of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides; but it is certain that those 

 tragedies appealen to the primal passions of mankind, stronger and leas 

 hridliHl the closer rivilistnl man is to the primitive savaije ; and it is not 

 certain that nine-tenths of that audience did not prefer tlie hutibonery scenes 

 from "The Birds," just as the 5 7„ niore highly educated class of to-day 

 professes interest in problem plays but attends the 'revues.' 



Galton uses the Greeks as an illustration of a race two to three 'grades' 

 higher in intelligence than our own, and hence as an argument that what 

 man has been man can be. Its failui-e wtvs due, he holds, to lax morality. 

 But surely that want of moral stability indicated an inferiority in certani 

 aspects of the psychical side, a lack which permitted the shadow of the 

 doctrines of Paul to dim the brilliance of Greelc culture. Galton traces with 

 emphasis how tlie more intellectual rather than the physically stronger 

 nations have dominated the world, the survival of the titter meaning rather 

 the mentally than the physically fitter. In this evolution of fairly consist-ent 

 trend, the collapse of the Attic race appears as a most disturbing factor. 

 Galton distinctly felt this, but I Ijelieve he t(X)k too nmch on faith. Our 

 confidence in the superiority of the Greek intellect has been too largely 

 based on the judgment of men, the classical scholai-s, who have devoted a 

 disproportionately large period of their lives to the study of a single, if 

 undoubtedly important, phase of human culture. You cannot judge the 

 relative value of a human culture — especially if you approach it from a 

 literary side oidy — unless you have a fairly comprehensive knowledge of the 

 achievements of other cultures, and it is needful to study them not from one 

 but from many sides. Our judgment of Greek culture has, I venture to think, 

 not been mjule with a due appreciation of other cultures even up to our own ; 

 it has not been in the highest sense an anthropological judgment — we have 

 taken at second-hand the opinion of men whose lives have oeen devoted to 

 the .study of an isolated, if brilliant incident in the hundreds of thousands of 

 years of human evolution, and we have accepted their justifiable enthusiasm, 

 as if it must be the whole truth as seen from a more distant but wider point 

 of view. 



It is a strange illustration of human love of dogmas that Galton's appraisal 

 of the Greek intellect has, perhaps, been the most frenuently remembered 

 and cited passage of a Ixwk remarkable for its novel and reasoned opinions. 

 Of course its citation is generally associated with the suggestion that the 

 history of man is not one of advancing mental develoj)ment ; whereas Galton 

 used it to point out that races could by judicious organi.satioii raise their intel- 

 lectual grade. 



"And we too, the foremost labourers in creating this civilisation, are Ijeginning to show 

 omrselvcs incapable of keeping pace with our own work. The needs of centralisation, connnuni- 

 CAtion, and culture, call for more brains and mental stamina than the average of our race possess. 

 We are in crying want of a greater fund of ability in all stations of life ; for neither the classes 

 of statesmen, philosophers, artizans, nor labourers are up to the modern complexity of their 

 •everal professions. An extended civili.sation like ours comprises more interests than the ordinary 

 statesmen or philosophers of our present race are ai{ukble of dealing with, and it exacts more 

 intelligent work than our ordinary artizans and laljourers are capable of {xtrforming. Our race 

 is overweighted, and apiiears likely to be drudged into degeneracy by demands that exceed 



