250 Life and Lettrnt of Fraiicia Galton 



" ' Wo .siiii|ily l<wik U) the main issue — Do sick iKtrsons who pniy or nre prayi><l for, 

 recover on tlie avcnigo won' nipidly than others! ' 



•I have tlis<'<jvcrt><l hardly any instance in wliioh a nie<lical man of repute liius attributed 

 recoverj' t<» the inllueni-e of prayer.' 'The univei-sui! liahit of the si-ieiitilic world to ignore 

 the powfr of prayer is a very inijiortant fact.' 

 Is this a fact at allt Wliat evidence has Mr Galton to bring forward in Kupi>ort of tliis 

 outrageous assertion concerning the scientific world M" 



And again: 



"A nation, he informs us, ou>;ht not to hold tof^ther by purely gregarious instincts, 'a mob 

 of slaves clinging to one another thi-ough fear,' it should consi.st of 'vigorous self-reliant men, 

 knit to one another by innumerable til's,' and as he ought to have added, well versed in the 

 new dt)ctrincfi of evolution and det<'rmine<l to destroy their weaker brethren in obedience to 

 the great law of the survival of the fittest in the struggle for existence. Instead of wasting his 

 time ujx)n the records of the past and preparing for a future state, the new animal man is to 

 'awake to a fuller knowledge of his relatively gn-at jiosition, and begin to assume a deliberate 

 part in furthering the great work of evolution.' It is his 'rtdigious duty,' saj's Mr Gallon, to 

 do this 'tleliberately and systematically.' This is the privctical outcome of the new philasophy 

 for the now animal — the only religious duty he has to perform in the new Cosmos'." 



I have cited these passages — very characteristic of the ecclesiastical 

 feeling of that day — to show how the anti-Darwinian odium thcoloyicum was 

 within a year of Darwin's death transferred to his cousin, because, going farther 

 than Darwin, he had seen that if the doctrine of evolution through heredity 

 and natiual selection be true, then man ought to use this principle as any 

 other natural law to raise his kind. The thoughts and puiposes of the Deity, 

 Florence Nightingale held, are only to be discovered by the statistical study 

 of natural phenomena, and both Francis Galton and Florence Niglitingale 

 believed that application of the results of such study was the religious duty of 

 man. Are we any nearer to-day than the theological world wiis in 1883 to a 

 true appreciation of that position ? Are Dean Inge and Canon Barnes avei-age 

 representatives of the modern Church, or is their grade, as Galton would 

 have put it, somewhere about the "sulx>ctile"? We sadly fear that Father 

 Wasniann, Mr G. K. Chesterton, and Herr BumuUer would more nearly 

 reproduce the median theological mind of to-day. In 1 883 it was probably 

 Romanes alone who recogni.sed the fact that Galton wiis virtually marking 

 out the lin&s of what n)ay be appropriately called a new religion. 



"We have of late hiul so many manufactures of this kind that the market is somewhat 

 glutted, and therefore it is very doubtful how far this n<'w supply will meet with an a)>pnipriaU< 

 demand; but we can safely recommend Mr (Jalton's wares to all who deal in such conniioditius 

 as the best which have hitherto been turned out. They are the l>est because the materials of 

 their comjKwition are honesty and commonsense without admixture with folly or metaphor'." 



After this slight indication of the reception the publication of Galton's 

 work met with, 1 turn to its contents. The earlier pages discuss material 



' Yet surely Galton was merely stating a universal oxpeiience! What chance of publication 

 by a recognise*! scientific society would a memoir have if the author, describing the sequence 

 of any jihysiail or vital phenomena, adde<l: "but aiicording to my exjwrience the s(-<|uence is 

 niodifie<l in x' j ^ of ca.m^s by the power of jirayer"? We must go Iwck to Cuvier practically to 

 find breaks in the sequcnctw of nalui-al phenomena directly attributed in a "scientific" memoir 

 to tlw-ocratic intervention. 



' Th'-. (Jtuirdian, July 1, 1HS3, p. 1001. » Nature, Vol. .\xvni, p. 98, Mar. 31, 1883. 



