260 Life and Lettent of Fraiwin Galton 



of reoogniaed Boperalition. It in not two centuries ago, long subsequent to the clays of Shake- 

 ■pawe Mid other great men wdose opinions 8till educate our own, that the HovcrtMgn of this 

 country w«« accustomed to hiy liands on tlie sick for their recovcrj", under tlio Ranction of a 

 regular Church service, which wim not oinitte<l from our prayerlKwks till the time of (ieorgo IT. 

 AVitche* were unanimously Ijelieved in and were regularly exorcised, and puninhiKl by law, up 

 to the lieginning of the last century. Ordeals and duels, most reasonable solutions of com- 

 plicated difticultie.s acconling to the popular theory of religion, were found untrustworthy in 

 practice. The minu-ulous power of relics and images, still so general in Southern Europe, is 

 •couted in England. The im|M>rtancc attribut4?d to dreams, the luin^ly extinct claims of 

 artrology, and auguries of good and evil lucks, and many other well-known products of super- 

 stition which are found to exist in every country, have ceased to be believed in by us. This is 

 the natural course of events, just as the Waters of Jealousy, and the Urim and Thummim of 

 the Mosaic I^w had l)ecome obsolete in the times of the later Jewish kings. The civilised 

 world has alrea<ij yielded an enormous amount of honest conviction to the inexorable require- 

 ments of solid fact; and it seems to me clear that all belief in the efficacy of prayer, in the 

 sense in which I have been considering it, must be yieldetl also. The evidence I have been 

 •ble to collect beai-s wholly and solely in that direction, and in the face of it the onus pro- 

 bandi must henceforth lie on the other side." (pp. 293-4.) 



The following section is termed Enthusiasm (pp. 294-98), and is con- 

 cerned not so much with "aixlent zeal" in any kina of" work, as with the 

 definition of the word in its proper range — "a belief or conceit of private 

 revelation ; the vain confidence or opinion of a person that he has special 

 divine communications from the Supreme Being or familiar intercoui-se with 

 him'." Galton remarks that to a large number of the ablest class of man- 

 kind the ideu of an indwelling divine Spirit, with which they can cf)nimune, 

 is so habitual and vivid as to be an axiomatic truth to them. This possi- 

 bility, he says, has been to him a real and almost lifelong subject of thought, 

 and has been a motive for many of the inquiries in his book, for were 

 this "enthusiasm" a reality and not a vain confidence, it is clear that those 

 races should be encouraged who are characterised by spiritual-mindedness, 

 for they would be far more worthy occupants of the earth than the gene- 

 rality of ourselves (p. 395). Those who have known Francis Galton, and 

 so realised his innate simplicity of mind, will appreciate as no others can 

 that there was no flippancy in his words. 



"There is no subject more worthy of itsverent but thorough investigation than the objective 

 evidence for or against the existence of inspiration from an unseen world, and none that 

 up to the present time has so tantalised the anxious and honest inquirer with uni)erfornied 

 promise of solution. The arguments scattered or hinted at throughout this book are negative 

 so far as they go, but it must be borne in mind that they would be scattered to the winds by 

 solid objective evidence on the other side, such as could be seriously entertaine<l by scientific 

 men desiring above all things to arrive at truth." (pp. 296-6.) 



Galton then cites the points in his Ijiqtdn'es winch l)ear on the axiomatic 

 assumption of inspiration, the visions of apparently objective character, the 

 fluency which is considered automatic unless it deals with devout subjects, the 

 prevalence of extreme forms of religious rapture among the hysterical and in- 

 sane, the axiomatic necessity, to those that i)erceive tliem, of their individual 

 nuralier forms or colour associations. Lastly, Galton claims — and here the 

 dogmatic theologians would not be at one with him— that "it appears to Ije 

 tacitly recognisetl by all that the absolute and final court of appeal is not 

 ' Oalton cites this definition as occurring in a "recent" dictionary. 



