90 Life and Letters of Francis Gallon 



Thus, I think, he sympathises with the Victorian scientific criticism of 

 religion as defined by Kant and Gruppe, but he desires to see a religion in 

 Mill's sense built up to replace the formal religions. He holds that : 



"the destructive task is a necessary though painful preliminary, because until obstructions are 

 thoroughly cleared away, and the view is quite open, the character and exigencies of the vacant 

 space cannot be rightly understood, nor can a judgment be formed as to how far and in what way 

 rebuilding is needful. It is also pardonable enough that the work of destruction should be over 

 zealously indulged in by some who have long chafed under what they consider to be the irra- 

 tionality of one or other of the many conflicting creeds. 



"All earnest inquirers recognize the awful mysteries that surround human life, but they are 

 angered by theosophies that attempt to solve part of the problems by means of hypotheses that 

 are improbable in themselves, while they introduce gratuitous complications. For instance if we 

 strip from Milton's fable and from the dramatis personae of Paradise Lost all the glamour thrown 

 over them by his superb diction, a grotesquely absurd framework remains behind. His high 

 undertaking to justify the ways of God to man becomes ludicrously inadequate. The same spirit 

 under another guise that moved our ancestors in the days of the Reformation to shatter the 

 authority of Rome, is abroad again but is now directed against the dogmas of the time. The 

 spirit is that of a determination to face and view the grand and terrible problem of life in the 

 clear light of day, and not through artificial mediums that partly hide, partly colour and partly 

 refract it." (pp. 758-9.) 



Galton, while desiring a reformation of religion in the sense of Erasmus, 

 was perfectly conscious that the bulk of our people, who may be weary of 

 the old superstitions, are in such a backward state that they will be more 

 ready to accept new superstitions* than to seek a rational basis for a national 

 religion. Granted the discredit of the long accepted ultra-rational faith, 

 granted that a nation "be suffering in a still more acute form than our 

 own from poverty, toil, and an unduly large contingent of the weakly, the 

 inefficient, and the born-criminal classes, and that the existing social 

 arrangements are acknowledged to be failures," what will follow? Galton 

 held that socialistic experiments on various scales and in various ways will 

 be largely tried and will be admitted to be ineffective owing to the moral 

 and intellectual incompetence of the average citizen^. 



"There would then be a widely-felt sense of despair; there would be ominous signs of 

 approaching anarchy and of ruin impending over the nation, while a bitter cry would arise for 

 light and leading. A state of things like this is by no means impossible in the near future, even 

 here in England, and therefore, it deserves some consideration as being something more than a 

 merely academic question. In the imagined event, preachers of all sorts of nostrums would 

 abound, mostly fanatics who could see only one side of a question, and on that account they 

 would be all the more earnest in their opinions and persuasive to the multitude." (p. 759.) 



Thus Galton uses the probable ineffectiveness of socialistic experiments 

 as an argument in favour of the acceptance of eugenics as a social and at 



* Salvationism, Spiritualism, Theosophy, Christian Science, to say nothing of the resurrection 

 of the urge, dating from the Neolithic period, to the sacrifice of the people's deity or its totem, 

 and a communal feast on the remains. 



t I do not remember any other reference of Galton's to Socialism. The present passage indi- 

 cates that it was not in its ideas antipathetic to him, but that he conceived it would fail owing 

 to the moral and mental feebleness of the average citizen. The present experiments in Russia 

 and China will serve to test his opinions in the eyes of sympathetic onlookers. Their failure 

 would convince men according to Galton that racial progress in the eugenic direction must 

 precede or accompany social reconstruction. 



