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58   Life and Letters of Francis Galton

was perhaps the most respectable object a man can have in life, and this desire to increase knowledge amounts in some of our greatest men to the equivalent of Spinoza's Amor dei intellectualis ; in the case of Francis Galton it was rather an " intellectual love of man " which was the motive force in his work. Charles Darwin collected facts bearing on selection without any theory and on a .wholesale scale. He made his systematic enquiry and then searched for a law'. This Baconian method was not Francis Galton's. He had formed his problem, and he devised his experiments or recorded his observations so as to give a definite answer yes or no to his questions. It was rather the economy of a business instinct. The inspiration came first, but he did not put it down as possibly his grandfather Erasmus would have done without array of reasoned and well-marshalled facts. He made just the limited observations which confirmed or refuted it, and in almost all Galton's work we see observations collected to answer an individual and relatively closely defined issue. We cannot fit diverse types of mind into rigid categories, but roughly we may say that Erasmus Darwin, Charles Darwin, and Francis Galton all possessed in a high degree scientific imagination. Erasmus put down his inspirations without due demonstration or effective self-criticism. Charles Darwin collected his facts before he allowed his imagination to play on them, he followed his inspirations by self-criticism and due demonstration. Francis Galton used his imagination to find his problem, then narrowed it to a small issue, and tested its truth by experiment and observation before publication. To a certain extent the difference in method is that of Bacon and Newton-possibly that of the biological and mathematical temperament. Something of the difference in Charles Darwin and Francis Galton was hereditary, and marked the concentrated business instinct which Galton inherited from Farmers and Freames, Braines and Barclays, as well as his own name-stock. It was that business instinct applied in science. Perhaps also the' danger of "mental fag," a heritage which we are inclined to think came from the Farmers-was influential in guiding Galton in the matter. He was never a great collector or a mighty reader as his cousin Charles Darwin undoubtedly was.

In the roving lust again we see Cameron, Barclay and Colyear ancestry rather than Darwin, and, as already hinted, this influenced

' See Life and Letters, Vol. i, p. 83.


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