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CHAPTER XI

PSYCHOLOGICAL INVESTIGATIONS

"While recognising the awful mystery of conscious existence and the inscrutable background of evolution, we find that as the foremost outcome of many and long birth-throes, intelligent and kindly man finds himself in being. He knows how petty he is, but he also perceives that he stands here on this particular earth, at this particular time, as the heir of untold ages and in the van of circumstance. He ought therefore, I think, to be less diffident than he is usually instructed to be, and to rise to the conception that he has a considerable function to perform in the order of events, and that his exertions are needed. It seems to me that he should look upon himself more as a freeman, with power of shaping the course of future humanity, and that he should look upon himself less as the subject of a despotic government, in which case it would be his chief merit to depend wholly upon what had been regulated for him, and to render abject obedience."

FRANCIS GALTON, Inquiries into Human Faculty, 1883.

Introductory. We have marked the transition of Galton's mind from interest in geographical to interest in anthropological studies. But once deeply interested in physical anthropology, he very soon grasped that the superficial anthropometric characters were no adequate index to the real man himself. Probably to the day of his death he would have been unwilling to admit that the size of a man's head had no real prognostic value as a measure of his intelligence. But he gradually came to the conclusion that the static anthropometric superficial characters afforded little index to a man's mentality, and from the middle of the seventies onwards Galton's thoughts turned more and more to the psychometric side of anthropology. He thus grew to have less and less faith in any superficial or bodily measurements being of psychological importance. He did not, I think, consider whether the dynamic anthropometric characters were more closely related than the statical to mental efficiency; indeed the measurement of the correlation between the physiological functioning of the various organs of the body and its psychical activities is a problem of quite recent days; and we stand only at its threshold as far as scientific-by which I understand quantitative-solution goes. Galton was, however, among the first, if not absolutely the first, in this country to insist that anthropometry cannot make real progress without psychometric observation and experiment. He was the first to insist upon the importance of experimental psychology-and he approached the subject from the standpoint of the anthropologist. It is perfectly true that Germans were working at experimental psychology at least as early as Galton. Wundt reversed Galton's process and passed with

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