Inquiries into human faculty and its developmentGalton, Francis
Science
Inquiries into human faculty and its development
Galton, Francis
Ability; Eugenics
It will be seen from the Table that out of the 48 earliest
associations no less than 12, or one quarter of them, occurred in
each of the four trials; of the 57 associations first formed in
manhood, 10, or about one-sixth of them, had a similar recurrence,
but as to the 19 other associations first formed in quite recent
times, not one of them occurred in the whole of the four trials.
Hence we may see the greater fixity of the earlier associations, and
might measurably determine the decrease of fixity as the date of
their first formation becomes less remote.
The largeness of the number 33 in the middle entry of the last
column but one, which disconcerts the run of the series, is wholly
due to a visual memory of places seen in manhood. I will not speak
about this now, as I shall have to refer to it farther on. Neglecting,
for the moment, this unique class of occurrences, it will be seen
that one-half of the associations date from the period of life
before leaving college; and it may easily be imagined that many of
these refer to common events in an English education. Nay further, on
looking through the list of all the associations it was easy to see
how they are pervaded by purely English ideas, and especially such
as are prevalent in that stratum of English society in which I was
born and bred, and have subsequently lived. In illustration of this,
I may mention an anecdote of a matter which greatly impressed me at
the time. I was staying in a country house with a very pleasant
party of young and old, including persons whose education and
versatility were certainly not below the social average. One evening
we played at a round game, which consisted in each of us drawing as
absurd a scrawl as he or she could, representing some historical
event; the pictures were then shuffled and passed successively from
hand to hand, every one writing down independently their
interpretation of the picture, as to what the historical event was
that the artist intended to depict by the scrawl. I was astonished
at the sameness of our ideas. Cases like Canute and the waves, the
Babes in the Tower, and the like, were drawn by two and even three
persons at the same time, quite independently of one another,
showing how narrowly we are bound by the fetters of our early
education. If the figures in the above Table may be accepted as
fairly correct for the world generally, it shows, still in a
measurable degree, the large effect of early education in fixing our
associations. It will of course be understood that I make no absurd
profession of being able by these very few experiments to lay down
statistical constants of universal application, but that my principal
object is to show that a large class of mental phenomena, that have
hitherto been too vague to lay hold of, admit of being caught by the
firm grip of genuine statistical inquiry. The results that I have
thus far given are hotch-pot results. It is necessary to sort the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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