Francis Galton: Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development (1883)

Francis Galton²⁰⁹ was one of the most seminal, versatile, broad ranging intellects of all time. He explored and helped map a portion of the African interior, invented the weather map, developed the first workable system for classifying and identifying fingerprints, and pioneered the use of composite photography. Within the realm of psychology, he introduced among others the questionnaire method, statistical technique (including correlation and regression), nature/nurture terminology, and mental testing. He designed important apparatus, including the first animal maze and the Galton whistle, and was the first to study mental imagery, to explore the psychological implications of word associations, and to make use of twin studies to assess inheritability.

Although Wilhelm Wundt is usually credited with 'founding' scientific psychology,²¹⁰ in terms of its problems, methods, terminology, and even certain of its concepts, modern scientific psychology owes a far greater debt to Galton than to Wundt. This is true despite the fact that Galton was a gentleman scholar without an official university connection or regular students.²¹¹

Galton's psychological contributions are scattered over a number of books and articles. There is, however, one text that, more than any other, illustrates his extraordinary talent for creative work on the frontiers of the new field that was to become scientific psychology. This is Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development, published in 1883. Indeed, if the direction eventually taken by modern psychology is employed as the yardstick against which early work is to be measured, a case can be made that Galton's Inquiries was one of the greatest works of the period.

A list of some of the topics taken up in the Inquiries provides a sense of the books' exceptional range. These include composite portraiture, mental measurement techniques and apparatus, statistical methods, criminality, insanity, gregariousness, mental imagery, color associations, visions and hallucinations, nature/nurture, word associations, psychometric methods, the subconscious (or as Galton calls it, the 'antechamber' of consciousness), twin studies, the domestication of animals, the objective efficacy of prayer, selection and race, population, and eugenics.

What is not obvious from such a list is the richness of conceptualization and innovation in measurement technique that also mark much of the work. This is especially evident in three areas of research that have had great impact on psychology: mental measurement, mental imagery, and word associations.

Although we now think of intelligence in terms of higher mental functions such as problem solving, reasoning, and thinking, the prevailing view in Galton's era was that intelligence involved the active manipulation of ideas and that ideas derived in part at least from elementary sensations. It stood to reason, therefore, that individual differences in intelligence might be a direct reflection of individual differences in sensation. As Galton wrote in Inquiries: 'The only information that reaches us concerning outward events appears to pass through the avenue of our senses; and the more perceptive the senses are of difference, the larger is the field upon which our judgment and intelligence can act.^'212

Basing his work on this assumption, Galton began to devise apparatus that would enable him to measure sensory acuity.²¹³ Some of this apparatus, including a series of geometrically increasing test weights and the Galton whistle, together with the results of observations on sensory acuity in the blind and high frequency auditory perception in animals, was described in the Inquiries. Although we now know that individual differences in intelligence cannot be measured using tests assessing sensory acuity, Galton's work defined the problem of intelligence measurement and helped motivate others to seek a workable mental test.

Struck by descriptions of photographic memory that had appeared in the popular press, Galton had also decided to investigate individual differences in visual imagery. To do so, he devised a questionnaire asking respondents to visualize something definite (e.g., their breakfast tables) and then describe aspects of the brightness, clarity, and apparent location of the resultant visual images. He also inquired about ability to imagine things such as scenery, faces, numbers, dates, smells, and sounds.

Galton's results, published in the Inquiries, indicated an extraordinarily wide range of variability in mental imagery. Respondents ranged from those, at one end of the distribution, for whom visual imagery was indistinguishable from perception to those, at the other end, for whom visual imagery was non-existent, merely a figure of speech to describe a thought without visual content of any kind. This characterization of variability in mental imagery proved to be very influential and is still widely accepted.

Finally, one of the most innovative contributions of the Inquiries concerned Galton's self study of associations. Writing seventy-five stimulus words on sheets of paper, he presented them to himself one at a time in varying order and recorded the first ideas (sometimes only one, sometimes, three or four) that came to mind. After four repetitions of the experiment carried out at monthly intervals in various places, Galton subjected his data to statistical analysis.

Among the more important findings, Galton reported much less variety in associates than he had expected. Twenty-three percent of his stimulus words gave rise to exactly the same associates on all four trials, 21% to the same associates on three out of four trials, etc. He also found that more than a third of his associates derived from the period of his boyhood and youth, that these associates were especially likely to have occurred on all four trials, and that many of his associates were of an embarrassing nature. As he put it: 'They lay bare the foundations of a man's thoughts with curious distinctness, and exhibit his mental anatomy, with more vividness and truth than he would probably care to publish to the world.'²¹⁴

Galton even recognized the unconscious nature of this process: 'Perhaps the strongest of the impressions left by these experiments regards the multifariousness of the work done by the mind in a state of half-unconsciousness, and the valid reason they afford for believing in the existence of still deeper strata of mental operations, sunk wholly below the level of consciousness, which may account for such mental phenomena as cannot otherwise be explained.'²¹⁵ Here, in other words, as in so many other aspects of this remarkable work, Galton anticipated one of the most important directions that psychology would eventually take.

²⁰⁹ 1822-1911. For biographical information on Galton, see Galton, F. (1908). Memories of My Life. London: Methuen; Pearson, K. (1914-30). The Life, Letters and Labours of Francis Galton (3 vols. in 4). Cambridge: At the University Press; Forrest, D. W. (1974). Francis Galton: The Life and Work of a Victorian Genius. New York: Taplinger; and Fancher, R. E. (1979). Pioneers of Psychology (Chapter 7: The measurement of mind: Francis Galton and the psychology of individual differences). New York: Norton, pp. 250-94.

²¹⁰ Wundt established the first psychological laboratory to carry out original research, at Leipzig in 1879, and served as dissertation advisor to an entire generation of early experimentalists.

²¹¹ Although Galton had no "students" in the generally accepted sense of the term, he did have two "protgs," James McKeen Cattell and Karl Pearson, who continued aspects of his work; and both of these men were themselves enormously influential.

²¹² Galton, F. (1883). Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development. London: Macmillan, p. 27.

²¹³ In 1884, Galton brought this apparatus to the London International Health Exhibition, where he set up an anthropometric laboratory designed to measure various aspects of individuals' sensory and motoric skills.

²¹⁴ Galton (1883), op. cit., p. 202.

²¹⁵ Ibid., pp. 2023.

Extracted from Classics in Psychology, 1855–1914: Historical Essays
ISBN 1 85506 703 X
© Robert H. Wozniak, 1999