Galton’s Conception of Race in Historical Perspective

Abstract

Like many of his contemporaries, Galton used the word race in a variety of senses. First of all there was a literary sense, as when he wrote that ‘judges are by no means an unfertile race’, that ‘poets are a sensuous, erotic race, exceedingly irregular in their way of life’, and that there was ‘no reason to believe that Divines are an exceptionally favoured race’ (1869, pp. 131, 225, 274). Secondly there are passages in which he appears to use the word in a taxonomie sense. It looks as if he is using race as a synonym for genus when he speaks of ‘the human race’; as a synonym for species when he writes that ‘the American Indian race is divided into many varieties’; and possibly as a synonym for variety when he refers to the race of the Irish Celt, or to ‘our race’ when he seems to mean the English. However he draws no distinction between a race and a breed and can refer to ‘a highly bred human race’ (1865, pp. 319–20, 1869, p. xxiv). Thirdly, and in his later writing rather than in that of the 1860s, there is a sense in which race is used apparently as a synonym for heredity. What otherwise is one to make of the passages in the 1892 preface to Hereditary Genius in which he writes about ‘the question of race’, ‘the influence of race’ and the ‘importance to be attached to race’, going on to regret scientific ignorance of the ‘respective ranges of the natural and acquired faculties in different races’? Since this is an elaboration of ‘the importance to be attached to race’, it seems as if the third and second senses feature in successive sentences.