Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [135]
Galton’s interest in individual differences reflected the status of psychology in Britain in his time. Unlike the German universities, the British universities gave psychology no support and established no laboratories or departments of psychology; those who were interested in the field pursued it not as a subspecialty of physiology or of psychotherapy but according to their own interests and as a hobby. In a German university, Galton might well have been guided into physiological psychology; in Britain, he was free to ask what had made him a gifted person and how society could increase the number of people like himself.
Galton was born in Birmingham in 1822, well before Wundt and James and long before Freud, though his contributions to psychology, made in his middle and late middle years, were roughly contemporaneous with theirs.3 The precocious youngest of seven children in an intellectual middle-class family, he began to read at two and a half, and before five could read almost anything in English, knew a good deal of Latin and some French, and could solve most basic arithmetic problems. At six, when he went to a local school, he was scornful of the other boys because they had never heard of Marmion or the Iliad, and at seven he was reading Shakespeare and Pope for pleasure.
This promising start was blighted in boarding school, where rote learning was stressed and natural curiosity and independence were suppressed by floggings, sermons, and punitive homework assignments. Nor did he fare well when he went to Cambridge: feeling himself under pressure to excel, he was obsessed by examinations and by his academic standing relative to other students. In his third year, failing to rank at the very top of the list and seeing no possibility of becoming a Wrangler (an honors student in mathematics), he developed palpitations, dizziness, and an inability to concentrate. “A mill seemed to be working inside my head,” he recalled late in life. “I could not banish obsessing ideas; at times I could hardly read a book, and found it painful even to look at a printed page.” In the throes of breakdown, he left school and returned home. Only after deciding not to compete for an honors degree but to settle for a pass degree was he able to return and complete his studies. His obsession with tests and the ranking of intellectual ability, though, remained for the rest of his life.
After Cambridge, Galton completed medical training (which he had begun earlier), but when his father died, in 1844, leaving him well-to-do at twenty-two, he dropped the idea of practicing medicine and for several years lived the life of a gentleman, riding, shooting, attending parties, and traveling. However, the life of pleasure proved to be thin gruel for his restless mind, and in his late twenties, after consulting the Royal Geographical Society, he led a two-year expedition, at his own expense, to the interior of southwest Africa. He brought back a wealth of cartographic information on what had been a blank area of the map and at thirty-one was awarded the society’s gold medal and recognized as a leading explorer.
In that same year, 1853, he married and thenceforth limited his traveling, keeping up his interest in exploration by writing travel books and helping to plan major expeditions. But these activities could not long content him, and he turned to invention, producing a number of useful devices, among them a printing telegraph (forerunner of the teletype), an improved oil lamp, a device for picking locks, a rotary steam engine, and a periscope to enable him to see over taller people in crowded places.
By his forties, in need of a new challenge, he took up meteorology. It had occurred to him that he could collect simultaneous weather data from many places by means of the recently developed