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STATISTICAL INQUIRIES INTO THE EFFICACY OF PRAYER, |
Index | |||
On the efficacy of prayer | |||
On visualising a million | |||
Outline of Galton’s life and studies | |||
Fingerprints | Also
by Francis Galton: Kantsaywhere |
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Travels and exploration | |||
Eugenics | |||
Bibliography | |||
Endnotes |
STATISTICAL
INQUIRIES INTO |
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FROM |
THE
FORTNIGHTLY REVIEW. |
{p.125}AN eminent authority has recently published a challenge to test the efficacy of prayer by actual experiment. I have been induced, through reading this, to prepare the following memoir for publication nearly the whole of which I wrote and laid by many years ago, after completing a large collection of data, which I had undertaken for the satisfaction of my own conscience. The efficacy of prayer seems to me a simple, as it is a perfectly appropriate and legitimate subject of scientific inquiry. Whether prayer is efficacious or not, in any given sense, is a matter of fact on which each man must form an opinion for himself. His decision will lie based upon data more or less justly handled, according to his education and habits. An unscientific reasoner will be guided by a confused recollection of crude experience. A scientific reasoner will scrutinise each separate experience before he admits it as evidence, and will compare all the cases he has selected on a methodical system. The doctrine commonly preached by the clergy is well expressed in the most recent, and by far the most temperate and learned of theological encyclopedias, namely, Smith’s Dictionary of the Bible. The article on "Prayer," written by the Rev. Dr. Barry, states as follows: "Its real objective efficacy is both implied and expressed [in Scripture] in the plainest terms We are encouraged to ask special blessings, both spiritual and temporal, in hopes that thus, and thus only, we may obtain them It would seem the intention of holy Scripture to encourage all prayer, more especially intercession, in all relations and for all righteous objects." Dr. Hook, the present Dean of Chichester, states in his "Church Dictionary," under "Prayer," that "the general providence of God acts through what are called the laws of nature By his particular providence God interferes with those laws, and he has promised to interfere in behalf of those who pray in the name of Jesus We may take it as a general rule that we may pray for that for which we may lawfully labour, and for that only." {p.126} The phrases of our Church service amply countenance this view; and if we look to the practice or the opposed sections of the religious world, we find them consistent in maintaining it. The so-called "Low Church" notoriously places absolute belief in special providences accorded to pious prayer. This is testified by the biographies of its members, the journals of its missionaries, and the ‘united prayer-meetings’ of the present day. The Roman Catholics offer religious vows to avert danger; they make pilgrimages to shrines; they hang votive offerings and pictorial representations sometimes by thousands, in their churches, of fatal accidents averted by the manifest interference of a solicited saint. A primā facie argument in favour of the efficacy of prayer is therefore to be drawn from the very general use of it. The greater part of mankind, during all the historic ages, have been accustomed to pray for temporal advantages. Hw vain, it may be urged, must be the reasoning that ventures to oppose this mighty consensus of belief! Not so. The argument of universality either proves too much, or else it is suicidal. It either compels us to admit that the prayers of Pagans, of Fetish worshippers, and of Buddhists who turn praying-wheels, are recompensed in the same way as those of orthodox believers; or else the general consensus proves that it has no better foundation than the universal tendency of man to gross credulity. |
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The collapse of the argument of universality leaves us solely concerned with a simple statistical question—are prayers answered, or are they not? There are two lines of research, by either of which we may pursue this inquiry. The one that promises the most trustworthy results is to examine large classes of cases, and to be guided by broad averages; the other, which I will not employ in these pages, is to deal with isolated instances. An author who made much use of the latter method might reasonably suspect his own judgment—he would certainly run the risk of being suspected by others—in choosing one-sided examples. The principles are broad and simple upon which our inquiry into the efficacy of prayer must be established. We must gather cases for statistical comparison, in which the same object ia keenly pursued by two classes similar in their physical, but opposite in their spiritual state; the one class being prayerful, the other materialistic. Prudent pious people must be compared with prudent materialistic people, and not with the imprudent nor the vicious. Secondly, we have no regard, in this inquiry, to the course by which the answer to prayers may be supposed to operate. We simply look to the final result—whether those who pray attain their objects more frequently than those who do not pray, but who live in all other respects under similar conditions. Let us new apply our principles to different cases. A rapid recovery from disease may be conceived to depend {p.127}on many causes besides the reparative power of the patient’s constitution. A miraculous quelling of the disease may be one of these causes, another is the skill of the physician, or of the nurse; another is the care that the patient takes of himself In our inquiry whether prayerful people recover more rapidly than others under similar circumstances, we need not complicate the question by endeavouring to learn the channel through which the patient’s prayer may have reached its fulfilment. It is foreign to our present purpose to ask if there be any signs of a miraculous quelling of the disease or if, through the grace of God, the physician had showed unusual wisdom, or the nurse or the patient unusual discretion. We simply look to the main issue—do sick persons who pray, or are prayed for, recover on the average more rapidly than others? |
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It appears that, in all countries and in all creeds, the priests urge the patient to pray for his own recovery, and the patient’s friends to aid him with their prayers; but that the doctors make no account whatever of their spiritual agencies, unless the office of priest and medical man be combined in the same individual. The medical works of modern Europe teem with records of individual illnesses and of broad averages of disease, but I have been able to discover hardly any instance in which a medical man of any repute has attributed recovery to the influence of prayer. There is not a single instance, to my knowledge, in which papers read before statistical societies have recognised the agency of prayer either on disease or on anything else. The universal habit of the scientific world to ignore the agency of prayer is a very important fact. To fully appreciate the "eloquence of the silence" of medical men, we must bear in mind the care with which they endeavour to assign a sanatory value to every in influence. Had prayers for the sick any notable effect, it is incredible but that the doctors, who are always on the watch for such things, should have observed it, and added their influence to that of the priests towards obtaining them for every sick man. If they abstain from doing so, it is not because their attention has never been awakened to the possible efficacy of prayer, but, on the contrary, that although they have heard it insisted on from childhood upwards, they are unable to detect its influence. Most people have some general belief in the objective efficacy of prayer, but none seem willing to admit its action in those special cases of which they have scientific cognisance. Those who may wish to pursue these inquiries upon the effect of prayers for the restoration of health could obtain abundant materials from hospital cases, and in a different way from that proposed in the challenge to which I referred at the beginning of these pages. There are many common maladies whose course is so thoroughly well understood as to admit of accurate tables of probability being constructed for their duration and result. Such are fractures and amputations. Now it would be perfectly practicable to select out of the patients at different {p.128} hospitals under treatment for fractures and amputations two considerable groups; the one consisting of markedly religious piously befriended individuals, the other of those who were remarkably cold-hearted and neglected. An honest comparison of their respective periods of treatment and the results would manifest a distinct proof of the efficacy or prayer; if it existed to even a minute fraction of the amount that religious teachers exhort us to believe. An inquiry of a somewhat similar nature may be made into the longevity of persons whose lives are prayed for; also that of the praying classes generally; and in both those cases we can easily obtain statistical facts. The public prayer for the sovereign of every state, Protestant and Catholic, is and has been in the spirit of our own, "Grant her in health long to live." Now, as a simple matter of fact, has this prayer any efficacy? There is a memoir by Dr. Guy, in the (Vol. XXII. p.355), in which he compares the mean age of sovereigns with that of other classes of persons. His results are expressed in the following table MEAN AGE ATTAINED BY MALES OF VARIOUS
CLASSES WHO HAD |
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in number | Average |
Eminent Men [1] |
Members of Royal houses |
97 |
64.04 |
|
Clergy |
945 |
69.49 |
66.42 |
Lawyers |
294 | 68.14 |
66.51 |
Medical Profession |
244 |
67.31 |
67.07 |
English aristocracy |
1,179 |
67.31 |
|
Gentry | 1,632 |
70.22 |
|
Trade and commerce | 513 |
68.74 |
|
Officers in the Royal Navy |
366 |
68.40 |
|
English literature and science | 395 |
67.55 |
65.22 |
Officers of the Army |
659 |
67.07 |
|
Fine Arts |
239 |
65.96 |
64.74 |
If we are satisfied that the actions of man are not influenced by the subtle influences of his thoughts and will, the only probable form of agency will have been disapproved, and no one would dare to advance a claim in favour of direct physical interferences. Biographies do not show that devotional influences have clustered in any remarkable degree round the youth of those who, whether by their talents or social position, have left a mark upon our English history. Lord Campbell, in his preface to the Lives of the Chancellors, says, “There is no office in the history of any nation that has been filled with such a long succession of distinguished and interesting men as the office of Lord Chancellor,” and that “generally speaking, the most eminent men, if not the most virtuous, have been selected to adorn it.” His implied disparagement of their piety is fully sustained by an examination of their respective biographies, and by a taunt of Horace Walpole, quoted in the same preface. An equal absence of remarkable devotional tendencies may be observed in the lives of the leaders of great political parties. The founders of our great families too often owed their advancement to tricky and time-serving courtiership. The belief so frequently expressed in the Psalms, that the descendants of the righteous shall continue, and that those of the wicked shall surely fail, is not fulfilled in the history of our English peerage. Take for instance the highest class, that of the Ducal houses. The influence of social position in the country is so enormous that the possession of a dukedom is a power that can hardly be understood without some sort of calculation. There are, I believe, only twenty-seven dukes to about eight millions of adult male Englishmen, or about three dukes to each million, yet the cabinet of fourteen ministers which governs this country, and India too, commonly contains one duke, often two, and in recent times three. The political privilege inherited with a dukedom in this country is at the lowest estimate many thousand-fold above the average birth-right of Englishmen. What was the origin of these ducal families whose influence on the destiny of England and her dependencies is so enormous? Were their founders the eminently devout children of eminently pious parents? Have they and their ancestors been distinguished among the praying classes? Not so. I give in a footnote [2] a list of their names, which recalls many a deed of patriotism, valour, and skill, many an instance of’ eminent merit of the worldly sort, which we Englishmen honour six days out of the seven—many scandals, many a disgrace, but not, on the other hand, a single instance {p.132} known to me of eminently prayerful qualities. Four at least of the existing ducal houses are unable to claim the title of having been raised into existence through the devout habits of their progenitors, because the families of Buccleuch, Grafton, St. Albans, and Richmond were thus highly ennobled solely on the ground of their being descended from Charles II. and four of his mistresses, namely, Lucy Walters, Barbara Villiers, Nell Gwynne, and Louise de Querouai1le. The dukedom of Cleveland may almost be reckoned as a fifth instance. The civil liberty we enjoy in England, and the energy of our race, have given rise to a number of institutions, societies, commercial adventures, political meetings, and combinations of all sorts. Some of these are exclusively clerical, some lay, and others mixed. It is impossible for a person to have taken an active share in social life without having had abundant means of estimating for himself, and of hearing the opinion of others, on the value of’ a preponderating clerical element in business committees. For my own part, I never heard of a favourable one. The procedure of Convocation, which, like all exclusively clerical meetings, is opened with prayer, has not inspired the outer world with much respect. The histories of the great councils of the Church are most painful to read. There is reason to expect that devout and superstitious men should be unreasonable; for a person who believes his thoughts to be inspired, necessarily accredits his prejudices with divine authority. He is therefore little accessible to argument, and he is intolerant of those whose opinions differ from his, especially on first principles. Consequently, he is a bad coadjutor in business matters. It is a common week-day opinion of -the world that praying people are not practical. |
On visualising a millionFrom Hereditary
Genius: |
Life of Francis Galton“I thought it better to proceed like the surveyor of a new country”—Galton. Francis Galton was born on 16th February 1822, near Sparkbrook, Birmingham, Warwickshire, England and died 17th January, 1911 at Grayshott House, Haslemere, Surrey, aged 89. He was ‘knighted’ two years before his death in 1909. Galton was first cousin of, and in wide contact with, Darwin. They each widely influenced the thinking, one of the other. In 1853, Galton married. There were no children of the marriage. He is buried, largely forgotten, at Claverdon in the quiet churchyard in a little-tended grave. Galton was one of the great 19th century founders of modern science, in particular human science. He was primarily a founder of anthropology, the study of human nature and origins. On all his topics, Galton has something original and interesting to say; and he says it with clarity, brevity, distinction and modesty. His contributions were as a minor explorer in Africa; as developer of statistical methods, especially correlation upon the basis of the Belgian mathematician Quetelet [3]. Galton was the originator of much of the study of meteorology: he discovered and introduced the term anti-cyclone; he laid the beginnings of the study of genetics and laid the ground for fingerprinting. He also engaged in studies of twins, blood transfusions and criminality. Most of Galton’s publications disclose his predilection for quantifying: an early paper, reproduced here, dealt with a statistical test of the efficacy of prayer. Over a period of 34 years, he concerned himself with improving standards of measurement. His dedication was such that, when on an occasion during his African travels he wished to measure the backside of a Hottentot female and feared that his intentions could be misinterpreted, he used a surveying instrument. Should you be mystified, look up the word steatopygia. |
EugenicsGalton founded ideas of human eugenics on much research into the heritability of intelligence and personality, matters that continue to be controversial. His passion was for eugenics, which has made him currently rather unpopular. Under the terms of his will, a eugenics chair was established at the University of London. Galton coined the word eugenics to denote scientific endeavours to increase the proportion of persons with better than average genetic endowment through selective mating of marriage partners. In his Hereditary Genius (1869), in which he used the word genius to denote “an ability that was exceptionally high and at the same time inborn”, his main argument was that mental and physical features are equally inherited—a proposition that was not accepted at the time. It is surprising that when Darwin first read this book, he wrote to the author, “You have made a convert of an opponent in one sense for I have always maintained that, excepting fools, men did not differ much in intellect, only in zeal and hard work.” Hereditary Genius doubtless helped Darwin to extend his evolution theory to man. Galton, unmentioned in Origin of Species (1859), is however several times quoted in Darwin’s Descent of Man (1871). Galton’s conviction that mental traits are no less inherited than are physical characteristics was strong enough to shape his personal religious philosophy. “We cannot doubt,” he wrote, “the existence of a great power ready to hand and capable of being directed with vast benefit as soon as we have learned to understand and apply it.” These problems remain under research and discussion to this date. [4] Galton’s ideas, like those of Darwin, were limited by a lack of an adequate theory of inheritance. The rediscovery of the work of Mendel (who was born in the same year as Galton) came when Galton was nearly 80 years old, too late to affect Galton’s contribution in any significant way. Mendel had approached the problems with the cell in mind, where Galton primarily used a statistical approach. |
BIBLIOGRAPHY |
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Main Works by Francis Galton |
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1853 | Narrative of an Explorer in Tropical South Africa. Murray, London. |
1855 | Art of Travel. Murray, London. |
1869 | Hereditary Genius, an Inquiry into its Laws and
Consequences, Macmillan, London (2nd ed. 1892). |
1874 | English Men of Science: their Nature and Nurture. Macmillan, London |
1883 | Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development. Macmillan, London (and Dent, 1951). |
1889 | Natural Inheritance. Macmillan, London. |
1893 | Finger Prints. Macmillan, London. |
1906 | Noteworthy Families (with B. Schuster). Murray, London. |
1908 | Memories of My Life. Methuen, London. |
Besides these books Galton wrote some 200 papers. Galton’s Inquiries into Human Faculty (see above) consists of some 40 articles varying in length from 2 to 30 pages, which are mostly based on scientific papers written between 1869 and 1883. The book can, in a sense, be regarded as a summary of the author’s views on the faculties of man. |
Books on Francis GaltonThe most important work on Galton is the monumental labour of love by
another statistician, The following are listed in cataloguesFrancis Galton, Galton, 1970, Frank Cass Publishers; ISBN: 0714616222, £22.50 Milo Keynes, Sir Francis Galton, FRS,1993, Macmillan Press Ltd; ISBN: 0333546954, £52.50 HB |
Further related reading |
|
Intelligence: misuse and abuse of statistics | |
Is Intelligence Distributed Normally? By Cyril Burt, 1963 | |
the anthropic principle, or what if the universe was not the way it is |
End notes |
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1 | The eminent men are those whose lives are recorded in Chalmers’s Biography, with some additions from the Annual Register. |
2 | Abercorn, Argyll, Athole, Beaufort, Bedford, Buccleuch, Buckingham, Cleveland, Devonshire, Grafton, Hamilton, Leeds , Leinster, Manchestor, Marlborough, Montrose, Newcastle, Norfolk, Northumberland, Portland, Richmond, Roxburghe, Rutland, St. Albans, Somerset, Sutherland, Wellington. |
3 | Quetelet, (Lambert) Adolphe (Jacques), 1796 – 1874, Belgian mathematician, astronomer, statistician and sociologist known for his application of statistics and the theory of probability to social phenomena. In Sur l’homme (1835; A Treatise on Man and the Development of His Faculties, 1842), republished in 1869 as Physique sociale, he presented his conception of the homme moyen (‘average man’) as the central value about which measurements of a human trait are grouped according to the normal probability curve. His studies of the numerical constancy of such presumably voluntary acts as crimes stimulated extensive studies in ‘moral statistics’ and wide discussion of free will versus social determinism. In trying to discover through statistics the causes of acts in society, Quetelet conceived of the relative penchant (propensity; e.g., to crime) of specific age groups. This idea, like his homme moyen, evoked great controversy among social scientists in the 19th century. |
4 | For more on this subject see franchise
by examination, education and intelligence on this site |
email abelard at abelard.org © abelard, 1999 (14 november) the address for this document is http://www.abelard.org/galton/galton.htm 7184 words |