The long period of the dark ages... is due... in a very considerable degree, to the celebacy enjoined by religious orders on their votaries. Whenever… - Francis Galton
" "The long period of the dark ages... is due... in a very considerable degree, to the celebacy enjoined by religious orders on their votaries. Whenever a man or woman was possessed of a gentle nature that fitted... deeds of charity, to meditation, to literature, or to art... they had no refuge elsewhere than in the bosom of the Church. ...celibacy. ...thus, by a policy so singularly unwise and suicidal... the Church brutalized the breed of our forefathers. ...as if she had aimed at selecting the rudest portion of the community to be alone the parents of future generations. She practised the arts which breeders would use, who aimed at creating ferocious, currish, and stupid natures. ...
The policy of the religious world in Europe... by means of persecutions... brought thousands of the foremost thinkers and men of political aptitudes to the scaffold, or imprisoned them during a large part of their manhood, or drove them as emigrants into other lands. ...Hence the Church, having first captured all the gentle natures and condemned them to celibacy, made another sweep of her huge nets ...to catch those who were the most fearless, truth-seeking, and intelligent ...and therefore the most suitable parents of a high civilization, and put a strong check, if not a direct stop, to their progeny. Those she reserved... to breed the generations of the future, were the servile, the indifferent, and again, the stupid. Thus, as she... brutalized human nature by her system of celibacy applied to the gentle, she demoralised it by her system of persecution of the intelligent, the sincere, and the free.
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About Francis Galton
Sir Francis Galton F.R.S. (16 February 1822 – 17 January 1911) was an English Victorian anthropologist, tropical explorer, geographer, inventor, meteorologist, proto-geneticist, psychometrician, and statistician. He was a half-cousin of Charles Darwin's and famously coined the study of desirable human characteristics: "eugenics" (from the Greek eugenes, meaning “good in birth” or "stock").
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Alternative Names:
Sir Francis Galton
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Sir Francis Galton, 1st Bt.
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F. G.
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Additional quotes by Francis Galton
[T]hough anthropometry owes an immense debt to Quetelet, we must be careful not to follow his principles and methods blindfold. We must recollect that Quetelet lived in pre-Darwinian times, at a date when the fixity of races was an established scientific belief. His central principle consequently was that the mean man is the perfect man. The theory of evolution now assures us of what common sense never doubted---that this principle is radically wrong. The most desirable man is not the one who is mediocre in his wits, in his honesty, and in his aspirations; or, again, in the proportions of his figure, in his muscular power, and in his ability to endure fatigue. Anthropologists, as a rule, are behindhand in their studies of men of superior types, who rank above the mediocrity of their race in every respect, and are not to be confounded with those who rank above the majority in only a few conspicuous ways, through the sacrifice of other qualities which are no less essential, but of a less showy kind.
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