Passage 1
Many years later I was so harassed with the old question of Determinism, which would leave every human action under the control of Heredity and Environment, that I made a series of observations on the actions of my own mind in relation to Free Will. I employ the word not merely as meaning ‘unhindered’ but in the special sense of an uncaused and creative action. It was carried on almost continuously for six weeks, and off and on for many subsequent months[55]. The procedure was this. Whenever I caught myself in an act of what seemed to be ‘Free Will’ in the above sense, I checked myself and tried hard to recollect what had happened before, made rapid notes, and then wrote a full account of the case. To my surprise, I found, after some days’ work, that the occasions were rare on which there seemed room for the exercise of Free Will as defined above. I subsequently reckoned that they did not occur oftener than once a day. Motives for all the other events could be traced backwards in succession, by orderly and continuous steps, until they led into a tangle of familiar paths. It was curious to watch the increase of power given by practice, of recalling mental actions which being usually overlooked give the false idea that much has been performed through a creative act, or by inspiration, which is really due to straightforward causation. The subject is too complex to be more fully gone into here; I must refer to the Memoir itself. The general result of the inquiry was to support the views of those who hold that man is little more than a conscious machine, the slave of heredity and environment, the larger part, perhaps all, of whose actions are therefore predictable. As regards such residuum as may not be automatic but creative, and which a Being, however wise and well-informed, could not possibly foresee, I have nothing to say, but I found that the more carefully I inquired, whether it was into hereditary similarities of conduct, into the life-histories of twins, or introspectively into the actions of my own mind, the smaller seemed the room left for this possible residuum.
Free will and automatismHeredity and biological controlautomatism · advancesScientific or empirical evidenceNature and evolutionDiminishes autonomyIndividualMind and body
Galton uses self-observation, twin evidence, and hereditary resemblance to argue that apparently creative acts are largely predictable effects of heredity and environment.
Chapter XX, ‘Heredity,’ pp. 299–300, lines 1811–1814