By the manner in which I spoke of the brain, you will see that I am
obliged to leave phrenology sub Jove,--out in the cold,--as not one of
the household of science. I am not one of its haters; on the contrary, I
am grateful for the incidental good it has done. I love to amuse myself
in its plaster Golgothas, and listen to the glib professor, as he
discovers by his manipulations
"All that disgraced my betters met in me."
I loved of old to see square-headed, heavy-jawed Spurzheim make a brain
flower out into a corolla of marrowy filaments, as Vieussens had done
before him, and to hear the dry-fibred but human-hearted George Combe
teach good sense under the disguise of his equivocal system. But the
pseudo-sciences, phrenology and the rest, seem to me only appeals to weak
minds and the weak points of strong ones. There is a pica or false
appetite in many intelligences; they take to odd fancies in place of
wholesome truth, as girls gnaw at chalk and charcoal. Phrenology juggles
with nature. It is so adjusted as to soak up all evidence that helps it,
and shed all that harms it. It crawls forward in all weathers, like
Richard Edgeworth's hygrometer. It does not stand at the boundary of our
ignorance, it seems to me, but is one of the will-o'-the-wisps of its
undisputed central domain of bog and quicksand. Yet I should not have
devoted so many words to it, did I not recognize the light it has thrown
on human actions by its study of congenital organic tendencies.
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