extended and popularized by Dr. Johann Caspar Spurzheim (1776-1832), Gall’s associate, and his successor as leader of the movement.
There are two distinct aspects to the work of Gall and Spurzheim; and it is not easy to understand or to set forth just how the connection stood in the minds of these contributors to the anatomy and physiology of the nervous system, and advocates of the locations of elaborate mental faculties by means of cranial prominences. The two orders of contributions are difficult to reconcile either in spirit or in method. The motive of “character-reading” was operative, though restricted by scientific considerations. It was forcibly made the consummation of a system quite irrelevant to the purpose. In the end, the practical temper prevailed; and phrenology allied with physiognomy, palmistry or other character-reading pretences, degenerated to the woeful state of a declassè pseudo-science. Its nearness to the illuminating truth served but to intensify the obscurity of its shadows. The contrast in the two spheres of the career of Gall and Spurzheim serves to explain why, as they travelled about Europe, they were by some called “a pair of vain-glorious mountebanks,” and by others placed with Newton and Galileo as illustrious contributors to science. Yet the fact that phrenology called larger attention to the study of character than had any other movement gives it an important place in a retrospective view.
The impressionistic origin of his phrenological interests is thus recounted by Gall. When at school, he was struck by the fact that his schoolmates had facilities independent of instruction; that one was musical, another artistically endowed, and that this innate ability rather than application was most decisive in determining progress. He seems to have been annoyed at being surpassed by schoolmates who had a capacity for memorizing; and in an inauspicious moment he observed that these schoolmates all had prominent eyes. At the university he directed his attention to students with prominent eyes, and persuaded himself that in every case such men had exceptionally good verbal memories; and thus was the fatal correlation made. Not unlike Lavater, he trusted to his “physiognomical sense” to recognize the prominences which were to find a local habitation and a name upon the phrenological chart. At church he observed the most devout of the attendants, detected what portions of the skull were well-developed in them, and discovered the organs of veneration. He compared the heads of murderers and found an organ of murder, and similarly studied the heads of thieves and located the organ of theft. He had organs for the preeminent quality of each of the five senses; an organ of tune for the musical, and one of number for the mathematical. He thus accumulated a group of some twenty-four organs (which Spurzheim enlarged to thirty-five or more), and in this contribution disclosed with strange unconcern at once his self-deception and the shallowness of his psychological notions.
