cians, nor painters, nor mathematicians.” Extravagant as this may appear to our scientifically minded generation, it yet represents the more sober conclusions of men conversant with the science of the day. In the hands of system-mongers and quacks the doctrines were carried to far more capricious conclusions.
It was the practical tendency to read character and predict capacity or even career that was responsible for the rapid deterioration of phrenology. This course was set by Spurzheim, under whose influence phrenological societies were founded in England and America, and the world deluged with books, pamphlets, manuals, lessons, exhibitions, charts, plaster-casts, institutes, parlor talks and street demonstrations for the dissemination of character-reading by the bumps of the head—a movement the waves of which still beat feebly along the remote frontiers of intellectual venture. An excursion into these disorderly by-paths—suggestive of the slums of psychology—would have little profit;[1] it would but indicate that slight deviations in principle lead to the widest divergence of result. An intellectual degradation ensues as the movement descends to lower strata,—an issue not unlike the social degradation of sections of cities where questionable occupants inhabit the dwellings that sheltered the respectable citizens of other days. Though we can not hold the founders responsible for this issue, it is yet true that they prepared the way for it by their own practises. Gall and Spurzheim conducted tours in prisons and asylums, reading from the shapes of the heads of the inmates the propensity to forgery, theft, violence or lack of thrift which brought them to their fate. One prisoner showed the “organs of theft, murder, and benevolence all well developed, and, true to his organs, robbed an old woman and had the rope around her neck to strangle her, when his benevolence came to the surface,” and prevented the fatality.
Such was the practical degeneration and such the fallacious principles by which phrenology attempted to oust physiology from its domain. At the time psychology was not sufficiently developed to assert its claim against the phrenological pretensions. Spurzheim had a
- ↑ The excursion would indeed serve to justify the general conclusion that the sporadic survival or revival of such systems as physiognomy, astrology, phrenology, palmistry, fortune-telling, dream-interpretation, etc., is due not to the appeal of their evidence, but to the persistence of the attraction of the occult as well as to the promise of practical revelation. For it is characteristic that this class of latter-day compendium upon “character” through the reading of heads, faces, hands, etc., combines and resurrects with curious ignorance of their source, with a strange insensitiveness to their mutually contradictory positions, all the varied bypaths of obscure and discredited lore which we have cursorily surveyed. Aristotle, Porta, Cardan, Lavater, Gall, Spurzheim reappear in doctrines, without assignment of source, in support of “systems” purporting to reveal the secrets of human nature for the small consideration of the purchase of the volume. The occult—representing poverty if not misery of mind—like misery, makes strange bedfellows.
