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Updated: June 14, 2025
The Phrenologists are right in placing the organ of self-love in the back of the head, it being there where a vain man carries his intellectual light; the consequence of which is, that every man he approaches is obscured by his own shadow. Nothing is rarer than a solitary lie; for lies breed like Surinam toads; you cannot tell one but out it comes with a hundred young ones on its back.
Next to these we find Sublimity, which was correctly suggested by the Edinburgh phrenologists. It lies between Reverence and Cautiousness.
Warrington's was what the wise phrenologists call the fighting nose; not pugnacious, but the nose of a man who will fight for what he believes to be right, fight bitterly and fearlessly. To-day he was famous, but only yesterday he had been fighting, retreating, throwing up this redoubt, digging this trench; fighting, fighting.
Opposite that high forehead, with its massive development of organs, scowled the low front of one to whom thought was unfamiliar, protuberant, indeed, over the shaggy brows, where phrenologists place the seats of practical perception, strongly marked in some of the brutes, as in the dog, but almost literally void of those higher organs by which we reason and imagine and construct.
But, I must not write too long a preface to my present story. Mr. Smith and myself cannot boast of larger organs of Inhabitativeness I believe, that is the word used by phrenologists than many of our neighbors. Occasionally we have felt dissatisfied with the state of things around us, and become possessed of the demon of change.
It was violently attacked by the old- school psychologists because it taught that the brain is the instrument of the mind, that the mind has a plurality of faculties and that various brain functions can be localized. Every one conversant with the present literature on physiology and psychology will see that phrenologists have conquered, and that their basic principles are now accepted by all.
Evolution does not graft well upon the Platonic Idealism, nor are physiology and the kindred sciences sympathetic. Nothing aroused Emerson's indignation more than the attempts of the medical faculty and of phrenologists to classify, and therefore limit individuals. "The grossest ignorance does not disgust me like this ignorant knowingness."
It is observed, however, that persons with what the Phrenologists call "good heads" are more prone than others toward plenary belief in the doctrine. It is so hard to prove a negative, that, if a man should assert that the moon was in truth a green cheese, formed by the coagulable substance of the Milky Way, and challenge me to prove the contrary, I might be puzzled.
In her character, what phrenologists call "destructiveness," in the comprehensive sense of the word, was superlatively developed. She had not actual cruelty; she was not bloodthirsty: those vices belong to a different cast of character. She was rather deliberately and intellectually unsparing. A goal was before her; she must march to it: all in the way were but hostile impediments.
The boasted discovery of phrenologists, that thought, feeling, and passion reside in this material brain and nerves of ours, has ages ago been anticipated by her simple faith in the letter of Scripture; a faith which puts to shame the irreverent vagueness and fantastic private interpretations of those who make an idol of that very letter which they dare not take literally, because it makes against their self-willed theories. . .
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