Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 21, 2025
Without taking these modifying conditions into account, a correct estimate of brain-power is impossible. And it is because these modifying conditions have been ignored by many professed teachers of Phrenology, and but poorly expressed by others who did recognize them, that many eminent physiologists have condemned phrenology hastily, as having no sound basis in physiology.
He may produce a phrenological chart showing that his knobby head is the home of all the virtues, and that the vicious tendencies are represented by holes in his cranium, and yet I cannot be sure that he will not be as disagreeable as if phrenology had not been invented. I feel sometimes that phrenology is the refuge of mediocrity.
I have rarely met a sensible man who would not allow that there was something in Phrenology. A broad, high forehead, it is commonly agreed, promises intellect; one that is "villanous low" and has a huge hind-head back of it, is wont to mark an animal nature. I have as rarely met an unbiassed and sensible man who really believed in the bumps.
New sects were formed, like the Universalists, the Spiritualists, the Second Adventists, the Mormons, and the Shakers, some of which believed in trances and miracles, others in the quick coming of Christ, and still others in the reorganization of society; and the pseudo-sciences, like mesmerism and phrenology, had numerous followers.
And yet, observing her again more closely, that suppression of the constitutional tendency to candid betrayal of emotion would the more enlist our curiosity or interest; because, if physiognomy and phrenology have any truth in them, there was little strength in her character.
Now, even the adversaries of Phrenology must, to a certain extent, admit the dependence of the soul on the body.... We are, therefore, no more Materialists than our predecessors, whether anatomists, physiologists, or physicians, or the great number of philosophers and moralists, who have admitted the dependence of the soul on the body.
You have had Phrenology defined to you as the Science of Intelligence, and you naturally ask for a definition of intelligence itself. Intelligence is the result of the radiation of magnetism from every object in the universe. Magnetism is radiated by different bodies in different degrees of intensity.
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.
'My dear sir, you can not succeed here with a lecture. We have had several in our village within a few years, but never one which 'paid, unless it was one on phrenology, or physiology, or psychology, and plentifully spiced with humor of the coarsest sort. If you want to make money in Tyre, you'll take my advice and get a two-headed calf, a learned pig, or a band of nigger minstrels.
Had that father studied phrenology, instead of reading nonsense, he would still live happy; and though the low scull was not born to be a genius, he might, at least, have been more honest, had he seen that it was too difficult for him to cheat his wise neighbor.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking