when, after a thrilling effort to assume a virtue, of which nature has denied him the elements, the unfortunate admirer of heroism wavers, faints, and gives way in his unhappy pursuit of it.

Without any corresponding mischief to the sanity of the mind, a corresponding failure in moral results is often observable, where benevolence obtains its stimulus from the imagination. The person thus excited is disposed to succour not the real sufferer from penury or distress, but the object which his fancy has dressed up in the picturesque colours of misfortune; and often, when real misfortune comes before him, he turns disgusted from its loathsome accompaniments.

CHAPTER V.

Relation of Phrenology to the Science of Mind considered.

In a disquisition, which proposes to inquire into the elements of the human mind in relation to its morbid states, it is not easy to leave the views of the phrenologists absolutely untouched. Since, if they are right, or I may say, so far as they are right, they ought to throw valuable light on the causes of mental disease.

There is certainly in the character of the phrenologists themselves one feature, which should attract the attention of a philosopher, independently of the subject matter of their pursuits. They are pains-taking, laborious men, prosecuting their views among accumulated facts, or what they consider to be facts, in a subject, to which

a priori reasoning has hitherto been far more commonly applied.

In this respect, indeed, they are somewhat hardly used for, while they receive on other and more reasonable grounds, their full meed of blame, they are constantly assailed with the epithet, "speculative and theoretical."

Surely, if the rapid formation of a system had been their object, they would have gone to work in a very different way. We should have seen them classing under a few elements all the phenomena of mind; in short, dealing with the mind as the ingenious author of the Brunonian theory dealt with the body.

But the phrenologists appear to have been forced into an hypothesis by accumulated observation, and being remarkably deficient in the faculty of generalising, they have thrown their work into a great number of detached pigeon holes, and have separated very arbitrarily into small parcels, what more skilful theorists would have collected into larger masses. This procedure has laid them open to much ridicule. But, as it is opposed to the more dangerous fault of rapid systematising, it in some degree increases the claims of their labours to our attention.

It would, I imagine, be very easy to state the

views of the phrenologists, in a form, which would appear perfectly reasonable to those, by whom they are derided on the above grounds. The facial angle of Camper has long ago directed our attention to the shape of the head in connection with the manifestations of intellect; and again, the connection between our intellectual and moral departments would dispose us to accept with attention the evidence of their having a common organic agent. But, if we think and feel through the instrumentality of the brain, we shall probably think and feel agreeably to laws, which will imply one kind of action in the brain for one operation intellectual or emotive, another for another; and it is far from improbable that this difference of cerebral action should be connected with a difference in the fibres appropriated to each function, or in other words, with a difference in the parts of the brain relative to each. On this basis, the general principle of a division into organs might be erected without any antecedent improbability; and if the divisions of Gall appear unphilosophically minute, it would be easy to reduce them into more general heads, without interfering with the location assigned to them by their discoverer. Viewing them, indeed, in groups according to their juxta position, we

shall often find that a generic character prevails, such as the experience which we possess of the human mind would lead us to expect. Thus benevolence and imitation (organs which touch each other in the phrenological map) embody the great principle of sympathy. Again, the elation of spirit, the self-congratulation which men experience, when the witness in their own breast commends them, is the same emotion differently exerted, with that which elevates the successful competitor for public applause. These organs accordingly are in contact. Hope, veneration, wonder and ideality constitute a mass of contiguous organs, which might easily be taught under common metaphysical principles. It would be easy in other instances to soften off the hard distinctness with which Gall and Spurzheim have split the cerebral mass. Their comparative neglect to do this for themselves, may well be accounted for, if their statements are true, by the marvellous individual facts, which seem first to have drawn their attention to the subject, and kept them entangled in its details.

One of the most frequent topics employed against them is furnished by their mistaken judgment in regard to character. And this appears to me to be pressed against them with some want