Thoughts on Man

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[39] Sterne, Tristram Shandy, Vol. 1.

"Pray, what was that man's name,--for I write in such a hurry, I
have no time to recollect or look for it,--who first made the
observation, 'That there was great inconstancy in our air and
climate?' Whoever he was, it was a just and good observation in
him. But the corollary drawn from it, namely, 'That it is this
which has furnished us with such a variety of odd and whimsical
characters;'--that was not his;--it was found out by another man,
at least a century and a half after him. Then again, that this
copious storehouse of original materials is the true and natural
cause that our comedies are so much better than those of France,
or any others that have or can be wrote upon the continent;--
that discovery was not fully made till about the middle of king
William's reign, when the great Dryden, in writing one of his
long prefaces (if I mistake not), most fortunately hit upon it.
Then, fourthly and lastly, that this strange irregularity in our
climate, producing so strange an irregularity in our characters,
cloth thereby in some sort make us amends, by giving us somewhat
to make us merry with, when the weather will not suffer us to go
out of doors,--that observation is my own; and was struck out by
me this very rainy day, March 26, 1759, and betwixt the hour of
nine and ten in the morning.

"Thus--thus, my fellow-labourers and associates in this great
harvest of our learning, now ripening before our eyes; thus it
is, by slow steps of casual increase, that our knowledge
physical, metaphysical, physiological, polemical, nautical,
mathematical, aenigmatical, technical, biographical, romantical,
chemical, and obstetrical, with fifty other branches of it, (most
of them ending, as these do, in ical,) has, for these two last
centuries and more, gradually been creeping upwards towards that
acme of their perfections, from which, if we may form a
conjecture from the advantages of these last seven years, we
cannot possibly be far off."

Nothing can be more true, than the proposition ludicrously
illustrated in this passage, that real science is in most
instances of slow growth, and that the discoveries which are
brought to perfection at once, are greatly exposed to the
suspicion of quackery. Like the ephemeron fly, they are born
suddenly, and may be expected to die as soon.

Lavater, the well known author of Essays on Physiognomy, appears
to have been born seventeen years before the birth of Gall. He
attempted to reduce into a system the indications of human
character that are to be found in the countenance. Physiognomy,
as a subject of ingenious and probable conjecture, was well known
to the ancients. But the test, how far any observations that
have been made on the subject are worthy the name of a science,
will lie in its application by the professor to a person
respecting whom he has had no opportunity of previous
information. Nothing is more easy, when a great warrior,
statesman, poet, philosopher or philanthropist is explicitly
placed before us, than for the credulous inspector or fond
visionary to examine the lines of his countenance, and to point
at the marks which should plainly shew us that he ought to have
been the very thing that he is. This is the very trick of
gipsies and fortune-tellers. But who ever pointed to an utter
stranger in the street, and said, I perceive by that man's
countenance that he is one of the great luminaries of the world?
Newton, or Bacon, or Shakespear would probably have passed along
unheeded. Instances of a similar nature occur every day. Hence
it plainly appears that, whatever may hereafter be known on the
subject, we can scarcely to the present time be said to have
overstepped the threshold. And yet nothing can be more certain
than that there is a science of physiognomy, though to make use
of an illustration already cited, it has not to this day been
extricated out of the block of marble in which it is hid. Human
passions, feelings and modes of thinking leave their traces on
the countenance: but we have not, thus far, left the dame's
school in this affair, and are not qualified to enter ourselves
in the free-school for more liberal enquiries.

The writings of Lavater on the subject of physiognomy are couched
in a sort of poetic prose, overflowing with incoherent and vague
exclamations, and bearing small resemblance to a treatise in
which the elements of science are to be developed. Their success
however was extraordinary; and it was probably that success,
which prompted Gall first to turn his attention from the
indications of character that are to be found in the face of man,
to the study of the head generally, as connected with the
intellectual and moral qualities of the individual.

It was about four years before the commencement of the present
century, that Gall appears to have begun to deliver lectures on
the structure and external appearances of the human head. He
tells us, that his attention was first called to the subject in
the ninth year of his age (that is, in the year 1767), and that
he spent thirty years in the private meditation of his system,
before he began to promulgate it. Be that as it will, its most
striking characteristic is that of marking out the scull into
compartments, in the same manner as a country delineated on a map
is divided into districts, and assigning a different faculty or
organ to each. In the earliest of these diagrams that has fallen
under my observation, the human scull is divided into
twenty-seven compartments.

I would say of craniology, as I have already said of physiognomy,
that there is such a science attainable probably by man, but that
we have yet made scarcely any progress in the acquiring it. As
certain lines in the countenance are indicative of the
dispositions of the man, so it is reasonable to believe that a
certain structure of the head is in correspondence with the
faculties and propensities of the individual.

Thus far we may probably advance without violating a due degree
of caution. But there is a wide distance between this general
statement, and the conduct of the man who at once splits the
human head into twenty-seven compartments.

The exterior appearance of the scull is affirmed to correspond
with the structure of the brain beneath. And nothing can be more
analogous to what the deepest thinkers have already confessed of
man, than to suppose that there is one structure of the brain
better adapted for intellectual purposes than another. There is
probably one structure better adapted than another, for
calculation, for poetry, for courage, for cowardice, for
presumption, for diffidence, for roughness, for tenderness, for
self-control and the want of it. Even as some have inherently a
faculty adapted for music or the contrary[40].

[40] See above, Essay II.

But it is not reasonable to believe that we think of calculation
with one portion of the brain, and of poetry with another.

It is very little that we know of the nature of matter; and we
are equally ignorant as to the substance, whatever it is, in
which the thinking principle in man resides. But, without
adventuring in any way to dogmatise on the subject, we find so
many analogies between the thinking principle, and the structure
of what we call the brain, that we cannot but regard the latter
as in some way the instrument of the former.

Now nothing can be more certain respecting the thinking
principle, than its individuality. It has been said, that the
mind can entertain but one thought at one time; and certain it
is, from the nature of attention, and from the association of
ideas, that unity is one of the principal characteristics of
mind. It is this which constitutes personal identity; an
attribute that, however unsatisfactory may be the explanations
which have been given respecting it, we all of us feel, and that
lies at the foundation of all our voluntary actions, and all our
morality.

Analogous to this unity of thought and mind, is the arrangement
of the nerves and the brain in the human body. The nerves all
lead up to the brain; and there is a centrical point in the brain
itself, in which the reports of the senses terminate, and at
which the action of the will may be conceived to begin. This, in
the language of our fathers, was called the "seat of the soul."

We may therefore, without departing from the limits of a due
caution and modesty, consider this as the throne before which the
mind holds its court. Hither the senses bring in their reports,
and hence the sovereign will issues his commands. The whole
system appears to be conducted through the instrumentality of the
nerves, along whose subtle texture the feelings and impressions
are propagated. Between the reports of the senses and the
commands of the will, intervenes that which is emphatically the
office of the mind, comprising meditation, reflection, inference
and judgment. How these functions are performed we know not; but
it is reasonable to believe that the substance of the brain or of
some part of the brain is implicated in them.

Still however we must not lose sight of what has been already
said, that in the action of the mind unity is an indispensible
condition. Our thoughts can only hold their council and form
their decrees in a very limited region. This is their retreat
and strong hold; and the special use and functions of the remoter
parts of the brain we are unable to determine; so utterly obscure
and undefined is our present knowledge of the great ligament
which binds together the body and the thinking principle.

Enough however results from this imperfect view of the ligament,
to demonstrate the incongruity and untenableness of a doctrine
which should assign the indications of different functions,
exercises and propensities of the mind to the exterior surface of
the scull or the brain. This is quackery, and is to be classed
with chiromancy, augury, astrology, and the rest of those schemes
for discovering the future and unknown, which the restlessness
and anxiety of the human mind have invented, built upon arbitrary
principles, blundered upon in the dark, and having no resemblance
to the march of genuine science. I find in sir Thomas Browne the
following axioms of chiromancy: "that spots in the tops of the
nails do signifie things past; in the middle, things present; and
at the bottom, events to come: that white specks presage our
felicity; blue ones our misfortunes: that those in the nails of
the thumb have significations of honour, in the forefinger, of
riches, and so respectively in the rest."

Science, to be of a high and satisfactory character, ought to
consist of a deduction of causes and effects, shewing us not
merely that a thing is so, but why it is as it is, and cannot be
otherwise. The rest is merely empirical; and, though the
narrowness of human wit may often drive us to this; yet it is
essentially of a lower order and description. As it depends for
its authority upon an example, or a number of examples, so
examples of a contrary nature may continually come in, to weaken
its force, or utterly to subvert it. And the affair is made
still worse, when we see, as in the case of craniology, that all
the reasons that can be deduced (as here from the nature of mind)
would persuade us to believe, that there can be no connection
between the supposed indications, and the things pretended to be
indicated.

Craniology, or phrenology, proceeds exactly in the same train, as
chiromancy, or any of those pretended sciences which are built
merely on assumption or conjecture. The first delineations
presented to the public, marked out, as I have said, the scull
into compartments, in the same manner as a country delineated on
a map is divided into districts. Geography is a real science,
and accordingly, like other sciences, has been slow and gradual
in its progress. At an early stage travellers knew little more
than the shores and islands of the Mediterranean. Afterwards,
they passed the straits of Hercules, and entered into the
Atlantic. At length the habitable world was distributed into
three parts, Europe, Asia, and Africa. More recently, by many
centuries, came the discovery of America. It is but the other
day comparatively, that we found the extensive island of New
Holland in the Southern Ocean. The ancient geographers placed an
elephant or some marine monster in the vacant parts of their
maps, to signify that of these parts they knew nothing. Not so
Dr. Gall. Every part of his globe of the human Scull, at least
with small exceptions, is fully tenanted; and he, with his single
arm, has conquered a world.

The majority of the judgments that have been divulged by the
professors of this science, have had for their subjects the
sculls of men, whose habits and history have been already known.
And yet with this advantage the errors and contradictions into
which their authors have fallen are considerably numerous. Thus
I find, in the account of the doctor's visit to the House of
Correction and the Hospital of Torgau in July 1805, the following
examples.

"Every person was desirous to know what Dr. Gall would say about
T--, who was known in the house as a thief full of cunning, and
who, having several times made his escape, wore an additional
iron. It was surprising, that he saw in him far less of the
organ of cunning, than in many of the other prisoners. However
it was proved, that examples, and conversation with other thieves
in the house, had suggested to him the plan for his escape, and
that the stupidity which he possesses was the cause of his being
retaken."

"We were much surprised to be told, that M., in whom Dr. Gall had
not discovered the organ of representation, possessed
extraordinary abilities in imitating the voice of animals; but we
were convinced after enquiries, that his talent was not a natural
one, but acquired by study. He related to us that, when he was a
Prussian soldier garrisoned at Berlin, he used to deceive the
waiting women in the Foundling Hospital by imitating the voice of
exposed infants, and sometimes counterfeited the cry of a wild
drake, when the officers were shooting ducks."

"Of another Dr. Gall said, His head is a pattern of inconstancy
and confinement, and there appears not the least mark of the
organ of courage. This rogue had been able to gain a great
authority among his fellow-convicts. How is this to be
reconciled with the want of constancy which his organisation
plainly indicates? Dr. Gall answered, He gained his ascendancy
not by courage, but by cunning."

It is well known, that in Thurtel, who was executed for one of
the most cold-blooded and remorseless murders ever heard of, the
phrenologists found the organ of benevolence uncommonly large.

In Spurzheim's delineation of the human head I find six divisions
of organs marked out in the little hemisphere over the eye,
indicating six different dispositions. Must there not be in this
subtle distribution much of what is arbitrary and sciolistic?

It is to be regretted, that no person skilful in metaphysics, or
the history of the human mind, has taken a share in this
investigation. Many errors and much absurdity would have been
removed from the statements of these theorists, if a proper
division had been made between those attributes and propensities,
which by possibility a human creature may bring into the world
with him, and those which, being the pure growth of the arbitrary
institutions of society, must be indebted to those institutions
for their origin. I have endeavoured in a former Essay[41] to
explain this distinction, and to shew how, though a human being
cannot be born with an express propensity towards any one of the
infinite pursuits and occupations which may be found in civilised
society, yet that he may be fitted by his external or internal
structure to excel in some one of those pursuits rather than
another. But all this is overlooked by the phrenologists. They
remark the various habits and dispositions, the virtues and the
vices, that display themselves in society as now constituted, and
at once and without consideration trace them to the structure
that we bring into the world with us.

[41] See above, Essay II.

Certainly many of Gall's organs are a libel upon our common
nature. And, though a scrupulous and exact philosopher will
perhaps confess that he has little distinct knowledge as to the
design with which "the earth and all that is therein" were made,
yet he finds in it so much of beauty and beneficent tendency, as
will make him extremely reluctant to believe that some men are
born with a decided propensity to rob, and others to murder. Nor
can any thing be more ludicrous than this author's distinction of
the different organs of memory--of things, of places, of names,
of language, and of numbers: organs, which must be conceived to
be given in the first instance long before names or language or
numbers had an existence. The followers of Gall have in a few
instances corrected this: but what their denominations have
gained in avoiding the grossest absurdities of their master, they
have certainly lost in explicitness and perspicuity.

There is a distinction, not unworthy to be attended to, that is
here to be made between Lavater's system of physiognomy, and
Gall's of craniology, which is much in favour of the former. The
lines and characteristic expressions of the face which may so
frequently be observed, are for the most part the creatures of
the mind. This is in the first place a mode of observation more
agreeable to the pride and conscious elevation of man, and is in
the next place more suitable to morality, and the vindication of
all that is most admirable in the system of the universe. It is
just, that what is most frequently passing in the mind, and is
entertained there with the greatest favour, should leave its
traces upon the countenance. It is thus that the high and
exalted philosopher, the poet, and the man of benevolence and
humanity are sometimes seen to be such by the bystander and the
stranger. While the malevolent, the trickish, and the grossly
sensual, give notice of what they are by the cast of their
features, and put their fellow-creatures upon their guard, that
they may not be made the prey of these vices.

But the march of craniology or phrenology, by whatever name it is
called, is directly the reverse of this. It assigns to us
organs, as far as the thing is explained by the professors either
to the public or to their own minds, which are entailed upon us
from our birth, and which are altogether independent, or nearly
so, of any discipline or volition that can be exercised by or
upon the individual who drags their intolerable chain. Thus I am
told of one individual that he wants the organ of colour; and all
the culture in the world can never supply that defect, and enable
him to see colour at all, or to see it as it is seen by the rest
of mankind. Another wants the organ of benevolence; and his case
is equally hopeless. I shrink from considering the condition of
the wretch, to whom nature has supplied the organs of theft and
murder in full and ample proportions. The case is like that of
astrology

(Their stars are more in fault than they),

with this aggravation, that our stars, so far as the faculty of
prediction had been supposed to be attained, swayed in few
things; but craniology climbs at once to universal empire; and in
her map, as I have said, there are no vacant places, no
unexplored regions and happy wide-extended deserts.

It is all a system of fatalism. Independently of ourselves, and
far beyond our control, we are reserved for good or for evil by
the predestinating spirit that reigns over all things. Unhappy
is the individual who enters himself in this school. He has no
consolation, except the gratified wish to know distressing
truths, unless we add to this the pride of science, that he has
by his own skill and application purchased for himself the
discernment which places him in so painful a preeminence. The
great triumph of man is in the power of education, to improve his
intellect, to sharpen his perceptions, and to regulate and modify
his moral qualities. But craniology reduces this to almost
nothing, and exhibits us for the most part as the helpless
victims of a blind and remorseless destiny.

In the mean time it is happy for us, that, as this system is
perhaps the most rigorous and degrading that was ever devised, so
it is in almost all instances founded upon arbitrary assumptions
and confident assertion, totally in opposition to the true spirit
of patient and laborious investigation and sound philosophy.

It is in reality very little that we know of the genuine
characters of men. Every human creature is a mystery to his
fellow. Every human character is made up of incongruities. Of
nearly all the great personages in history it is difficult to say
what was decidedly the motive in which their actions and system
of conduct originated. We study what they did, and what they
said; but in vain. We never arrive at a full and demonstrative
conclusion. In reality no man can be certainly said to know
himself. "The heart of man is deceitful above all things."

But these dogmatists overlook all those difficulties, which would
persuade a wise man to suspend his judgment, and induce a jury of
philosophers to hesitate for ever as to the verdict they would
pronounce. They look only at the external character of the act
by which a man honours or disgraces himself. They decide
presumptuously and in a lump, This man is a murderer, a hero, a
coward, the slave of avarice, or the votary of philanthropy; and
then, surveying the outside of his head, undertake to find in him
the configuration that should indicate these dispositions, and
must be found in all persons of a similar character, or rather
whose acts bear the same outward form, and seem analogous to his.

Till we have discovered the clue that should enable us to unravel
the labyrinth of the human mind, it is with small hopes of
success that we should expect to settle the external indications,
and decide that this sort of form and appearance, and that class
of character, will always be found together.

But it is not to be wondered at, that these disorderly fragments
of a shapeless science should become the special favourites of
the idle and the arrogant. Every man (and every woman), however
destitute of real instruction, and unfitted for the investigation
of the deep or the sublime mysteries of our nature, can use his
eyes and his hands. The whole boundless congregation of mankind,
with its everlasting varieties, is thus at once subjected to the
sentence of every pretender:

And fools rush in, where angels fear to tread.

Nothing is more delightful to the headlong and presumptuous, than
thus to sit in judgment on their betters, and pronounce ex
cathedra on those, "whose shoe-latchet they are not worthy to
stoop down and unloose." I remember, after lord George Gordon's
riots, eleven persons accused were set down in one indictment for
their lives, and given in charge to one jury. But this is a mere
shadow, a nothing, compared with the wholesale and
indiscriminating judgment of the vulgar phrenologist.

ESSAY XXI.
OF ASTRONOMY.

SECTION I.

It can scarcely be imputed to me as profane, if I venture to put
down a few sceptical doubts on the science of astronomy. All
branches of knowledge are to be considered as fair subjects of
enquiry: and he that has never doubted, may be said, in the
highest and strictest sense of the word, never to have believed.

The first volume that furnished to me the groundwork of the
following doubts, was the book commonly known by the name of
Guthrie's Geographical Grammar, many parts and passages of which
engaged my attention in my own study, in the house of a rural
schoolmaster, in the year 1772. I cannot therefore proceed more
fairly than by giving here an extract of certain passages in that
book, which have relation to the present subject. I know not how
far they have been altered in the edition of Guthrie which now
lies before me, from the language of the book then in my
possession; but I feel confident that in the main particulars
they continue the same[42].

[42] The article Astronomy, in this book, appears to have been
written by the well known James Ferguson.

"In passing rapidly over the heavens with his new telescope, the
universe increased under the eye of Herschel; 44,000 stars, seen
in the space of a few degrees, seemed to indicate that there were
seventy-five millions in the heavens. But what are all these,
when compared with those that fill the whole expanse, the
boundless field of aether?

"The immense distance of the fixed stars from our earth, and from
each other, is of all considerations the most proper for raising
our ideas of the works of God. Modern discoveries make it
probable that each of these stars is a sun, having planets and
comets revolving round it, as our sun has the earth and other
planets revolving round him.--A ray of light, though its motion
is so quick as to be commonly thought instantaneous, takes up
more time in travelling from the stars to us, than we do in
making a West-India voyage. A sound, which, next to light, is
considered as the quickest body we are acquainted with, would not
arrive to us from thence in 50,000 years. And a cannon-ball,
flying at the rate of 480 miles an hour, would not reach us in
700,000 years.

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