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faculties; and it does not seem, in any degree, to store or record their impressions; offices which are confined, we should presume, to the Intellectual powers. But, probably, by a fervour of conception, and extreme aptitude for belief, it easily imagines the existence of what is impalpable or absent, and stimulates the knowing faculties to realise in form, what in thought is yet but fantastical. Its resemblance in apparent function to the neighbouring organ of Imitation, is too palpable to escape notice. The action of the latter seems to enable the mind to reproduce the phantasmata of passion, form, expression, and utterance, and thus to give the power of presenting the spectrum of past or absent objects. What indeed is the imitation of any thing that has been seen or heard, but the result of a vivid conception of the actual form, object, or sound? From this circumstance we have been inclined to suspect, that Wonder is at least as much concerned in success in all imitative arts as Imitation itself; the former probably stimulating to great fervour of conception or recollection the perceptive faculties, and the latter producing that intense sympathy of action which has been observed in the higher paroxysms of the organ of Imitation. We have hitherto noticed the more excessive forms of the manifestation of Wonder; but it must evidently have some useful ordinary function. Man is a progressive being; and in this power of his nature, he is principally assisted by being enabled to avail himself of all the knowledge and thought of others. It is because each generation is enabled to put a round to the ladder of human progress, by availing itself of the steps furnished by the preceding-because, instead of each man being compelled by himself to commence at the rudiments of every science, and to collect all the facts which must be discovered preparatory to the formation of general principles, he is at once put in possession of every thing which has been ascertained before, and is the heir of all the theories and all the deductions which have been formed by his predecessors. But, in order to render these available to him, he must put them in the place of realities; he must be impressed with the conviction that they are as absolutely existences, as any thing that he sees with his eyes and handles with his hands; he must be impressed with their presence, not even simply as a fact, but in all the fervid conception of the existence of their real substance and proportions. It is upon this pivot that progression turns. If there be not an inherent and vital sense of the entity of things absent, every generation must at once throw behind it all the accumulated testimony of the past. The conviction of the reality of unseen and unfelt being, is a necessary condition of progression; man, in truth, only learning and forming principles by making the past present, the unseen apparent, the mysterious plain. This he cannot do but by the possession of a faculty of belief; and according as he possesses it, will be the power of realising. Hence we find, that mankind, so far from having a tendency to scepticism, have to undergo a process of unlearning, and to be rather taught by experience to disbelieve than to credit. The state of infancy, in which this organ is most prominently developed, is an age of credulity. Life, existence, is infused into every thing: the doll is a person, the watch has life, the cat has conversation. Every fictitious appearance is supposed to be real; and life is a splendid pageant, in which the true and the false are mingled together in one common impression of actual being. Did the child inquire into the truth of all it was taught, it would spend its life in rudimental discovery; while, we know that much of its after time is lost in unlearning the ideas of vital power in which Wonder had clothed all-in sobering down its impressions to the dry bareness of the facts, and in discovering that much which it endowed with reality was dead, inert, and spiritless.

We are inclined to the opinion, that in the inductions of the most severe philosophy, this principle holds its own and a most important place. Dr. Brown, in his able Treatise on Causation, has demonstrated, that causes stand in no other relation to effects than as antecedents. He has also shown, that at first they receive no other title; and that it is only after cause has preceded effect, and effect has followed cause invariably, that we conclude from the constancy of past sequence that the same uniformity will occur in future, and are induced to change the name of antecedent into cause. But mankind do not so reason. They feel at once and at first, that there is some efficient and vital power in the antecedent to produce the consequent; that they do not stand in the relation of sequence merely, but that the one animates and creates the other. We incline to the belief, that to the organ of Wonder is to be attributed this tendency, and that the province

of reason is rather to correct the impressions of this sentiment, than to create causes or trace effects. The original idea of all causation seems to be that of some inherent vital power dwelling in all existences, calculated to produce certain defined or mysterious results. Were objects to be presented to the intellect simply in the relation of sequence-as, before inquiry, they ought all to appear-we do not see how the impression of the relation of cause and effect could be, as in children, savages, and ordinary men, it is produced on the very first presentation of the objects -the discovery which ascertains that, in fact, there is no relation whatever requiring generally more labour and discrimination, than to detect in sequence some principle of causation.

All the feelings, if in excess, exhaust the objects of sense and reality, and by involuntary action create beings of their own. Wonder, above all, when large, is not to be satisfied with what merely is. When the mind is filled with anxious thoughts, intense feelings, and overmastering passions, the sense of reality comes to their aid, creates what they imagine, causes to be what they merely felt the dim shadow of, and calls into life and being what they feared or hoped, or hated or loved. Wonder is ancillary to the rest-the Alladin's lamp that evokes the genii of all the powers of the earth-the magic ring-the wishing cap-the seven-league boots, or the flying horse. It is situated immediately in the neighbourhood of Constructiveness, whose fertile genius reconciles all its contradictions, imagines readily the various latent particulars necessary to make its parts hang together, and, universal peace-maker of theories, gives a consistency to the greatest incongruities. Acting together, they compose and produce marvellous yet feasible stories; and, beginning by imposing on others, end-such is naturally the result of that very credulity which invents so easily-by imposing upon themselves.

To a true poet, Wonder is at least as necessary as Ideality. The latter is the organ by which perfection is perceived or selected; the former is that whereby the objects of selection are conceived, recalled, and presented for its choice. It is Wonder which makes the machinery of poetry,-impersonating the linnet, the lute, the rose, the nightingale, the rude sea, and the rattling thunder. It is developed very largely in the head of Chalmers, who is distinguished for the strength and copiousness of his imagery, and the vivid reality of person, object, or thing, which glows in his compositions.

Peron and other travellers in New Holland, mention, that the natives of that country are the only people hitherto discovered who have no conception of a God, or the existence of any supernal being. They do not labour under any deficiency of Veneration; which, indeed, considered relatively to the other organs, is large. But they are lamentably deficient in Wonder, which gives the sense of presence or vitality to what is absent or lifeless; and in Constructiveness, which produces the desire of accounting consistently for, and reconciling in theory, all phenomena. And thus are they Atheists, not from a sceptical disbelief of evidence, but from never having formed a conception of any thing that was not present to the senses. Veneration superinduces the sense of our own unworthiness; Wonder that of the personality of a First Cause or Intelligent Power in the elements-the attributes of the Being, of course, taking their shape from the leading tendencies of our own minds; a low intellect conceiving only a grovelling deity, while an elevated soul gives a lofty character to its conception. Without this organ of Wonder, faith in a God, or invisible power, is impossible; by faith, meaning not a conviction merely of the abstract proposition, that there is a First Cause, but the real sentiment that there is a Being with certain attributes, whose spirit we conceive, whose character we truly love, and whom we feel not to be far from every one of us. We say, that the man with deficient Wonder cannot be any thing else than practically a sceptic, because he naturally is so weak in the power of conception necessary to see "God in clouds, or hear him in the wind," that with him faith is a moral impossibility. Of course, we do not mean that such belief cannot, by a miraculous interposition of the Deity, be superinduced; but as God, even in the miracles recorded in the New Testament, always works by means, and as in the case of an individual with small Wonder the means are wanting, it appears to us unlikely that such a one should be selected as the subject of the miracle of regeneration. If, then, a large developement of Wonder is always found in believers, it will not be easy to prove that their faith is not the result of that organ, instead of being produced by a miracle. At all events, it is

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quite certain, that in this country, and in modern times, faith is present or absent invariably in the proportions in which this organ is developed.

The ordinary operation of this organ, in the every day occurrences of society, appears in the production of easy belief, or gullible credulity. When weak, the individual is sceptical of every thing. He will credit nothing that he has not seen himself, or that is not within the probable range of the most commonplace occurrences. Such a man is actually as much hallucinated as he who is over-credulous, and is just as likely to be less or more mistaken than the other, according as truth or error is more common in the world. The one believes upon slight evidence; while the other is incredulous even when the evidence is conclusive. Hence, we doubt whether there ever was or could be a great and comprehensive mind where Wonder was deficient. Nature is the most wonderful of all things; sober fact the most marvellous; "Truth is strange, stranger than Fiction;" human nature is astonishing; the history of mankind is full of bizarrerie and monstrosity. Who, without immense Wonder, could ever have imagined, that the fixed and firm-set earth on which he stood, rolled round the sun with a velocity that put to shame all other speed? Who that was sceptical, could ever have asked himself, why does an apple not fall upwards, or remain in air suspended? It requires a vast and luxuriant fancy to believe in and conceive of the real essence of things; and every sceptic is in fact credulous, when he disbelieves so much in the face of evidence which warrants unbounded credulity. All great men have possessed large Wonder,-the power of realising the absent, and of rendering the spiritual corporeal: Napoleon, Cæsar, Shakspeare, all had large Wonder. In the discoverers of continents, and new principles in nature, it is equally striking: Columbus, Galileo, Hahnemann, Gall, Socrates, Van Helmont, were distinguished for the size and manifestation of this important organ.

Wonder transports us to whatever locality we conceive of, or to the presence of whatever beings are described to us. It is necessary to give, in the reader or hearer, effect to the pictures of the poet or orator; and to make us feel that we are in Venice or Athens or Rome, or confronted with Richard or Brutus or Hamlet, or are living in past ages and in different times. It is upon this principle, that a liar of the mere long-bow kind, who has a wonderful story about every thing, at last brings himself to believe what he palms upon others; and it is from a desire to incite in them the sense of reality felt by himself, that he loves to embellish, while he would scorn any other species of dishonesty. To be an accomplished liar, there must be in the person's own mind a strong although fictitious credence, in order to obtain belief. The impersonation of brutes or inanimate objects, as in fables—or in Washington Irving's dance of the room furniture, where an old great-coat sidles up to an arm-chair, and the tongs perform a pirouette to the admiration of the clothespress-is the result of the activity of Wonder.

The discovery and analysis of this organ, is calculated to be of much benefit to society, by disabusing it of the very prevalent idea, that a credulous visionary is necessarily of unsound mind, or must be a fool. It may also teach the world a lesson of charity, towards those whose religious feelings are principally excited through this organ. Baron Swedenborg, from his religious writings, is generall termed a crazy enthusiast. Yet it is only necessary to examine his works upor philosophy, and to trace through his life the important public offices he filled with so much ability and sound discretion, in order to see how false and absurd so fou an epithet would be when applied to this excellent man. We are intimately ac quainted with one of his followers, a gentleman belonging to one of the most re spectable departments of the legal profession in Scotland. We have had frequent occasion to transact lengthened, intricate, and complicated business with him, and do not hesitate to pronounce him as distinguished for knowledge of his profession, as for dexterity of argument, and clearness of perception and sagacity. From his head, (of which a sketch is given below,) a Phrenologist would be quite prepared for this; as also to expect some extraordinary manifestations of Wonder, which is very large, accompanied with excellent Constructiveness. Accordingly, he has often assured us, that he had a direct revelation from heaven of all the events which have hap pened in Europe since the French revolution. He also gave us day and date for a rebellion which had happened in Tartarus, and minutely described the negotiations that took place betwixt the ringleaders and various ambassadors who were sent from heaven to keep the unruly members in order. Visions of the Deity

in his “human form," as he expressed it, were not hidden from him; and he declares, that the true church, as well as the most civilised of the nations, will certainly be found in the centre of Africa, where, it is said, the greatest number of horses are to be found-these quadrupeds, according to one of the three modes of interpreting Scripture which he has adopted, being emblematical of wisdom. In producing these theories of interpretation, Constructiveness must be in active requisition. Wonder, as well as Imitation, is very large in the head of Victor Hugo, and indeed in that of all great novelists.

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SECTION VII.-Organ XIX. Ideality.

THE situation of the organ of Ideality, has, we think, been in general incorrectly indicated by Phrenologists, and erroneously marked on most, if not all, of the model busts. It is generally placed in a situation immediately below and at the outside of Wonder, and exactly above and adjoining to Constructiveness. Now, in our opinion, there are no organs intervening betwixt these, which appear to monopolise all the anterior portion of the coronal surface, and superior part of the front of the side of the head. Gall describes the position of Ideality as "above the temples, in a direction backward and upward." In his model bust, and in that of Vimont, the centre, or perhaps almost the front edge of the organ, is intersected by the suture which joins the frontal and parietal bones, immediately above Acquisitiveness and behind Wonder, just in front of, or perhaps almost a continuation downward of, the organ of Hope, resting upon the ridge running from Cautiousness to Tune. It is pretty accurately indicated in the model bust, by that portion of the cranium which is marked with a point of interrogation, thus (?); and to which Mr. Combe has been inclined to assign the sense of the Sublime. In the head of Francois Cordonnier, whose bust Gall was in use to exhibit as possessing a very large developement of this organ, the projection of the head in front is altogether in the line of Acquisitiveness, but towards the posterior part it protrudes laterally to a great extent at the region we have just assigned to Ideality. Vimont's new organ, called the sense of the Beautiful in the Arts, is described as occupying pretty nearly the place at present supposed to belong to the organ we are considering.

Gall denominated this the Poetical faculty; and Spurzheim changed it to its present name, Ideality. Vimont protests against the alteration, and with a spice of Dr. Elliotson's bitterness, accuses Spurzheim of giving it a new title for the mere purpose of subtracting from the merit of Gall, and adding to his own. He most properly observes, that he has changed the name from a correct and intelligible one, to a title which is equally obscure and absurd. He says, that the ideal is the mere fanciful, whether beautiful, sublime, or mean and vulgar, which belongs to Wonder; and it is the beau-ideal which constitutes, what both of the writers mean by this faculty, and which is well defined by Gall as the sentiment of poetry.

In contemplating the condition of the lower animals, we cannot fail to be struck with the fact, that it has been, and is, perfectly stationary. The population of the

earth, the air, and the waters, all have paused and stood still. As they sprung at first from the hand of Omnipotence, so they stand now, perfect as their nature could admit of, permanent, unprogressive. A few months after they are born, they are as complete, and as absolutely without spot or blemish, as they are ever capable of being. Should they live for fifty years, they learn nothing, and make no higher acquirements. Not only is this the case, but they derive absolutely nothing from each other, and communicate only what may be sufficient in their infant state to enable them to fly, or to discern their food. They live in societies, but add nothing to mutual comfort; being as unprogressive, either as individuals or as a species, as if each lived for ever apart from all the rest. It is apparent from their faculties and nature, that in a short time they have fulfilled the purposes of their creation, and being intended for nothing more than what they are, and do, and feel. Without free-will, which they may abuse, or an amount of intellect sufficient to control, but with only enough to assist their instincts, and with no attribute of change or faculty of improvement, it is apparent that their end, nature, and destiny, are entirely served in their present state, and that, neither giving knowledge or benefit to others, nor receiving any in return, they bring as little as they leave, and both what they get and what they give amounts to-nothing.

Of man, on the other hand, the very reverse of all this is true. He is born a poor, feeble, muling creature, as helpless as the meanest thing of life; and if he be left solitary to self-education, he is little above an idiot, or starts a savage, without house, or home, or shed, or shelter. But does he, like the lower creation, remain what he was, the same in desire, emotion, and instinct, hunting, going naked, or climbing the forest trees? Has he exactly the same house in form, size, and shape, that he had at first? Has he, in all ages, precisely the same language, cries, gestures, habits, and tastes? The answer is, emphatically, No! From the moment each individual is born until he dies, he is acquiring something new, and learning what he did not know before; and whenever society is formed, he ceases to stand still. From the rudest but to the stateliest palace, from the frail canoe of bark to the line-of-battle ship, he proceeds. From the annals of his petty tribe, he learns the history of the world; and from ignorance of the principles of the most common phenomena of nature, he progresses to a knowledge of all the laws of creation; and, looking through and beyond space to myriads of worlds, he dives with Newton almost into the counsels of Omnipotence. He proceeds on and on, for ever—he is insatiable. When he is most wise, he looks upon what he knows as nothing to what he may acquire. The world is too mean for his aspirations and desires, his thoughts are boundless, and his eyes are turned to eternity. Whence is all this? Why is man alone marked out, in the theatre of creation, as a being that is never to stop? and while all else pauses and proceeds not, why is it that he alone never tarries, and never ceases to progress? The answer is plain: the faculties of man are capable of indefinite expansion and advancement, while those of the other animals are only fitted for a definite and unchangeable condition. Yet is it quite possible, that man might have all faculties adapted for progress, and, notwithstanding, remain stationary. If he did not entertain the desire to be better than he is, his other powers would not be directed to that end. They afford the means of improvement, but do not produce the desire. Veneration might for ever worship, without endowing the divinity with a more elevated character. Benevolence might continue to do good, but never extend its sphere or means of happiness; and Hope might continue to smile upon the most grovelling state, without ever imagining that it might be improved. All the feelings might demand a change of object, limiting their desires to the kind not the degree of mutation. To advance, we must desire to do so; and this desire is furnished by Ideality.

This organ gives us the disposition of making and thinking every thing better than it is. Whatever is seen is enhanced and magnified. We cannot rest in realities, or dwell upon any thing merely as it stands. Whatever object we behold, we wish it to be better; and if we possess large Wonder and Hope, we conceive it better. Luxuries become necessaries,-every thing progresses, all is magnified, enhanced, beautified, adorned, enchanted. A pestilent congregation of vapours becomes a brave o'erhanging firmament, a majestical roof fretted with golden fire. It is this that makes the temple solemn, the palace gorgeous, and cloud-caps the towers. It exalts the delight of every organ, enhances the emotions to the raptures of an ecstasy, sublimates the objects of the faculties, and beautifies the relations

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