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collection of the Phrenological Society. We have long been in the habit of trusting to this principle of measurement, and every fresh example gives us reason to entertain greater confidence in its truth. This projection is very large in the head of Julius Cæsar, sketched at the end of this volume.

It is a general doctrine of Phrenologists, that the observing faculties, as they are called, are manifested long before the reflective powers. If this were true, then, it would be fatal to Phrenology, for there is nothing more certain than that Causality and Comparison are developed in the forehead of the infant to a much greater extent than Individuality and the other organs at the base of the forehead, in the region of the knowing faculties. Indeed, these latter organs are decidedly defective, while the reflecting faculties are as uniformly large. If the persons who propounded the theory above noticed, had paid the slightest attention to facts, instead of hunting after a mere hypothesis, they would have come to a very different conclusion. Children reflect to a much greater extent than they observe. The fault of children is that of being too rapid in drawing inferences. They are apt to reason upon the foundation of a very narrow basis of facts. Their defect is that of drawing conclusions from premises that are too slender. Hence it will be found, that children are wrong in their inferences, not from the corollary being illegitimately drawn from the predicate, but altogether because of their ignorance of a number of facts which render their premises false. Any one acquainted with children, must have observed that they are continually reasoning, concluding, inferring. It is quite absurd to say that they are mere observers. The defect-if that can be so called, which nature evidently intended-of their mind, is that it reasons before it has sufficiently observed. Accordingly, it will be found that every day, as a man grows older, the observing faculties get larger in their relative proportion to the size of the reflecting region, and he is careful to collect a greater number of facts before coming to a conclusion.

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CHAPTER XI.

PERCEPTIVE FACULTIES.

DR. SPURZHEIM subdivided the Intellectual Faculties into three genera:-1st, The Senses; 2d, The Internal Faculties, which procure a knowledge of external objects, their physical qualities and relations; and 3d, The Reflective Faculties. We formerly assigned our reasons for discarding the first-named genus altogether from this Order. Physicians," observes Bichat, "have not sufficiently distinguished passions and sensations. The former have connexion with exterior objects, and give birth to the latter, which are therefore mere agents, and communicate as conductors -the cause, but participating not in the effect. Every kind of impression has its centre in the brain; for all sensations imply impression and perception. Thus the senses receive the impression, and the brain perceives it; and as the impression quits this organ, its action is suspended, and sensation ceases." We are also of opinion, that the distinction hitherto drawn betwixt the second and third genus of intellectual faculties is unsound. We do not believe that there are any faculties assigned to the purpose of reflection; which, on the contrary, we are inclined to suspect is a compound process, produced by a peculiar combination of all the intellectual faculties, and that they are all perceptive, the more proper definition of them being the organs of Simple and Relative Perception. The organs of Simple Perception are at the base of the forehead, those of Relative Perception at the middle and upper part

of it.

We also incline to the opinion, that there is no such thing as memory distinct from impression. Recollection depends on perception, and is not a conception or idea of a former impression, but a reproduction of the impression itself. When our eyes are shut, and our senses asleep, we are excluded from external impressions; the world around us is annihilated, and thoughts have nothing of the present, but depend upon the past. In our dreams the actual scenes of the day are reproduced. Some

times, indeed, objects take an eccentric shape, and we suppose that we must have created them. But the mind cannot create, it can only combine past impressions eccentrically. A blind man has the organ of Colour, but he has no conception of a picture; nor a deaf person of music. Nay, Dr. Darwin observes, that persons who have had the use of sight and hearing up to a very recent period, cease, in a short time after they have been deprived of these senses, in their dreams to experience any consciousness of objects of sight or sound. But if the mind could create the impression of external appearances, the blind and deaf should be able to form conceptions of sights and sounds. True, we see objects, and are placed in situations in our dreams, to which we can find no parallel in our waking moments. But this is thus accounted for:-A painter, in order to produce a female figure of surpassing beauty, selected from nature and art all the most admirable portions of each study. He took the beautiful limb of one copy, the elegant hand of another, the eyes of a third, the nose of a fourth, the cheeks or lips of a fifth, and so on. When, following this principle, he had completed his picture, it was discovered to be absolutely hideous; the separate features which each possessed, harmonising with their own body, were beautiful and becoming; but when disjointed and recombined in new forms, horrible beyond what invention could have conceived. Thus it is with the mind. For impres sions of external forms it is dependent upon the world without; but these once presented to it, they may be reproduced in a different order from their former arrangement. The colour which, on its first appearance to us, covered one object, may be reproduced with the figure of another. The radiant robes, the pearly complexion, and the golden locks which were associated, in their entry upon our minds, with the form of the seraphim, may be reproduced as with the countenance of the devil, making Satan more hideous; while an angel, with the visage of heaven, may walk in the sable hue of hell, making virtue horrible by its incongruous habiliments. Or the head and face of beautiful infancy may be combined with the bending frame and tottering limbs of extreme old age; changing innocency into the expression of idiocy, and the sober port of matured experience into the fantastic gambols of childhood. In short, all the diableries which pass for mental creations, are but the dissociated elements of former external impressions, reproduced in new, unnatural, and inharmonious combinations. Spectral illusions also prove that our recollections are not mere ideas or conceptions of former objects, but past perceptions reproduced; for it is certain that the spectrum is as complete as when originally seen, and appears quite involuntarily, as if it had lain a dormant impression until reproduced by some extraordinary cerebral stimulus.

The recollection of any impression can be nothing else than the original. We cannot remember what we never saw, any thing else than what we saw, or in any other manner than as we saw. If it be otherwise, it is not memory, but creation. If the impression have been obliterated, how can its image return? if it be not, then its recall is but the retained impress reproduced when the brain is re-stimulated.

The power of reproduction depends upon the vividness of the impression. That is remembered best which was most striking when it happened. A man never forgets the particulars of his shipwreck, his escape from a fire, his recovery of a large fortune, or his presentation to an office. "I remember it well," says he, "for it made a deep impression on me at the time." When the marches of the estates of great proprietors were fixed, according to ancient Scottish custom, the little boys of the parish were collected, and soundly whipped at the boundaries, as the best means of enabling them to remember their geography in after life, and to bear testimony to the locality, in the event of a dispute arising as to the extent of a particular property.

The vividness of the impression depends upon the size of the perceptive organ. A man with small Combativeness, Destructiveness, and Self-Esteem, is brow-beaten and insulted,—it hardly agitates him at all; another has these organs large,—his rage is a phrensy. There can be little doubt which of these would most easily reproduce his feelings. Mr. Milne, whose organ of Colour was so exceedingly small as not to project beyond the eyeball, could not perceive colours, and never was able to see that green was different from blue. A man, in like manner, with very small Tune, does not perceive harmony or melody; and cannot, even when he hears them, distinguish one tune from another. A fine painter or musician, on the contrary, possesses the power of remembering colours, or sounds, in the exact ratio of the power of his perception of them. Ann Ormerod heard the sounds of music as distinctly

as Handel, but they appeared to her as a disagreeable and confused noise. So, Mr. Fergusson, whose organ of Size was very small, not only did not remember, but did not perceive distances, the landscape presenting itself to his eyes as a flat surface.

The same thing occurs in purely intellectual processes. If a person detail accurately a sermon or lecture he has heard, it is said that he must have paid great attention to the orator; or, in other words, the subject must have made a vivid impression before it could be so precisely reproduced. If the recollection of a circumstance were a totally different thing from the original impression, none of those concurrent events with which it was originally associated would help us to the remembrance of it, because the impressions themselves are, in the hypothesis, assumed to have been obliterated. But we find, that if an individual endeavour to call a circumstance to our recollection, he instinctively begins to detail the time when, place where, and persons in whose company it occurred, and straightway we remember all, when the original impressions with which it was associated are again recounted. The old woman who showed Roslin Chapel had got off by heart a history of it, which she repeated fluently; but if interrupted in her story, she could not go on without commencing at the beginning again. This shows, that the order of the original impression becomes the order of reproduction, and that thus they are inferentially identical. It is thus with processes of pure ratiocination. We are inclined to think that reasoning, or genius of any kind, arises not from creation of ideas, but simply from a recombination of impressions. We perceive existences, we perceive their relations, we perceive antecedents and consequents; we detect resemblances betwixt different sets of sequences, relations, and existences. These perceptions combined, produce an integral idea, as the joint action of Form, Size, Weight, and Colour, produces a new impression, called a figure or an object. Our whole mind, therefore, is a mere storehouse of impressions made from without, which, by the action of the mind, are reproduced in new combination, and are thus called creations. One impression is allied to another, with which it was not originally associated, and thus a new image or thought is produced. And thus the highest order of mind, clothed almost with inspiration, is simply that on which the most numerous impressions have been made, and which has been most active in reproducing them in new and eccentric combination so as to form an intellectual or external image, itself to become an impression, and to be reproduced as an original thought. The combined action of a number of perceptive faculties, simple and relative, produces an idea or conception different from that which results from their separate or individual action; this idea is perceived, we think, by Eventuality, as the impression of a thought, in the same way that an object, presented to the organ of Form, is seen as the image or spectrum of a figure. Many of these thoughts, reproduced in a different series, coalesce, and a fresh idea becomes an impression, which also in future plays its part. We are often deceived with the idea, that thoughts presented to our consciousness have never occurred to us before, when simply we have forgotten the time, place, and circumstances associated with their first presentation, which individualised them, as it were, in the mind as substantive conceptions. This particularly occurred with Priestley, who wrote the same treatise twice over, having forgotten the first occasion on which the theory was impressed on his mind. So also we are inclined to think, that Shakspeare excels other men chiefly in the accurate reproduction of all the minutiae of his original impressions; so that while other poets describe a passion, he presents it exactly in the vivid reality with which it was first perceived by his intellect.

From these facts, it follows that there are as many different kinds of memory as of intellectual faculties. By not attending to this circumstance, a general misconception has arisen, that all who remember the same occurrence, remember the same thing. But much passes for memory which is not so. An individual will declare that a fact existed in a particular manner, simply because, although he had no recollection of the occurrence, he, by excluding all other modes of its existence, merely inferred that the form in which he had shaped it was the true one. Persons, too, frequently appear to remember precisely what the conduct and conversation of an individual were upon a specific occasion, when in truth they merely, from their knowledge of his character, knew what would be his behaviour. Twenty persons who have seen a picture, recognise it after a long interval, and suppose that each has the same power of memory, when probably not two recognise the same thing.

One man sees the same subject, another the same number of figures, a third the same style of colouring, and a fourth the same visual expression, and each calls this by the general term of recollection of the picture. So, of series of ideas. Large Comparison remembers the analogies, Causality the sequences, Language the very words, and Order the arrangement. All are supposed to recollect the same dissertation, while, were the individual who recollected the words asked to give an account of the argument, he would utterly fail.

From the fact, that all thought, knowledge, and fancy, arise from new combinations of past impressions being reproduced to the consciousness, and that the accuracy and perfection of the reminiscence depends upon the vivacity and comprehensiveness of the original impression, it results, that the more vivid the original perceptions either of mere thought or of the external world are, the more copious and accurate, memory, thought, and perception become. Men who merely think, and do not speak-who reason, but do not write, have not their ideas impressed upon their minds with the vividness and clearness which the adjunctive aids of time, place, and circumstance, the passion of Combativeness, the orderly array of chosen and well-defined language, lend to the depth of their impressions, and thus all their past reasoning is cast behind them and comparatively lost. "Who has not passed over with his eye," observes Coleridge, "a hundred passages, without offence, which be yet could not have even read aloud, or have heard so read by another person, without an inward struggle? In mere passive silent reading, the thoughts remain mere thoughts, and these, too, not our own-phantoms with no attribute of place, no sense of appropriation, that flit over the consciousness as shadows over the grass or young corn in an April day. But even the sound of our own or another's voice takes them out of that lifeless twilight realm of thought which is the confine, the intermundium, as it were, of existence and non-existence." Persons whose ideas are caught as they float or fly through their minds by circumstances which give them a substantial existence, and by language which imparts to them a corporeal form and pressure, never lose a single thought which appears to their consciousness; and thus, when the occasion calls for it, they can, from their well-protected storehouse, produce every idea which they ever formed, and exhibit an aptness of cogitation which never presents them unprepared. In that man who appears to speak most clearly, directly, and exclusively to the peculiar subject in hand, it will be found that the entire discourse is made up of matured general principles and statements, admitted and assumed to be known to his auditory, which are applied to the determination of the peculiar circumstances of the specific subject of investigation. Reflection and ratiocination, hitherto considered as peculiarly internal and self-originating, we trust subsequently to be enabled to show, are mere perceptions of relation; and that the most cogent or severe logic is nothing whatever but a mere statement of fact, arising generally from a perception of sequence or resemblance. Thus, when it is said, man is mortal, the discovery is the result merely of experience; when we add John is a man, therefore John is mortal, we make this an inference, simply from perceiving the resemblance of man to John, and that what is true of the whole is true of a part; a conclusion at which we have arrived, solely from having found that proposition true as matter of fact.

We here leave this subject for the present, and shall reserve the rest of our observations until we come to treat of the functions of the Reflective Faculties.

SECTION I-Organ XXII. Individuality.

THE first effort of mind seems to be the experience of the feeling of pain; then of the more articulated consciousness implied in the sensations of hunger and thirst, heat and cold, and so forth. As persons often feel hungry when the stomach is full, so they not unfrequently experience the sensation of cold, when their bodies are warm to feverishness, and possess a delusive feeling of oppression in their breathing when the air is quite pure, or smell strange odours when the external world sends nothing to their nostrils. We incline, therefore, to the opinion, that these sensations are mental; dependent for their excitement, when in a healthy state, unquestionably upon the condition of the body, as Alimentiveness is affected by the nerves of the

stomach, or Colour by the optic nerves, but still acting independently of these in the reproduction of sensations, and when diseased, even defying the state of the corporeal system altogether.

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The next mental process is that whereby we take cognizance of the external world, ́ and observe the phenomena of matter. In treating of the organ, upon the consideration of which we have just entered, Mr. Combe observes, "In surveying the external world, we may consider, first, objects simply as substances or existences, such as a rock, a horse, a tree, a man; these perceptions are designated by substantives; -in the next place, the properties and relations of things which exist, such as their form, size, weight, and colour. After these perceptions, we may notice their active phenomena; the rock falls, the horse runs, the tree grows, the man walks; these actions are designated by active verbs. As size, form, weight, and colour, are adjuncts of physical existence; time is an adjunct of action. Now, the faculty of Individuality renders us observant of objects which exist; it gives the notion of substance, and forms the class of ideas represented by substantive nouns, when used without an adjective, as rock, man, horse." Now, in surveying the external world, it is certain that we do not observe, first, objects simply as substances; and second, their properties or attributes, such as their size, form, or colour. On the contrary, what is first seen, or discriminated rather, is simply a colour, and afterwards we mark its outline, as square, round, or oblong. By touch we detect its density; and, by handling, its weight. We, therefore, even assuming the correctness of Mr. Combe's idea of the term substance, observe general properties first, and then their aggregated form in an object or existence. But as the true inquiry is, not what we first observe, but the means by which we observe it; so the finding out of what we perceive, will lead us but a little way in ascertaining the faculties whereby the operation is performed. The question at issue, is not what exists, but what we observe. For the purpose of pursuing the investigation, we here insert the following narrative of a chemical experiment. 'If a piece of silver," says Bakewell, in his Natural Evidence of a Future Life, "be immersed in diluted nitric acid, the affinity of the acid to the metal will occasion them to unite, a brisk action will ensue, and in a short time the silver will be entirely dissolved. The liquid will remain as limpid as before, and will present no difference in its appearance to indicate a change. What, then, has become of the solid piece of silver that was placed in the liquid? Its hardness, its lustre, its tenacity, its specific gravity, all the characteristics which distinguish it as a metal are gone; its very form has vanished; and the hard, splendid, ponderous, and opaque metal, that but a few minutes since was immersed in the mixture, is apparently annihilated. Must we conclude that the metal is destroyed, because its presence is inappreciable by our senses? The reproduction of the silver may be effected by introducing some pieces of copper into the solution, to which metal the acid has a stronger affinity than to the silver, and the latter will consequently be disengaged and fall to the bottom in small brilliant metallic crystals. The quantity thus deposited will be found to correspond exactly with the weight of the metal dissolved; and if the minute particles be melted and cast into the same shape that the piece of silver presented before the solution, it will be reproduced, not only the same in substance and endued with the same properties it possessed before its disappearance in the acid, but even in its pristine form!" Now, here a piece of silver, a shilling for example, round, white, hard, thick, rough in the edges, with the monarch's face upon it, is put in a glass of nitric acid which exactly resembles water. In a little time we see nothing whatever but the limpid liquid. To a certainty, the substance or object called a shilling, is there as absolutely and as much, to all intents and purposes, as ever it was; but we as certainly do not see it, or appreciate its existence in any shape whatever. The abstraction called a substance is therefore invisible, and there is not a single observing faculty we possess that can detect its existence. And why? What has occurred to render it inappreciable? Simply this, that all those properties or attributes of objects which Mr. Combe supposes to be the second thing observed, are taken from it. It has, to our senses, no size, no weight, no colour, no density, no form, no figure. These are taken away, and the substance, so far as our observation is concerned, is annihilated; restore them, and we perceive a shilling. It is clear, then, that we do not, and cannot perceive what Mr. Combe terms a substance; and that we see only its properties in combination, such as the roundness, hardness, weight, density, whiteness, and superficial extension. Had it no colour

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