Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887: Volume 1, Number 7
Religion
Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887: Volume 1, Number 7
Medicine -- Periodicals; Phrenology -- Periodicals; Science -- Periodicals
self-control, he failed to reach his just position in political life
and fell into premature mental decay from over-excitement. H., with
much less of intellectual capacity, but a better balanced organization
rose to the highest rank in the esteem of his countrymen. I., with an
intellect adapted to the exploration of the mysteries of science, of
which he gave good evidence, but lacking in all the elements of
strength of character lead a life of uniform failure, obscurity and
poverty, and yet I felt assured that a different education in youth
which would have developed his manhood and ambition and would have
carried him to eminence. J. is a man of superior intellect,
benevolence and strength of character, but the organ of love is
singularly defective in his head and his domestic life is therefore
void of happiness.
Neither the men nor the women in whom I have observed the deficiency
of the faculty of love, ever seemed to be aware of the fact or to
suspect that their intense antipathies were the product of a faulty
organization, and their discords chargeable to themselves.
K. and L. are two gentlemen richly endowed in intellect and in the
other virtues, but not in conscientiousness, in which they are
strangely deficient. This is the only defective region in their heads
and it is fully borne out in their lives, which are void of integrity
and truth, though they have escaped the condemnation of the law.
M. was a lady of intense ambition in whom the regions of love and
religion were deficient. Aspiring to be a leader in philanthropic
reform she had a limited following in an erratic course, but ended her
labors by obtaining a snug position for herself and repudiating all
she had done. N. was another would-be leader in philanthropic reforms,
who was at one time quite conspicuous, but while he had the ideal
speculative intellect to appreciate theories, he was lacking in love
and religion. His philanthropy did not pay, and he abandoned it
entirely for a life of selfish self-indulgence.
I might enumerate many more, with whose organic development I was
familiar, whose lives displayed conspicuously their organic defects of
brain, but who never seemed to understand their own deficiencies or
make any effort to correct them. Could they have been corrected in
adult life? Much might have been done if they had understood and been
admonished by Anthropology. I know of one in whom an organic defect
was pointed out, in his first manhood, who, by persistent effort, so
far overcame it as to modify the form of his head, and increase its
fulness in the moral regions. But, as the world goes, men are not
admonished, and they cherish their defects, refusing to believe that
they are faults.
It is in childhood and youth that the work of reformation is to be
accomplished, when parents and teachers shall have learned the
methods.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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