Buchanan's Journal of Man, October 1887: Volume 1, Number 9
Philosophy
Buchanan's Journal of Man, October 1887: Volume 1, Number 9
Medicine -- Periodicals; Phrenology -- Periodicals; Science -- Periodicals
Approximate correctness and incompleteness of Gall and
Spurzheim--Grand anatomical discoveries of Gall---Reception of
his doctrines--His successors--Omission of Pneumatology and
Physiology by Gall and Spurzheim--Organs and faculties
overlooked--True locations of the faculties they recognized,
Amativeness, Philoprogenitiveness, Adhesiveness, Inhabitiveness,
Destructiveness, Combativeness, Secretiveness, Acquisitiveness,
Constructiveness, Cautiousness, Approbativeness, Self-Esteem,
Firmness, Religion, Benevolence, Hope, Marvellousness, Poetry,
Ideality, Imitation, Wit or Mirthfulness, Eventuality,
Individuality, Perceptive Organs, Time, Comparative Sagacity,
Causality, Tune, Constructiveness, Language--Comments on the
Organology of Gall.
The first question that occurs to the enlightened enquirer, when he
learns that the functions of the brain have been positively determined
by experiment, is whether the cranioscopy of Gall and Spurzheim was
successful in locating the cerebral functions, and how nearly their
inferences from development correspond with the revelations of
experiment.
It is with great pleasure that I am able to say that the system of
Gall and Spurzheim was a wonderful approximation to the truth. Dr.
Gall was pre-eminently the scientific pioneer of the nineteenth
century. No single individual ever did so much to enlarge the sphere
of human knowledge, and to establish the permanent foundations of
philosophy. Up to his time, the brain of man was at once the greatest
mystery of anatomy and the repository of a greater amount of wisdom
and truth than all other realms of science which had previously been
explored. But so limited was the knowledge, and so narrow the
understanding of the learned, that the grandeur of cerebral science
was not even suspected, and, even at the present time, it is so remote
from the speculations of the learned that, like a distant star, it has
few practical relations to their life; nor will its magnitude be
realized until an ample literature shall have made its scientific
record.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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