Sir William Hamilton and phrenology : an exposition of phrenology, shewing the complete inefficacy of the objections lately advanced in the Royal Society, and the real grounds on which the system ought to be assailed.

Date:
1826
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Sir William Hamilton and phrenology : an exposition of phrenology, shewing the complete inefficacy of the objections lately advanced in the Royal Society, and the real grounds on which the system ought to be assailed. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    bling credulity of boyhood:—and that, having- been nursed amidst the contagious bustle of travel and vicissitude, they have been educed to maturity in the excited atmosphere of clubs and disputation. Germany has not yet shaken herself free of the fogs of Gothicism: her mental pupil has not hitherto expanded in the full sunlight of discovery. She has put on, no doubt, much of the bravery of reason ; but the rags and chains of her broken thraldom are yet clinging to her limbs. She has the wing of the eagle, but wants his clear and pe- netrating eye. Phrenology may serve well enough in the gluttonous infancy of opinion, —it may excite a stare in ignorance, or im- part a tickle to phlegm ; but it will not do, we trust, among a people who are cast in the happy mean between the soberness of reason and the audacity of hope. It must sink, like the Roman traitress, under the weight of the very notice which it has invoked. In what we have observed, we do not be- lieve it can be said that we have libelled the Phrenologists. We have entered into no cavil, nor have we wished to profit by any difference. We have dealt with the System in its simplest elements; and, as far as may be done by this sort of reasoning, we flatter ourselves, destroy- ed them. Our charges against it may be summed up in a word :—They are, that the whole system of “ faculty” is gratuitous, and a lie:—that the whole machinery of “ organ” c