Observations on Dr Barclay's objections to phrenology / by A. Combe.

Date:
1823
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Observations on Dr Barclay's objections to phrenology / by A. Combe. 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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    have no foundation; and he then proceeds to shew, by argu- ment, that the phrenological conclusions are inconsistent, not with their own premises, but with certain preconceived notions of his own, altogether foreign to the question. The result is, that he fights with a shadow, and the merits of Phrenology remain exactly as he found them. The fol- lowing observations, therefore, are necessarily limited to pointing out the insufficiency of Dr Barclay's method of attack. His first and principal proposition, upon the strength of which all the others more or less depend, is so very unte- nable, that I am surprised at his stating it seriously; and if his whole subsequent reasoning had not been founded upon it, I should have passed it over as an unintentional mistake. It is as follows: that voluntary organs, or organs formed to obey the will, are not restricted to any specific modes of operation. This proposition he illustrates as follows : The human hand, says he, is not limited to acts of be- neficence, or to acts of cruelty; it is equally subservient to all the instincts, appetites and passions; equally obedient to all who employ it in the different departments of the fine arts, and to all who exercise it in the numerous fatiguing and diver- sified labours of the mechanic. An organ thus employed, in such a variety of different offices, and executing each with promptness and precision, might naturally lead the unwary to imagine, that it is composed of a great variety of subordinate organs, corresponding in number to the different duties which it has to perform. Such is the conclusion which one would draw in reasoning analogically from the works of art; but such a conclusion certainly would not follow, in reasoning ana- logically from the works df nature; for although the hand be composed of many dissimilar parts, it is not constructed on the principle of a time-piece, whereof each index, as that for the hour, the minute and the second, requires a distinct and appro.- priate apparatus. In the human hand all the parts are ob- served to combine in each operation; and it is certain, that the varieties of its operations are not so much owing to the num- ber of parts as to the varieties of their combinations; the com- binations into which they enter being almost incalculable, while the parts themselves are comparatively few, and easily counted. Taking the hand, then, as a specimen of the works of nature and of animal structure, and thence reasoning on the prin-