Physiognomy illustrated; or, nature's revelations of character : A description of the mental, moral, and volitive dispositions of mankind, as manifested in the human form and countenance / By Joseph Simms, M.D. ... Complete in one volume and illustrated by upwards of three hundred engravings.

  • Simms, Joseph, 1833-1920.
Date:
1887 [©1887]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Physiognomy illustrated; or, nature's revelations of character : A description of the mental, moral, and volitive dispositions of mankind, as manifested in the human form and countenance / By Joseph Simms, M.D. ... Complete in one volume and illustrated by upwards of three hundred engravings. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    took a wider view of things. He saw that mind wrought through every part of the body, and that, in order to study the faculties inherent or developed by cultivation in the mind of man, every part of the body must be taken into account; and this system he called Physiognomy, a name which we have adopted, as covering the whole field of that investigation of which we speak. Standing, then, on this platform, we are able to discover what the dogmatic mind has never yet seen. Faculties are yearly being noted, and their signs observed, that hereto- fore have been unindicated. Still, we dare not say, even from the stand-point of the Physiognomist, that all the faculties in the human mind have been discovered. Lying between the zoophite and the man of cultivation, there is a strange gradation of faculties; but we cannot say that all that is possible within the sphere of mental activity and development has been brought to pass, even in the most thoroughly educated and cultivated of minds. We can tell what we have discovered, but can say nothing of that which has been unexplored. We know that Physiognomy reveals many new faculties, and calls attention to their signs, but we dare not say that Physiognomy has as yet revealed all. There are depths yet unsounded. Progress is the law of nature and the law of the human mind. As men continue going forward, so will their mental faculties increase. Already in some, as many as a hundred and even two hundred have been discovered; but who can tell what Physiognomy will bring to light, when the science has been brought to perfection? Who can say what number of faculties will be possessed by the human mind when the present sustains the relation to the future that the past sustains to the present? As the petals of the flower are unfolded by the light of the sun, so are men's minds wrought upon by minds greater than themselves. Truth begets truth, science begets science, faculties beget faculties: