Phrenology : and its application to education, insanity, and prison discipline / by James P. Browne.

  • Browne, James P.
Date:
1869
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Phrenology : and its application to education, insanity, and prison discipline / by James P. Browne. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    entertained by themselves, and by all the rest of the Greek philosophers, in regard to the connexion between the faculties of the mind and the organs of the body. In truth, they had no accurate notion of the physical agents by which the mind of man is enabled to gain a knowledge of substances and their qualities, and of events, with their antecedents and probable consequences. And they were equally in the dark as to the nature of the means used by the Creator for diversifying the human character. They knew not how it came to pass that Heraclitus was by natural instinct a purely speculative philosopher, and a desponding recluse; while Democritus was an able and willing administrator of state affairs, and an indefati- gable investigator of the hidden forms of physical things, and of the intricacies of their combinations. Demo- critus of Abdera, says Lord Bacon, was a great philosopher, and, if ever any man amongst the Grecians, a true naturalist, a surveyor of many countries, but much more of nature; also a diligent searcher into experiments, and (as Aristotle objected against him) one that followed similitudes more than the laws of arguments. Now, of all the researches of this great naturalist, none of them attracted the notice of the men of his time so much, perhaps, as his dissections of the human brain. To this practice he was led by a conviction that the brain was the seat of the soul, or mind. And, doubtless, a man of his superior penetration and sagacity could not fail to suspect that this abode of the mind must be composed of several compartments, each of which forms the residence of some special mental faculty. Aristotle, who followed him, after a long interval of time, was also a great naturalist. He went so far, with regard to the constitution of the brain, as to divide