minutes he informs you what can be expected of it, what vices are to be guarded against, what faculties ask for exercise. Thus you can satisfy the vow of Socrates, yvw✪ɩ oɛavtov, know thyself. At the end of a certain time you may renew the experience and see what you have gained upon your pupil, what you have gained upon yourself. You can follow thus step by step the progress and the delays of education.

-But the foundations of phrenology, are they true?

II.

Few persons remember now that, before the works of Doctor Gall, physiology was still localizing the passions as in the Homeric times; and, as Plato had reëdited the matter, anger was located in the liver, courage in the heart, sadness in the spleen, and so on of the others. Gall has shown in the brain the organ in which the directing faculties of animality are found, and where the passions, inaccessible in their organic fountains, reveal themselves at least through their instrumental faculties. But after having localized the animal faculties in the brain, there remained a step which Gall did not take this was, to have removed from the brain the intellectual faculties, leaving to this organ functions purely animal. In this nomenclature of the cerebral functions, he makes the metaphysical spirit and theosophy to enter. Hence the materialism into which some phrenologists have fallen, and which has injured their science. They would have thought a mere function of the brain, reason and will organic phenomena of the cerebral tissue.

Spurzheim, who was to Gall what theory is to experience, did not depart from his master on this point. He draws no distinction between the intellectual faculties and the animal faculties.

M. Cubi is of another school, and forms the third stage in this science. With him, Materialism dethroned, Reason is disengaged from the organic function, and human liberty resumes its legitimate empire. With Gall, phrenology was empirical; with Spurzheim, it became philosophical; with M. Cubi, it becomes reasonable, ethical and religious. In his grouping he seems to change but little in Spurzheim's system, but in spirit he is quite different: there is a gulf between them.

Gall and Spurzheim, in localizing the intellectual and moral faculties in the antero-superior lobes, made of them neither more nor less than organic functions, equal in value of position to the genera

tive faculty or to combativeness: thus the intellectual faculties were materialized. If, instead of this view, you state the antero-posterior faculties as only secondary, as are, moreover, all the cranial faculties, governed by one superior principle, whence each derives at once its intelligence and its impulse-the superior principle, not localized, directing and harmonizing them, then you issue from materialism. Such is the system of M. Cubi.

The defect of this work is its labyrinthine maze of explanations that need in turn to be explained, and which might have been avoided by acquaintance with certain great works of scholastic philosophy, whose statement may thus be resumed: The brain is the central organ of the animal faculties. Its functions are complex because the animal faculties serve at once the vegetative and the intellectual faculties: the first, in aiding nutrition and generation by sensibility and motion; the second, in permitting the abstract idea by the sensible idea and in translating abstract conceptions by sensible acts. Thus the brain serves at once the vegetative and the intellectual faculties, without containing either class, and fulfils only acts of the sensible order. Thus is the point of departure clearly defined for phrenology, and its fundamental basis squarely laid.

III.

All Phrenologists start from the principle that the containing indicates the contained, and for them every cranial development corresponds to an encephalic development. Is this an axiom? It has been contested, and objections have abounded. For phrenologists, however, the exception has seemed to confirm the rule, and even in the exception they find signs that warn them against deception.

In M. Cubi's work long answers are given to his adversaries, with the relation of curious facts wherein he has proved his ability. He maintains that malconformations of the skull can be discerned, as well as their particular nature. A far more serious objection lies in the neglect by phrenology of the deep-lying parts of the brain at its base.

Again while it places amativeness and philoprogenitiveness in the cerebellum, physiological experiments prove that the function of this organ is to coördinate movements. The ground taken by Flourens has been substantiated, as any one may see by reference to Mr. Carpenter's Physiology. One of the ablest phrenologists of

America, Dr. Wm. Byrd Powell, has shown within a very limited region of the occipital bone, at the sides of the vertebral canal, what is more probably the true localization of the generative instinct.

The lines of demarcation made by phrenology upon the skull do not correspond to the natural anatomical divisions of the brain. Thus phrenology has been of no use to physiology in obtaining a knowledge of the cerebral functions. It has thrown no light upon the office of the corpora striata, the thalami, the insula, the vault, the nates and testes, the pineal gland, and many other parts of the brain.

On the chapter of pathological anatomy, M. Cubi, in answer to the numerous facts that one hemisphere of the brain having been injured the faculties have nevertheless persisted, maintains, with many physiologists, that either hemisphere may act vicariously for the other, its symmetrical counterpart. But he might have found in Mr. Longet's first volume on the Nervous System a much more embarrassing case; to wit, that of the complete destruction of both the anterior lobes of the brain, with absolute preservation of the intellectual faculties; and, on the contrary, the loss of the intelligence in connection with the preservation of the anterior lobes and destruction of the posterior lobes. How get out of such a difficulty as this? The fact is, that abolition of the memory, of intelligence, and of speech correspond to lesions of parts so diverse, that no physiologist can in the present state of science be sure that a certain part of the brain corresponds exactly to such or such a function. Thus in the mystery of the functions of the brain, UNITY seems to be everywhere, and Variety is only in its acts.

Phrenology, dethroned from the physiological daïs where Gall had fondly placed it, is not, then, in a position to control Psychology, to judge Aristotle or St. Thomas. So much pretension ill suits a science that is struggling to assure its own existence. The head is all, it pretends: it is the master of the body, the compend of its faculties; and the head is the skull. All that it is, all that it can, all that it resumes, is translated by the conformation of its case, and of this conformation phrenology is judge.

Let us not go so fast, not so far.

The brain is not, properly speaking, an instrument of the soul; the soul is united with the body as form not as a motor to that

which is moved, but as substantial compound, all whose acts hold at once to both of its components.

The soul resides in no special part of the body, but entire in each part, the variety of her acts in the different parts depending only upon the necessity of having different organizations for the different organic functions. Thus the faculties, which are the powers of the soul, essentially differ from the functions, which are the acts of living organs. In the language of St. Thomas: "Substantial forms immerge the less in matter, as they are of a superior mechanical order; so that in man the soul overflows matter, and preserves a power beyond it."

IV.

Phrenology stands outside of Physiology, without exact relations to it; it is isolated, and unclasped among the sciences. This ambiguous position seems to cause no uneasiness to phrenology; and its adepts, convinced of their results, say, We are a fact, and against a fact no argument holds good.

Here we enter into another order of ideas. No more metaphysics, philosophy or physiology; nothing but to see, to measure and to weigh, and experience alone can decide. Certain minds there are whom the absurd repels, and who, considering phrenology as such, will refuse to it even the appeal to experiment. We shall not be so rigorous. If experiment assures as clearly the truth of phrenological deductions as it demonstrates the power of infinitesimal doses, why not accept the results? Do infinitesimal doses fail to act because their action is not to be imagined? If phrenology is a fact which experience assures, we must submit and let reason make the most of it she can.

Those who are led by the authority of men will find large satisfaction in the work of M. Cubi, which the Emperor of France himself caused to be translated into French and published there, after be had had a long conference with the author.

Spurzheim, whose system is generally adopted, sensibly modified that of his predecessor. He increased the number of faculties recognized up to thirty-seven, he changed their denomination, and he classified them. Feeling acutely the justice of many censures on the denominations of Gall, he changed them in order to substitute for an appreciation too narrow and special, another more general and philosophical.

"The acts of the soul proceed rarely from a single faculty, but very often from abuses of the faculties; wherefore Gall's nomenclature has always appeared to

me defective. No organ ought ever to be denominated by its action. The names theft and murder, given at first to two organs, have lent arms to our adversaries. There are, it is true, individuals who from their childhood steal, or who have a strong propensity to murder, and a certain region of the head is salient in these persons; but all who have this region salient are not robbers or assassins. Gluttony and drunkenness depend on some organic cause, but no one has spoken of these maladies. The abuses of physical love depend on a certain organic irritation, but it would be the height of absurdity to speak of an organ of adultery. Gall committed an error in adopting faculties for acts, and naming them accordingly. It was necessary to modify this manner of considering phrenology. I shall try to specify the nature of the mental actions or manifestations of the soul, and to name the faculties abstracted or independent from all action and application, distinguishing completely what belongs to each faculty considered in itself, exclusively, from what is to be referred to the action of the same combined with other faculties."

In proceeding to his classification, Spurzheim observes that all the faculties belong to either the affective or the intellectual group. Then he subdivides the affections into impulsive propensities and emotional sentiments, while his intellectual group comprises the perceptive faculties. This tabular arrangement and mapping is

familiar to the public.

In this nomenclature, memory is suppressed-every faculty, as Spurzheim teaches, having its own memory. Remarkable fact! The first observation of Gall is considered as false; the first step of phrenology is regarded by the phrenologists as an error! This is not the first lesson the sciences have taken from the game of blind man's buff.

Cox censures the distinction into propensitive and motor, observing that every faculty is an inclination. But we will not stop at Cox, nor at Combe, nor at Caldwell, still less at the Fowlers, et id genus omne, but come at once to M. Cubi, who forms another school.

M. Cubi objects to Spurzheim's classification, not only because the sentiments are inclinations, but also because all the faculties are essentially both affective and intellectual, and all possess memory and attention. He does not accept, like Gall and Spurzheim, the independence of the faculties; he considers them as harmonizing together in mutual excitement and alliance, and even in their oppositions. Finally, he admits an abstract reason superior to them all and presiding over them. This reason he isolates from the will, which he associates with the faculty of comparison. He admits forty-seven faculties, arranged in four classes: