CHAPTER II. PHRENOLOGY. 8 I. LIFE OF Gall. FRANCIS JOSEPH GALL was born at Tiefenbrunn, in Suabia, on the 9th of March, 1757. In the preface to his great work, Anatomie et Physiologie du Système Nerveux, 1810, he narrates how as a boy he was struck with the differences of character and talents displayed by members of the same family, and how he observed certain external peculiarities of the head to correspond with these differences. Finding no clue given in the works of metaphysicians, he resumed his observations of nature. The physician of a lunatic asylum at Vienna allowed him frequent occasions of noticing the coincidence of peculiar monomaniacs with peculiar configurations of the skull. The prisons and courts of justice furnished him with abundant material. Whenever he heard of a man remarkable either for good or evil, he made his head a study. He extended his observation to animals; and finally sought confirmation in anatomy. The exterior of the skull he found, as a general rule, to correspond with the form of the brain. After twenty years of observation, dissection, theorizing, and arguing, he delivered his first course of lectures in Vienna. This was in 1796. The novelty of his views excited a great sensation; one party fanatically opposing them, another almost as fanatically espousing them. Ridicule was not sparing. The new system lent itself to ridicule, and angry opponents were anxious, as opponents usually are, to show that what made them angry was utterly farcical. In 1800. Gall gained his best disciple, Spurzheim. Hitherto Gall had been aided by a young anatomist named Niklas, to whom he taught the new method of dissecting the brain;* now Spurzheim's mastery of anatomical manipulation, combined with his power of generalization and of popular exposition, came as welcome aids in the gigantic task of establishing the new doctrine on a scientific basis. In 1802, M. Charles Villers, the translator of Kant, published his Lettre à Georges Cuvier sur une Nouvelle Théorie du Cerveau par le Docteur Gall. I have not been able to procure this Letter, but it is in many points interesting to the historian of Phrenology, because it not only expounds the doctrine as it was then conceived, but describes the localization of the organs then fixed on by Gall. A plate represents the skull, marked by Gall himself, with the four-and-twenty organs, which at that period comprised the "original faculties" of the mind. Among these twenty-four, there are four subsequently discarded altogether: Vital Force-Susceptibility-Penetration (independent of that which characterizes the metaphysical faculty)—and Generosity (independent of benevolence.) Not only are these four astonishing organs marked by Gall as representing original faculties, but the twenty organs which were afterwards retained by him are differently localized; so that, according to M. Lélut, from whom I borrow these details, "of those twenty organs there is scarcely one which occupies the place Gall finally assigned to it." Phrenologists should give prominence to this fact. They are bound not to pass it over. In every way it is important in the history of the doctrine. It may perhaps be satisfactorily explained; but until it be so explained, it must tell against them; and for the very reason which they incessantly advance as their claim to consideration, namely, that the several organs were * Gall pays his tribute to Niklas in the first edition of the Anat. et Phys. du Système Nerveux, i. preface xv. In the second edition this tribute is omitted; not very creditably. + Lélut: Rejet de l'Organologie Phrénologique, 1843, p. 29. established by observation, not by any theory.* For, if the doctrine had been established by a mingling of hypothesis and observation, nothing would be more likely than that the first sketch of it would be immature in conception, and uncertain in details; whereas, if the doctrine grew up slowly from a gradual accumulation of rigorously verified facts, these facts would remain constant through all the tentative changes of doctrine. Gall had been twenty years collecting facts of correspondence between external configuration and peculiarities of character. He had controlled these observations by repeated verifications. Prisons, lunatic asylums, busts, portraits, remarkable men, even animals, had furnished him with facts. Unless these facts really deserve all the credit which is demanded for them, Phrenology has the ground cut from under it; and if we are to give them our confidence, upon what ground can we relinquish it in favor of subsequent facts, which deny all that has been said before? If Gall could be deceived after twenty years of observation of facts which, according to his statement, are very easily observed, because very obvious in their characters, why may he not have been equally deceived in subsequent observations? If one collection of facts forced him to assign the organ of poetry to a particular spot (on the skull marked by him for M. Villers), how came another collection of facts to displace poetry, and substitute benevolence on that spot? Are the manifestations of poetry and benevolence so closely allied as to mislead the observer? Probably Spurzheim's assistance came at the right moment to rectify many of the hazardous psychological statements, and to marshal the facts in better order. Together they made a tour through Germany and Switzerland, diffusing the knowledge of their doctrine, and everywhere collecting fresh facts. On the 30th of October, 1806, they entered Paris. In 1808 they pre * "On voit par la marche de ces recherches que le premier pas fut fait par la découverte de quelques organes; que ce n'est que graduellement que nous avons fait parler les faits pour en déduire les principes généraux, et que c'est subséquemment et à la fin que nous avons appris à connaître la structure du cerveau.”—Anat. et Phys. i. preface xviii. sented to the Institute their Mémoire on the Anatomy and Physiology of the Nervous System in general, and of the Brain in particular; and in 1810 appeared the first volume of their great work, under the same title, which work was remodelled in 1823, and published in six volumes, octavo, under the title of Fonctions du Cerveau. In 1813 Gall and Spurzheim quarrelled and separated. Spurzheim came to England, Gall remained in Paris, where he died on the 22d of August, 1828. At the post-mortem examination, his skull was found to be of at least twice the usual thickness,—a fact which has been the source of abundant witticisms, for the most part feeble. A small tumor was also found in his cerebellum: "a fact of some interest, from that being the portion of the brain in which he had placed the organ of amativeness, a propensity which had always been very strongly marked in him.' I know not in what sense the writer just quoted thinks the fact so remarkable. Tumors in other organs are not usually the indications of increased activity; nor are we accustomed to find great poets with tumors in the organ of "imagination;" great artists with tumors in the perceptive region; great philanthropists with tumors on the frontal arch; great rebels with tumors behind their ears.t § II. GALL'S HISTORICAL POSITION. The day for ridiculing Gall has gone by. Every impartial competent thinker, whether accepting or rejecting Phrenology, is aware of the immense services Gall has rendered to Physiology and Psychology, both by his valuable discoveries, and by his bold, if questionable, hypotheses. He revolutionized Physiology by his method of dissecting the brain, and by his bold assignment * The English Cyclopædia, vol. iii., Art. Gall. + To anticipate the reply that the existence of disease in the organ would provoke unusual activity of the organ, it is only necessary to state that Gall's propensity" is not said to have been called into unusual activity shortly before his death, but to have always been very active. Had there been a casual connection between the disease and the activity, increase of the activity would have followed the rapid progress of the disease. of definite functions to definite organs. To verify or refute his hypotheses, vast researches were undertaken; the nervous system of animals was explored with new and passionate zeal; and now there is no physiologist who openly denies that mental phenomena are directly connected with nervous structure; while even Metaphysicians are beginning to understand the Mechanism of the Senses, and the general laws of nervous action. The time has arrived in which it seems almost as absurd to theorize on mental phenomena in defiance of physiological laws, as it would be to adopt Stahl's advice, and consider anatomical and chemical researches futile in the study of Medicine. We owe this mainly to the influence of Gall. He first brought into requisite prominence the principle of the necessary relation between organ and function. Others had proclaimed the principle incidentally; he made it paramount by constant illustration, by showing it in detail, by teaching that every variation in the organ must necessarily bring about a corresponding variation in the function. He did not say mind was the product of organization: "Nous ne confondons pas les conditions avec les causes efficientes;" all he asserted was the correspondence between the state of the organ and its manifestations.* This was at once to call the attention of Europe to the marvellous apparatus of organs, which had previously been so little studied, except from a purely anatomical view, that no one, until Sömmerring (who was Gall's contemporary), had observed the relation between size of the brain and intellectual power, as a tolerably constant fact in the animal kingdom. This one detail is sufficient to make every reader suspect the chaotic condition of Physiological Psychology when Gall appeared. Nor has Gall's influence been less remarkable in the purely psychological direction. People are little aware how that influ * So also Spurzheim says: "Both Dr. Gall and I have always declared that we merely observe the effective and intellectual manifestations, and the organic conditions under which they take place; and that in using the word organs we only mean the organic parts by means of which the faculties of the mind become apparent, but not that these constitute the mind."-Phrenology, p. 16. |