THE STUDY OF CHARACTER 60 1 



extended and popularized by Dr. Joliann Caspar Spurzheim (1776- 

 1832), Gall's associate, and his successor as leader of the movement. 



There are two distinct aspects to the work of Gall and Spurzheim; 

 and it is not easy to understand or to set forth just how the connection 

 stood in the minds of these contributors to the anatomy and physiology 

 of the nervous system, and advocates of the locations of elaborate mental 

 faculties by means of cranial prominences. The two orders of contribu- 

 tions are difficult to reconcile either in spirit or in method. The 

 motive of "character-reading" was operative, though restricted by 

 scientific considerations. It was forcibly made the consummation of 

 a system quite irrelevant to the purpose. In the end, the practical 

 temper prevailed; and phrenology allied with physiognomy, palmistry 

 or other character-reading pretences, degenerated to the woeful state 

 of a declasse pseudo-science. Its nearness to the illuminating truth 

 served but to intensify the obscurity of its shadows. The contrast in 

 the two spheres of the career of Gall and Spurzheim serves to explain 

 why, as they travelled about Europe, they were by some called " a pair 

 of vain-glorious mountebanks," and by others placed with Newton and 

 Galileo as illustrious contributors to science. Yet the fact that phrenol- 

 ogy called larger attention to the study of character than had any 

 other movement gives it an important place in a retrospective view. 



The impressionistic origin of his phrenological interests is thus 

 recounted by Gall. When at school, he was struck by the fact that his 

 schoolmates had facilities independent of instruction; that one was 

 musical, another artistically endowed, and that this innate ability rather 

 than application was most decisive in determining progress. He seems 

 to have been annoyed at being surpassed by schoolmates who had a 

 capacity for memorizing; and in an inauspicious moment he observed 

 that these schoolmates all had prominent eyes. At the university he 

 directed his attention to students with prominent eyes, and persuaded 

 himself that in every case such men had exceptionally good verbal 

 memories; and thus was the fatal correlation made. Xot unlike 

 Lavater, he trusted to his " physiognomical sense " to recognize the 

 prominences which were to find a local habitation and a name upon 

 the phrenological chart. At church he observed the most devout of 

 the attendants, detected what portions of the skull were well-developed 

 in them, and discovered the organs of veneration. He compared the 

 heads of murderers and found an organ of murder, and similarly 

 studied the heads of thieves and located the organ of theft. He had 

 organs for the preeminent quality of each of the five senses; an organ 

 of tune for the musical, and one of number for the mathematical. He 

 thus accumulated a group of some twenty-four organs (which Spurz- 

 heim enlarged to thirty- five or more), and in this contribution disclosed 

 with strange unconcern at once his self-deception and the shallowness 

 of his psychological notions. 



VOL. LXXXVI.-=-41. 



