THE STUDY OF CHARACTER 605 



cians, nor painters, nor mathematicians." Extravagant as this may 

 appear to our scientifically minded generation, it yet represents the 

 more sober conclusions of men conversant with the science of the day. 

 In the hands of system-mongers and quacks the doctrines were carried 

 to far more capricious conclusions. 



It was the practical tendency to read character and predict capa- 

 city or even career that was responsible for the rapid deterioration of 

 phrenology. This course was set by Spurzheim, under whose influence 

 phrenological societies were founded in England and America, and 

 the world deluged with books, pamphlets, manuals, lessons, exhibi- 

 tions, charts, plaster-casts, institutes, parlor talks and street demonstra- 

 tions for the dissemination of character-reading by the bumps of the 

 head — a movement the waves of which still beat feebly along the remote 

 frontiers of intellectual venture. An excursion into these disorderly 

 by-paths — suggestive of the slums of psychology — would have little 

 profit;* it would but indicate that slight deviations in principle lead 

 to the widest divergence of result. An intellectual degradation ensues 

 as the movement descends to lower strata, — an issue not unlike the 

 social degradation of sections of cities where questionable occupants 

 inhabit the dwellings that sheltered the respectable citizens of other 

 days. Though we can not^iold the founders responsible for this issue, 

 it is yet true that they prepared the way for it by their own practises. 

 Gall and Spurzheim conducted tours in prisons and asylums, reading 

 from the shapes of the heads of the inmates the propensity to forgery, 

 theft, violence or lack of thrift which brought them to their fate. 

 One prisoner showed the "organs of theft, murder, and benevolence 

 all well developed, and, true to his organs, robbed an old woman and 

 had the rope around her neck to strangle her, when his benevolence 

 came to the surface," and prevented the fatality. 



Such was the practical degeneration and such the fallacious prin- 

 ciples by which phrenology attempted to oust physiology from its 

 domain. At the time psychology was not sufficiently developed to as- 

 sert its claim against the phrenological pretensions. Spurzheim had a 



4 The excursion would indeed serve to justify the general conclusion that the 

 sporadic survival or revival of such systems as physiognomy, astrology, phren- 

 ology, palmistry, fortune-telling, dream-interpretation, etc., is due not to the 

 appeal of their evidence, but to the persistence of the attraction of the occult 

 as well as to the promise of practical revelation. For it is characteristic that 

 this class of latter-day compendium upon "character" through the reading of 

 heads, faces, hands, etc., combines and resurrects with curious ignorance of their 

 source, with a strange insensitiveness to their mutually contradictory positions, 

 all the varied by-paths of obscure and discredited lore which we have cursorily 

 surveyed. Aristotle, Porta, Cardan, Lavater, Gall, Spurzheim reappear in doc- 

 trines, without assignment of source, in support of "systems" purporting to 

 reveal the secrets of human nature for the small consideration of the purchase 

 of the volume. The occult — representing poverty if not misery of mind — like 

 misery, makes strange bed-fellows. 



