LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. 371 



»ri"angement of the qualities of the human mind by Dr. Spurzheim must be admitted 

 on all hands to be very superior. His nomenclature of our faculties, though new, 

 are very significant, and if 



" All a rhetorician's rules 

 Teach nothing but to name the tools ;'* 



yet to name the tools correctly, and to assign to each its individual use, is certainly 

 an essential step in acquiring a knowledge of the art in which the tools are employed. 

 On a little reflection it is not difficult to conceive why such crude, such indistinct 

 notions should have been formerly put forth by philosophers who have written on the 

 doctrines of the mind. In early ages when the prejudices against human dissection 

 amounted to a prohibition of anatomizing the human body, all ideas of the mind 

 were obtained from reflection, and from considering its manifestations. Hence 

 arose the notion that mind was immaterial and distinct from matter. Mind and 

 soul were spoken of in synonymous terms. Theologians soon took hold of this 

 doctrine and their anathema fell with such disastrous fury on the head of the man 

 who dared to speak of mind as emanating from matter that but few were found fool- 

 hardy enough to raise a scruple against their adopted darling. In progress of time, 

 and knowledge, it was observed, that if the proofs of the mind in man were employed 

 to test the cerebral operations of brute animals — some of the higher brutes must be 

 allowed minds too — this position could not be borne. A new ground was therefore 

 taken — the functions of the brain in the lower animals were called their instincts, 

 while similar qualities in man were denominated his reason. This state of things 

 existed some time, and was a sort of placebo to both contending parties — 

 the materialists and immaterialists. But knowledge is a restless goddess, and 

 in her on ward march it was at length discovered that man possessed as many instincts 

 as brutes, and their instincts viewed as a whole, greatly resembled the operations 

 of his mind. Here was a sad dilemma. Mind in the lower animals ? Absurd ! 

 Reason in brute beasts ? impossible ! Besides reason, mind, and soul, were 

 immaterial, and brute animals could never, by either party, however they disagreed 

 on all other points, be permitted to have minds and souls — at this crisis, anatomy 

 shed her light on the benighted combatants. It was found that, in the scale of 

 creatures, their organ of all their instincts, their structure of brain, bore a just rela- 

 tion to their instinctive endowments — that, the brain of man — his organ or instru- 

 ment of thought and reason was composed like their's, but, unlike their's, was 

 possessed of a complexity of structure, and an addition of parts, unknown in any 

 lower creature yet examined. And now it became necessary to enlarge our philo- 

 sophy of the mental functions— to consider thought and instinct as the operation of 

 the brain, both in brutes and man, and to speak of mind as the operation of brain — 

 thus to separate the mind and soul from each othei' — the former a property of 

 matter, the latter an addition to matter — an emanation from God himself — unevi- 

 denced in the brute — unfathomable by man — connected with his mind during his 

 earthly abode, yet disenthraled at his death — returning to the God who gave it to 

 be again at his disposal. In this view of Psycology the blessings of religion and its 

 revelations are not disturbed as they were, by considering the mind immaterial — 

 for if the mind were immaterial, it could not be deranged — which we daily see 

 it is — and if deranged at death, what must be our conception of it hereafter — " the 

 soul can never be deranged nor can ever die." 



When Mr. Turley's lectures ** On the Anatomy of the Nervous System of Man and 

 of the Inferior Animals," were first announced, it did not strike us that the functions 

 of the nervous system embraced Phrenology, and we were agreeably surprised to 

 find him including this subject in his inquiry. Phrenology, or " the doctrine of the 

 special faculties of the mind, and of the relations between their manifestations and 

 the brain" has now been before the public nearly half a century, and was first called 

 craniology — and perhaps no theory of late years, has so perturbed and so divided 

 the metaphysical world — men of the highest mental rank and distinction have ar- 

 ranged themselves in opposing phalanxes, and if the public were to be led by either 

 party, the believers or the sceptics, it might receive all advanced by the former, 

 or reject all as insisted on by the latter. Perhaps, the truth in this, as in 

 many other questions, lies between. In medias res — we shall ourselves be content 

 at present to remain ; neither believing all, nor rejecting all advanced by men of 

 such endowments as — Gall, Spurzheim, Cuvier, Andral, Coombe, Elliotson, &c. &c. 



