1874.] Physiology of the Brain. 57 
taste and capacity for the observation, description, and 
arrangement of material facts, who are singularly deficient 
in the power of contemplating abstract existences. The 
majority of men appear to require a physical substratum 
for their thoughts. Their ideas are almost limited to images, 
or pictures of outward objects presented by the external 
senses; or secondly, to conceptions of actions being a change 
in the relation of material objects; or thirdly, to bodily 
sensations arising from the action of the external senses. 
Hither the specialised senses—taste, smell, hearing, and sight 
—or the diffused sense of feeling, co-extensive with the 
surface of the body, and hence adopted as a generic term, 
and applied metaphorically (with its opposite poles, pleasure 
and pain) to all internal affections. They have not adequate 
power of abstraction to separate the subjective from the 
objective. Not analytical power sufficient to dig phantoms 
from their consciousness, isolate them from their surround- 
ings, and hold them continuously before their mental vision 
for contemplation. They catch a glimpse of a figure fora 
moment, but before they have time to study its features it 
dissolves away like a wreath of mist. Now the subject 
matter of Phrenology is mental qualities, not material 
objects ;. whilst, in addition to its abstract basis, it superadds 
the doctrine of the dependence of the mental functions on 
certain external relationships of form and size, successfully 
to appreciate which demands an amount of preliminary 
study hardly likely to be expended on the problem, by those 
to whom one of the factors in the equation presents the 
aspect not merely of an unknown, but of an incom- 
measurable quantity. Non omnia possumus omnes, indeed, 
it is usually those whom some predominating instinct 
prevents being too discursive and keeps in one path of 
study by whom additions to the sum of human knowledge 
are made. Let us be thankful to the student, whose range 
of thought is limited to objects of sense, for his con- 
tributions to his own department ; but do not let us regard 
him as an authority in others, nor commit the shallow 
blunder of citing his indifference to, or disbelief in, the 
invisible rays at the higher extremity of the spectrum as an 
argument for their non-existence. We have cultivators of 
the physical sciences, mathematicians, astronomers, natural 
philosophers, chemists in abundance, plenty of naturalists, 
ready to seize and describe all the peculiarities in form, 
size, weight, colour, distribution, and habits, of everything 
that has life. We have even a limited supply of meta- 
physicians and psychologists, who deal with abstractions and 
VOL. IV. (N.S.) I 
