250 STUDIES IN LlfE AND SENSE. 



XII. 



THE MIND'S MIRROR. 



IN very varied fashions has philosophy endeavoured at various 

 stages of its career to solve the problem of the face as the mind's 

 mirror, and to gain some clue thereby to the ways and workings of 

 the brain. Often when philosophy was at its worst and vainest, has 

 the problem appeared most certain of solution. From classic ages, 

 onwards to the days of Lavater, Gall and Spurzheim, the wise and 

 occult have regarded their systems of mind-localisation as adapted 

 to answer perfectly all the conditions whereby an enquiring race 

 could test their deductions. But as time passed and knowledge 

 advanced, system after system of mind-philosophy has gone by the 

 board, and has been consigned to the limbo of the extinct and non- 

 existent. Now and then the shreds and patches of former years are 

 sought out by the curious to illustrate by comparison the higher and 

 better knowledge of to-day ; and occasionally one may trace in the 

 bypaths of latter-day philosophies, details which figured prominently 

 as the sum and substance of forgotten systems and theories of matter 

 and of mind. So that the student of the rise and decline of philoso- 

 phies learns to recognise the transient in science as that which is 

 rapidly lost and embodied in succeeding knowledge, and the perma- 

 nent as that which through all succeeding time remains stamped by 

 its own and original individuality. 



Especially do such remarks apply to the arts which have been 

 employed to find "the mind's construction'*' in face or head. If 

 Lavatef's name and his long list of " temperaments " are things of 

 the far-back past in science, no less dim are the outlines of the ex- 

 tinct science of brain-pans, over which Gall and Spurzheim laboured 

 so long and lovingly, but for the name of which the modern student 

 looks in vain in the index of physiological works dealing with the 

 subjects "phrenology" once called its own. Pursued together in 

 out-of-the-way holes and corners, the systems of Lavater and Gall 

 are represented amongst us to-day chiefly by devotees whose ac- 

 quaintance with the anatomy and physiology of the brain is not that 

 of the scientific lecture-room, but that of the philosophers who deal 

 in busts, and to whom a cranium represents an object only to be 

 measured and mapped out into square inches of this quality and half- 

 inches of that. Neglected because of their resting on no scientific 

 basis, the doctrines of phrenology and physiognomy have died as 



