HYPOTHESES. 21 



6. It is perfectly consistent with the spirit of the 

 method, to assume in this provisional manner not 

 only an hypothesis respecting the law of what we 

 already know to be the cause, but an hypothesis 

 respecting the cause itself. It is allowable, useful, 

 and often even necessary, to begin by asking ourselves 



natural magnet with two poles, was originally an hypothesis of the 

 celebrated Gilbert. 



Another hypothesis, to the legitimacy of which no objection can 

 lie, and one which is well calculated to light the path of scientific 

 inquiry, is that suggested both by Dr. Arnott and Sir John Hers- 

 chel, that the brain is a voltaic pile, and that each of its pulsations 

 is a discharge of electricity through the system. It has been 

 remarked, 'that the sensation felt by the hand from the beating of a 

 brain, or even of the great arteries, bears a strong resemblance to a 

 voltaic shock. And the hypothesis, if followed to its consequences, 

 might afford a plausible explanation of many physiological facts, 

 while there is nothing to discourage the hope that we may in time 

 sufficiently understand the conditions of voltaic phenomena to 

 render the truth of the hypothesis amenable to observation and 

 experiment. 



The attempt to localize, in different regions of the brain, the 

 physical organs of our different mental faculties and propensities, 

 was, on the part of its original author, a strictly legitimate example 

 of a scientific hypothesis ; and we ought not, therefore, to blame him 

 for the extremely slight grounds on which he often proceeded, in an 

 operation which could only be tentative, though we may regret that 

 materials barely sufficient for a first rude hypothesis should have 

 bem hastily worked up by his successors into the vain semblance 

 of a science. Whatever there may be of reality in the connexion 

 between the scale of mental endowments and the various degrees 

 of complication in the cerebral system (and that there is some such 

 connexion comparative anatomy seems strongly to indicate), it 

 was in no other way so likely to be brought to light as by framing, 

 in the first instance, an hypothesis similar to that of Gall. But 

 the verification of any such hypothesis is attended, from the peculiar 

 nature of the phenomena, with difficulties which phrenologists have 

 not hitherto shown themselves even competent to appreciate, much 

 less to overcome. 



