AND CRANIOGNOMY. 



507 



Spurzheim gives to this protuberance, therefore, a different and a far am- 

 pler scope, so as to cover, as all his names do, fifty or a hundred qualities 

 at the same time. He calls it, indeed, the organ of veneration, v/hich at 

 first sight appears to have an approach to the name given it by Gall and 

 Bojames ; but then he especially tells us, " that this faculty does not de- 

 termine the object to be venerated, nor the manner of venerating ; and 

 that it equally includes the veneration of God, of saints, of persons, or any 

 thing else, however mean or contemptible " Yet this is the organ which 

 Dr. Spurzheim has supposed to have been peculiarly developed in the 

 head of the Saviour. As some amends, however, for his philosophical 

 apostaoy upon this point, he makes Dr. Gall's origin of moral goodness, in 

 his explanation^ the organ of Chrutian charity,* for so he expresses him- 

 self; introduces a new organ, which Gall will not allow, and a bump which 

 Oall cannot find out, to indicate religious hope and faith, and which he 

 places next to Gall's religious bump ; at the same time totally defeating 

 the value of his amende honorable by adding, that this organ of faith and 

 hope, " in persons endowed with it in a higher degree, manifests cre- 

 dulity, "f 



Such, then, ar6 a f6W bf the inconsistencies of the new hypothesis, and 

 the discdi'dances of its diflferefit professors with each other. 



But it may be replied, that there is no reasoning against facts ; that the 

 gentlemen I allude to are men of learning and character ; and that they 

 have actually determmed the moral propensities of a multitude of persons, 

 by a reference to the rules of their own art. 1 admit the learning and 

 character of these gentlemen, and most freely pay homage to them on this 

 score ; but these quahties, though a full security against voluntarily de- 

 ceiving others, is no proof whatever against self deception. 



There is no science, perhaps, among those professed formerly, and held 

 in the highest estimation, which has fallen into more contempt than that 

 of judicial astrology. Yet this, when it was in fashion, was for ages em- 

 braced by men of the greatest learning and talents, and of unblemished 

 integrity : and who, in a thousand instances, foretold events that actually 

 came to pass : and persuaded themselves that they foretold them by the 

 rules of their own art. Such, to confine ourselves to times comparatively 

 recent, were Baptista Porta, Cardan, and Kepler, of the sixteenth cen- 

 tury : the first, the most distinguished scholar, and the two last the most 

 distinguished mathematicians of their age ; and such were the Abbe de 

 Kaincc, the celebrated founder of the monastery of La Trappe, and our 

 own two learned countrymen and poets Cowley and Dryden, in the seven- 

 teenth century. And let the school before us, therefore, boast as much as 

 they may upon this subject, we can bring far more numerous instances of 

 individuals as honest, as successful, and incomparably more learned, who 

 have devoted themselves to a science which is now utterly abandoned by 

 every man in the possession of his senses. To talk, therefore, of the occa- 

 sional success of the physiognomists before us, is to add not a barley corn 

 to the scale in their favour ; since right they must sometimes be, upon the 

 cornmon doctrine of chances and the very nature of things ; right they may 

 sometimes be, from the common physiognomy of the face : right they may 

 still more frequently be, from the artful and sweeping ampHtude of tfie 

 reply which may be made to cover a variety of tempers or propensities at 

 the sanie time ; and necessarily £tnd inYallibly right they do not profess to be. 



* i»hysibT6g.^yst. f>, 4t6, 



i Id. p. 4101 



