NewThoughtLibrary.com / DivineLibrary.org

divisions of mental faculties can be found either on the outside or inside of a skull is preposterous. Passing the experimental proof so fully given by Hamilton, that no such connection as that sometimes claimed between certain powers and certain localities of the brain can be shown to exist, we insist, that even if the fact of such a connection were proved, we should still as much as ever need an independent philosophy derived from consciousness. These regions are not labelled in the human subject. They contain in themselves no suggestion of the purpose subserved by the portion of the brain beneath them. The observer must have an antecedent idea of certain mental powers, and be ready to attribute one or other of these to the prominence under his fingers. Afterward he may confirm the act by observation. This first condition, however, failing him, the bump under discussion might as well be a protuberance on a potato as a projection on a human skull. The one, in and of itself, as a mere prominence on a round body, makes no more declaration of ideality, benevolence, language, than the other. Suppose we have made from consciousness a wrong division of powers, what is there to hinder us from transferring these errors to our map of the cranium? Nothing; they will rather inevitably thus reappear. The chart that is to guide us must be made out before we can begin to outline and number and name the divisions of our plaster bust, and equally also before we can attribute a faculty to a locality in the living subject. The absurd classification of phrenologists; such faculties as combativeness, philoprogenitiveness, secretiveness, are sufficient proof, if further proof were wanting, of this inability to find the invisible action of the mind in the visible form of its instrument. All the aid given to philosophy by an external fact is inferential, not direct; and that invisible faculty or force which is thus to be reached, on which our