"Phrenology" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... saw, and being a very imperfect, inaccurate observer of forms and outlines, he attached himself chiefly to the idea of prominences (or bumps) at certain localities, and to his mode of presenting the subject we are mainly indebted for the ridicule of phrenology as a science of bumps. I have taken much pains to assure my students that cerebral science has little or nothing to do with bumps, that bumps upon the skull belong to its osseous structure, which ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, November 1887 - Volume 1, Number 10 • Various
... his deep chest and short neck were huge. This lack of proportion did not, however, interfere with his gait, which was firm and steady. The student of character would have declared the stripling to be self-reliant and secretive; ambitious and calculating; masterful, but kindly. In an age when phrenology was a mania, its masters found in his cranium the organs of what they called imagination and causality, of individuality, comparison, and locality—by which jargon they meant to say that he had a strong power of imaging and of inductive reasoning, ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... Gall have acquired immense renown for their ingenious and plausible system of phrenology. These eminent philosophers have by a novel and wonderful process divided that which is indivisible, and parcelled out the human mind into several small lots, which they call "organs," numbering and labelling them ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... explore the processes underlying these abilities. It can, therefore, never serve as a detailed chart for the vocational guidance of children, telling us which will succeed in business, which in art, which in medicine, etc. It is not a new kind of phrenology. At the same time, as we have already pointed out, it is capable of bounding roughly the vocational territory in which an individual's intelligence will probably permit success, ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... appetite for a bit of fun. It was while I was "reading, learning, and inwardly digesting" the contents of the book that Professor Fowler, the well-known phrenologist, came to Keighley and gave lectures on the science of bumps, or phrenology, in the old Mechanics' Hall—now the Yorkshire Penny Bank. I attended one of those lectures in company with Morgan Kennedy, a Keighley man, who afterwards became a professional phrenologist. When the ...
— Adventures and Recollections • Bill o'th' Hoylus End
... in mind, that I have not here spoken of their personal appearance. That that generally is against them, cannot be doubted. If there is any truth in phrenology, they must have their share of the brutal passions. The whole appearance of the cranium indeed, would lead to the conclusion that they possess few of the intellectual faculties; but, in a savage state, these are seldom called forth. ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt
... Mr. Atkinson have just published a volume entitled "Letters on Man's Nature and Development," in which they handle very boldly the subjects of Mesmerism, Clairvoyance, Phrenology, &c. It is ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... listened like a father to Elsie's confession of her thoughtlessness in giving Tim such a nervous shock. 'I used to dabble in phrenology and chiromancy, and such things, when I was young,' he said. 'As guides to character they are certainly interesting and often helpful, but, one should remember, ...
— Cicely and Other Stories • Annie Fellows Johnston
... began early, but my taste for good literature was of a much later and of slow growth. My interest in theological and scientific questions antedated my love of literature. During the last half of my 'teens I was greatly interested in phrenology and possessed a copy of Spurzheim's "Phrenology," and of Comb's "Constitution of Man." I also subscribed to Fowler's Phrenological Journal and for years accepted the phrenologists' own estimate of the value of their science. And I still see some general truths in it. The ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... do justice to the extravagance and frolic inseparable from the character of of the Irish people; nor has any system of philosophy been discovered that can with moral fitness be applied to them. Phrenology fails to explain it; for, so far as the craniums of Irishmen are concerned, according to the most capital surveys hitherto made and reported on, it appears that, inasmuch as their moral and intellectual organs predominate over the ...
— Phil Purcel, The Pig-Driver; The Geography Of An Irish Oath; The Lianhan Shee • William Carleton
... talent than for its abstract demerit," she concludes; and "Ion," which she finds beautiful morally rather than intellectually, and thinks that, as dramatic poetry, it lacks power, passion, and condensation. Reading Combe's "Phrenology," she refers to his theory that slowness of the pulse is a sign of the poetical impulse. If this be true, she fears she has no hope of being a poet, "for my pulse is in a continual flutter," she notes; and she explains to Mr. Boyd ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... attention, is evidenced by the words of that prince of modern psychologists, Professor James, when he says, "At present psychology is in the condition of physics before Galileo and the laws of motion or of chemistry before Lavoisier." I believe that phrenology has blazed the way for this new psychology. It was violently attacked by the old- school psychologists because it taught that the brain is the instrument of the mind, that the mind has a plurality of ...
— To Infidelity and Back • Henry F. Lutz
... Lake,—the dread of all honest men; the brutal M—-, who treated oxen as if they had been logs, by beating them with handspikes; and there was Old Wittals, with his low forehead and long nose, a living witness of the truth of phrenology, if his large organ of acquisitiveness and his want of consciousness could be taken in evidence. Yet in spite of his derelictions from honesty, he was a hard-working, good-natured man, who, if he ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... long neglected, and a society for the protection of ground-worms, slugs, and mosquitoes was to be incorporated without delay. With these appeared the adepts of homoeopathy, of hydropathy, of mesmerism, of phrenology, and their wonderful theories of the ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes |
