June 1848.
THE HAND
PHRENOLOGICALLY CONSIDERED,
&c. &c.
CHAPTER I.
“The form and posture of the human body, and its various organs of perception, have an obvious reference to man’s rational nature; and are beautifully fitted to encourage and facilitate his intellectual improvement.”—Dugald Stewart, Moral Philosophy.
THE BRAIN THE ORGAN OF MIND.
From the time of Thales and Pythagoras to our own day the opinions of metaphysicians have been divided with respect to the mode in which ideas take their origin. Some, with Descartes and Leibnitz, have contended that the faculties of the mind are innate—that is, that they originate solely from within; while others, with Locke and Condillac, affirm that they are acquired, and in all cases derived, from impressions received through the medium of the senses,—“Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu.”
However it may be with respect to this controverted point, whether ideas originate from without or from within, it is at least certain that the manifestations of the mind, far from being independent of, are, on the contrary, closely linked and connected with, the conditions of matter. Hippocrates, when sent for by the Abderites to cure Democritus of his supposed madness, found him busily engaged in dissecting the brains of animals for the purpose of ascertaining the organs and causes of thought. That the brain is the organ through which the manifestations of mind are made known to us, was therefore suspected by Democritus; and the accumulated experience of centuries has rendered that a certainty which with him was but a mere conjecture. In the language of an eloquent modern writer, “Where shall we find proofs of the mind’s independence of the bodily structure,—of that mind which, like the corporeal frame, is infantile in the child, manly in the adult, sick and debilitated in disease, frenzied or melancholy in the madman, enfeebled in the decline of life, doting in decrepitude, and annihilated by death?”