In short, the various aptitudes, the natural faculties, the vocations of human beings, are easily explained by the doctrine of the transmigration of souls. If we reject this system, we must charge God with injustice, because we must believe that He has granted to certain men useful faculties which He has refused to others, and made an unequal distribution of intelligence and morality, these foundations of the conduct and direction of life.
This reasoning appears to us to be beyond attack, for it does not rest upon an hypothesis, but upon a fact: namely, the inequality of the faculties among men, and of their intelligence and morality. This fact, inexplicable by any theory of any received philosophy, is only to be explained by the doctrine of re-incarnations, and forms the basis of our reasoning.
Discussion for and against phrenology has been plentiful, and has ended in the abandonment of the inquiry, because the ideas of ordinary philosophy do not supply a sound theory on the subject. It has been found more convenient to ignore the labours of Gall than to endeavour to explain them. The truth is, that Gall has committed some errors of detail, which is always the case with every founder of a new doctrine, who cannot bring an unprecedented work to perfection by himself alone; but his successors have rectified the errors of the system, and we are now obliged to acknowledge that Gall's theory is correct. It is indeed simply composed of observations which everyone may repeat for himself.
When Gall's theory, or phrenology, is applied to animals, the evidence in its favour is astonishing. In the case of man the facts are almost always confirmatory of the theory. It is certain that the skull of an assassin does exhibit the abnormal developments indicated by Gall, and that, according to the doctrine of the German anatomist, the sentiments of affection, love, cupidity, discernment, &c., may be recognised externally by the bumps in the human skull. It rarely happens that the phrenologist, on examining the skull of a Troppmann, or a Papavoine, fails to trace the hideous indications of evil passions and brutality.
Unfortunately, many of our moralists find themselves seriously embarrassed by philosophy, because their views are limited by the commonplace philosophy of the day. Classic moralists ask themselves whether a man with the bump of murder in his skull is responsible for his crime, whether he is a free agent, whether he is so guilty as he is held to be, when he yields to the cruel instincts with which nature, in his case a wicked step-mother, has endowed him. Is it just to be pitiless towards a man who has only obeyed his physical conformation, almost as a madman obeys the impulses of his diseased mind? It would seem that the punishment of assassination is an injustice, and men ask themselves whether the criminal courts and the scaffold ought not to be abolished, and whether the judge who condemns to death an individual, who is not responsible for his actions, is not the real criminal?
The same reasoning, the same uncertainty apply to virtuous deeds. Is much commendation due to the man who fulfils his duties exactly, to the conscientious and faithful citizen, the honest and kindly individual, if his wise and respectable conduct be simply obedience to the good impulses communicated to him by his physical organization?
These results of phrenology were, it is evident, very embarrassing, and almost immoral. Barbarity on the part of society which punishes the guilty;—absence of merit in the well-behaved man! these consequences were difficult and painful to admit, so the world got out of the difficulty by rejecting phrenology.
It is quite unnecessary to reject phrenology; we may retain it, and congratulate ourselves on a fresh conquest in the sphere of the sciences of observation, if we hold the doctrine of previous existences. Phrenology is most naturally explained, in fact, by that doctrine. When it enters on the occupation of a human body, the soul lends to the cerebral matter, which is the seat of thought, a certain modification, a predominance in harmony with the faculties which that soul possesses at the period of its birth, and which it has acquired in an anterior animal or human existence. The brain is moulded by the soul into conformity with its proper aptitudes, its acquired faculties; then the bony covering of the skull, which moulds itself upon the cerebral substance within its cavity, reproduces and gives expression to our predominant faculties. The ancients who said, Corpus cordis opus (the body is the work of the soul, or the soul makes its body), expressed this same idea with energetic conciseness.
There is, therefore, no need to excuse a murderer, there is no need to deny his free will, there is no need to spare him the just chastisement of his crime. It is not because there are certain protuberances on his skull that the murderer dips his hands in the blood of his victims. These protuberances are only the external indications of the evil and vicious propensities with which he was born, by which he might have been warned and corrected, and which he might have conquered by the strength of his will, by a real and ardent desire to restore his deformed and vicious soul to rectitude. It is always possible, by adequate effort, to surmount the evil inclinations of one's nature; every one of us can resist pride, idleness, and envy. The man who has not corrected these bad impulses is guilty, and nothing can render a crime committed in all the plenitude of his free will excusable. Thus, neither God nor society is implicated in this question, if we accept the doctrine of the plurality of existences.
Descartes and Leibnitz have demonstrated that the human understanding possesses ideas called innate, that is to say, ideas which we bring with us to our birth. This fact is certain. In our time, the Scotch philosopher, Dugald Stewart, has put Descartes' theory into a more precise form, by proving that the only real innate idea, that which has universal existence in the human mind after birth, is the idea, or the principle of causality, a principle which makes us say and think that there is no effect without cause, which is the beginning of reason. In France, Laromiguière and Damiron have popularized this discovery of the Scotch philosopher. Thus the classics of philosophy record this proposition as a truth beyond the reach of doubt. We unreservedly admit the principle of causality as the innate idea par excellence, and we take account of the fact. But we ask the fashionable philosophy how it can explain it? In our minds there are innate ideas, as Descartes has said; and the principle of causality, which invincibly obliges us to refer from the effect to the cause, is the most evident of those ideas which seem to make a part of ourselves; but why have we innate ideas, where do they come from, and how did they get into our minds? The classical philosophy, the philosophy of Descartes, which reigns in France, at the Normal School, and among the professors of the University of Paris, cannot teach us that. It will be said, perhaps, to use the favourite argument of Descartes, that we have innate ideas because it is the will of God, who has created the soul. But such a reply is at once commonplace and arbitrary, it may be used on all occasions—it is so used in fact—and it is not a logical argument.