“God exists,” adds he, “for there is an organ to know and adore him.”[69]
But he continues: “Climate and other circumstances may obstruct the development of the cerebral part, by means of which the Creator designed to reveal himself to his creature man.”[70]
Again: “If there were a people whose organization should be altogether defective in this respect, they would be as little susceptible as any other kinds of animal, of the religious idea or sentiment.”[71]
Further: “There is no God for beings whose organization does not bear the original stamp of determinate faculties.”[72]
What! If I happen not to possess a little peculiar organ, (for it may be wanting,) can I not feel that God exists! And how can I be an intelligence, knowing myself, and yet not knowing that God is? I do not more strongly feel that I am, than that God is. “This idea,” (the idea of God) says Descartes, “is born and produced along with me, just as is the idea of myself.”[73]
My understanding, which perceives itself and feels itself to be an effect, necessarily perceives the intelligent Cause which produced it. “It is a very evident thing,” says Descartes again, “that there must be at least as much reality in a cause as in the effect it produces; and since I am a thing that thinks, whatsoever be in fact the cause of my being, I am compelled to confess, that it also is something that thinks.”[74]
Hitherto I have considered Gall’s philosophy only under its speculative points of view; what would it be, if considered in a practical relation?
In one of his happy moments, Diderot wrote the following very remarkable phrase: “The ruin of liberty overthrows all order and all government, confounds vice and virtue together, sanctions every monstrous infamy, extinguishes all shame and all remorse, and degrades and deforms without recovery the whole human race.”[75]
Nothing astonishes a phrenologist.