What! Shall Gall endow twenty-seven faculties, and Spurzheim not have the same privilege for seven or eight?[148] Shall Gall have a faculty for space, one for number, &c. and Spurzheim be refused one for time, one for extent, &c.? Is not Spurzheim half right, when he says:
“One does not readily perceive why M. Gall should desire to suggest to his readers that his method of treating the doctrine of the brain is the only admissible one, and that there are no other organs than those he has recognised; that the organs do nothing but what he attributes to them; ... that all he says and all he does (and that only) bears the stamp of perfection; and that his decision constitutes the supreme law.”[149]
4. Classification and attributes of the faculties. Gall, by giving the same attributes to all the faculties, and to each faculty all the attributes of the understanding, in fact forms out of the faculties only two groups: the group of faculties that he supposes common to man and the animals, and the group of faculties that he supposes to be proper to man alone. Spurzheim divides and subdivides them.
None of the formulas required for the classification agreed upon are omitted.[150]
In the first place, there are two orders of faculties: the affective and the intellectual faculties; then each of these orders is divided into genera. The first order has two genera: the affective faculties common to man and animals,[151] and the affective faculties peculiar to man alone.[152] The second has three genera: the faculties or internal senses which make external objects known;[153] the faculties or internal senses which make known the relations of objects in general;[154] and the faculties or internal senses that reflect.[155]
What an apparatus for saying very simple things; for saying that there are propensities,[156] sentiments,[157] and intellectual faculties! What singular personification of all these faculties: faculties that know; faculties that reflect![158] Spurzheim elsewhere speaks of happy faculties.[159] Indeed, what arbitrariness in the distribution of facts! And Gall, too, is he not half right?
“By what right,” says he, “does M. Spurzheim exclude from the intellectual faculties imitation, wit, ideality or poetry, circumspection, secretivity, constructivity? How are perseverance, circumspection, imitation; how are they sentiments? What reason have we for counting among the propensities constructivity rather than melody, benevolence, or imitation?”[160]
Gall, by endowing each faculty with all the attributes of an understanding, makes as many understandings as faculties. Spurzheim makes several kinds of understandings: understandings that know, understandings that reflect, &c. He restores the sensitive and rational souls.