Buchanan's Journal of Man, December 1887 / Volume 1, Number 11

by Unknown

The primal laws applied to the brain—The four directions—The elements of good and evil—The horizontal line of division—Frontal and occipital organs and vertical dividing line—Preponderance of the front in certain heads—Gall, Spurzheim, and Powell—Contrast of frontal and occipital—Latitude, longitude, and antagonism—Location of Health and Disease, of Benevolence, Conscientiousness, Acquisitiveness and Baseness, Energy and Relaxation or Indolence, Patience and Irritability—Duality of the brain and its important consequences—Errors of old system—Self-respect and Humility—Modesty and Ostentation—Combativeness and Harmony—Love and Hate—Adhesiveness and Intellect, median and lateral—Religion and Profligacy—Laws of arrangement and Pathognomy—Physiological influences of basilar and coronal regions—Insanity—beneficial influence of coronal region.

To feeble minds, that excel only in memory, an arbitrary statement of facts to be recollected may be satisfactory, but to those who are capable of fully understanding such a science as Anthropology, arbitrary details, void of principle and reason, are repulsive. A chart of the human brain, without explanation of its philosophic basis and relations, embarrasses even the memory, for the memory of a philosophic mind retains principles rather than details.

After many years of experimental investigation, I have long since fully demonstrated that the human constitution is developed in accordance with the universal plan of animal life, and the human brain is organized functionally in accordance with those higher laws of life, which control all the relations of the spiritual and material worlds,—all interaction between mind and matter. These primal laws are easily comprehended, and their application to the brain removes all the perplexing complexity of organology.

Their application to the brain may be stated as follows: The upper legions of the brain, pointing upwards, relate to that which is above,—to the spiritual realm, to love, religion, duty, hope, firmness, and all that lifts us to a higher life. The lower regions point downwards, and expend their energy upon the body, rousing the heart and all the muscles and viscera, developing the excitements, passions, and appetites.

The maximum upward tendency is at the middle of the superior region, and the maximum downward tendency at the middle of the basilar region, while organs half-way between them are neutral between these opposite tendencies. Hence every faculty or impulse has a location in the brain, higher or lower, as it has a more spiritual or material tendency, and as its influence on the character inclines to virtue or vice. The better the faculty, the higher its location,—the more capable of evil results, the lower it is placed. The higher position given to the nobler faculties accords with their right to rule the inferior nature, the predominance of which is evidently abnormal, and the effects of which, in this abnormal predominance, are expressed by terms full of evil, although their functions in due subordination are useful and absolutely necessary.

In applying this principle, we realize that such a faculty as Conscientiousness must be near the very summit, and that propensities to theft and murder must belong to the base. That such propensities exist in many, we know, and it is an absurd optimism which would ignore such facts because they are abnormal. The world is full of human abnormality, because it is not yet above the juvenile age of its growth, which is the age of feebleness and folly, disease and crime. The imperfect organism of childhood is incapable of resisting either temptation or disease. The twenty-five millions destroyed by the black death, in the fourteenth century, and the countless millions destroyed by war in all centuries, including the present, show how little we have advanced beyond the spirit of savage life. The ferocity of nations is as much the product of their cerebral organization, as the ferocity of the tiger, and springs from the same region of the brain,—lying on the ridge of the temporal bone,—a region that delights in fierce destruction, and is large in all the carnivora. It would be contrary to the spirit of science to ignore the fact that man has an element of ferocity similar to that of the tiger, because in the fully developed man that fierce element is overruled by the higher powers and confined to the destruction of that which does not suffer. The unwillingness to recognize anything evil comes not from the spirit of science, but from the a priori assumptions of sentimental theology, which presumes that it thoroughly comprehends the Deity (who is beyond all human comprehension), and, out of its imaginative ignorance, fabricates a priori philosophies and doctrines that everything in man is good, or that everything in man is evil. Anthropology has not thus been evolved from a priori speculation, but presents its systematic doctrines as generalizations of the facts and experiments which have been carefully acquired and studied through the last half-century. The facts and experiments are too numerous to be recorded and published now, and had no channel for publication when they occurred.

Everything in the lower half of the brain has a tendency to evil, in proportion to its over-ruling power, and everything in the upper half operates in proportion to its elevation with that controlling influence against evil, which uplifts him toward angelic or divine superiority.

The brain may be divided by a horizontal line from the center of the forehead into its coronal and basilar halves, and by a vertical line from the cavity of the ear, into its frontal and occipital halves.

The vertical line separates the more passive and the more active faculties. The posterior half of the brain is the source of the backward forces by which the body is advanced, as the anterior half is the source of the forward movements by which our progress is checked. The posterior half would make blind, unceasing, irrepressible action—the anterior half would produce a state of relaxed and feeble tranquillity and sensibility—the condition of a helpless victim. The concurrence of the two is indispensable to human life, and the necessity of their more or less symmetrical balance is so great that nature balances the head upon the condyles of the occipital bone, at the summit of the neck, which are so located as to correspond very nearly with the opening of the ear.

The contour of the head is very nearly that of a semicircle, with its center an inch or more above the cavity of the ear. Thus wisely has nature arranged in well-balanced individuals the symmetrical proportion between the active and passive elements of life. In the head of the writer there is a preponderance of the passive over the active elements, which gives him the attraction to a studious, rather than active or ambitious life.[1] In nations or races of ambitious character, the head is long, or Dolico-cephalic, and the occipital measurement is larger than the frontal, but in those of peaceful, unambitious character, like the ancient Peruvian and the Choctaws of the United States, the occipital measurement is less than the frontal.