‘Natural philosophers were wrong in looking for organs of common faculties.’—[That’s true.]—‘A speculative philosopher may be satisfied with vague and common expressions, which do not denote the particular and determinate qualities of the different beings; but these general or common considerations are not sufficient for a naturalist who endeavours to know the functions and faculties of every organic part in particular. Throughout all natural history, the expressions are the less significant the more general or common they are; and a distinct knowledge of any being requires a study of its peculiarities.’ Page 275.

Take away the human mind and its common functions, operations, and principles, and Dr. Spurzheim’s craniology gives a very satisfactory and categorical view of human nature. In material science, the common properties may be the least significant; but in the mind of man, the common principle (whatever it be) that feels, thinks, and acts, is the chief thing.

I do not believe then in the Doctor’s organs, either generally or particularly. I have only his word for them; and reason and common sense are against them. There may be an exception now and then, but there is every where a total want of classification and analytic power. The author, instead of giving the rationale of any one thing, runs on with endless illustrations and assumptions of the same kind. The organs are sometimes general and sometimes particular; sometimes compound and sometimes simple. You know not what to make of them: they turn over like tumbler-pigeons. I should be inclined to admit the organ of amativeness as a physical reinforcement of a mental passion; but hardly that of philoprogenitiveness—at least, it is badly explained here. I will give an instance or two. ‘A male servant,’ Dr. Spurzheim observes, ‘seldom takes care of children so well as a woman.’ Women, then, are fond of children generally; not of their own merely. Is not this an extension of the organic principle beyond its natural and positive limits? Again: ‘Little girls are fond of dolls,’ &c. Is there then an express organ for this; since dolls are not literally children? Oh no! it is only a modification of the organ of philoprogenitiveness. Well then, why should not this organ itself or particular propensity be a modification of philanthropy, or of an amiable disposition, good-nature, and generosity in general? There seems no assignable reason why most, if not all of these special organs should be considered as any thing more than so many manifestations or cases of general dispositions, capacities, &c. arising from general irritability, tenderness, firmness, quickness, comprehension, &c. of the mind or brain; just as the particular varieties and obliquities of organic faculties and affections are attributed by Spurzheim and Gall to a common law or principle combined with others, or with peculiar circumstances. The account of the organ of inhabitiveness is a master-piece of confusion. It is an organ seated on the top of the head, and impelling you to live in high places, and then again in low places; on land and water; to be here and there and everywhere; which is the same and different, and is in short an organ, not for any particular thing, but for all sorts of contradictions. First, it is the same as the organ of pride, and accounts for the chamois climbing rocks, and the eagle the sky; for children mounting on chairs, and kings on thrones, &c. But then some animals prefer low marshy grounds, and some birds build in the hollows, and not on the tops of trees. Then it looks like a dispensation of Providence to people different regions of the earth; and one would think in this view that local prejudices would be resolved into a species of habitual attachment. But no, that would not be a nostrum. It is therefore said—‘Nature, which intended that all regions and countries should be inhabited, assigned to all animals their dwellings, and gave to every kind of animal its respective propensity to some particular region;’ that is, not to the place where it had been born and bred, but where it was to be born and bred. People who prefer this mode of philosophy are welcome to it. No wonder our author finds it ‘difficult to point out the seat of this organ;’ yet he assures us, that ‘it must be deep-seated in the brain.’ The organ of adhesiveness is evidently the same as the general faculty of attachment. The organ of combativeness I conceive to be nothing but strength of bone and muscle, and some projection arising from and indicating these. The organs of destructiveness and constructiveness are the same, but ‘so as with a difference’—that is, they express strong will, with greater or less impatience of temper and comprehensiveness of mind. The conqueror who overturns one state, builds up and aggrandises another. I can conceive persons who are gifted with the organ of veneration to have expanded brains as well as swelling ideas. ‘The head of Christ,’ says our physiologist, ‘is always represented as very elevated.’—Yet he was remarkable for meekness as well as piety. Spurzheim says of the organ of covetiveness, that ‘it gives a desire for all that pleases.’ Again, Dr. Gall observed, that ‘persons of a firm and constant character have the top of the brain much developed;’ and this is called the organ of determinativeness. Now if so, are we to believe that the difference in resolute and irresolute persons is confined to this organ, and that the nerves, fibres, &c. of the rest of the brain are not lax or firm, in proportion as the person is of a generally weak or determined character? The whole question nearly turns upon this. Say that there is a particular prominence in this part, owing to a greater strength and size of the levers of the will at this place. This would prove nothing but the particular manifestation or development of a general power; just as the prominence of the muscles of the calf of the leg denotes general muscular strength. But the craniologist says that the strength of the whole body lies in the calf of the leg, and has its seat or organ there. Not so, in the name of common sense! When Dr. Spurzheim gets down to the visible region of the face, the eyes, forehead, &c. he makes sad work of it: an infinite number of distinctions are crowded one upon the back of the other, and to no purpose. Will any body believe that there are five or six different organs for the impressions of one sense (sight,) viz. colour, form, size, and so on? Do we see the form with one organ and the colour of the same object with another? There may be different organs to receive different material or concrete impressions, but surely only the mind can abstract the different impressions of the same sense from each other. The organ of space appears to me to answer to the look of wild, staring curiosity. All that is not accounted for in this way, either from general conformation or from physiognomical expression, is a heap of crude, capricious, unauthenticated trash. I select one paragraph out of this puzzling chaos, as a sample of what the reader must expect from the whole.

‘What then is the special faculty of the organ of individuality and its sphere of activity? Persons endowed with this faculty in a high degree are attentive to all that happens around them; to every object, to every phenomenon, to every fact: hence also to motions. This faculty neither learns the qualities of objects, nor the details of facts: it knows only their existence. The qualities of the objects, and the particularities of the facts, are known by the assistance of other organs. Besides, this faculty has knowledge of all internal faculties, and acts upon them. It wishes to know all by experience; consequently it puts every organ into action: it wishes to hear, see, smell, taste, and touch; to know all arts and sciences; it is fond of instruction, collects facts, and leads to practical knowledge.’ Page 430.

In the next page he affirms that ‘crystallography is the result of the organ of form,’ and that we do not get the ideas of roughness and smoothness from the touch.—But I will end here, and turn to the amusing account of Dousterswivel in the Antiquary![[18]]

ESSAY XV
ON EGOTISM

It is mentioned in the Life of Salvator Rosa, that on the occasion of an altar-piece of his being exhibited at Rome, in the triumph of the moment, he compared himself to Michael Angelo, and spoke against Raphael, calling him hard, dry, &c. Both these were fatal symptoms for the ultimate success of the work: the picture was in fact afterwards severely censured, so as to cause him much uneasiness; and he passed a great part of his life in quarrelling with the world for admiring his landscapes, which were truly excellent, and for not admiring his historical pieces, which were full of defects. Salvator wanted self-knowledge, and that respect for others, which is both a cause and consequence of it. Like many more, he mistook the violent and irritable workings of self-will (in a wrong direction) for the impulse of genius, and his insensibility to the vast superiority of others for a proof of his equality with them.

In the first place, nothing augurs worse for any one’s pretensions to the highest rank of excellence than his making free with those of others. He who boldly and unreservedly places himself on a level with the mighty dead, shows a want of sentiment—the only thing that can ensure immortality to his own works. When we forestal the judgment of posterity, it is because we are not confident of it. A mind that brings all others into a line with its own naked or assumed merits, that sees all objects in the foreground as it were, that does not regard the lofty monuments of genius through the atmosphere of fame, is coarse, crude, and repulsive as a picture without aerial perspective. Time, like distance, spreads a haze and a glory round all things. Not to perceive this, is to want a sense, is to be without imagination. Yet there are those who strut in their own self-opinion, and deck themselves out in the plumes of fancied self-importance as if they were crowned with laurel by Apollo’s own hand. There was nothing in common between Salvator and Michael Angelo: if there had, the consciousness of the power with which he had to contend would have over-awed and struck him dumb; so that the very familiarity of his approaches proved (as much as any thing else) the immense distance placed between them. Painters alone seem to have a trick of putting themselves on an equal footing with the greatest of their predecessors, of advancing, on the sole strength of their vanity and presumption, to the highest seats in the Temple of Fame, of talking of themselves and Raphael and Michael Angelo in the same breath! What should we think of a poet who should publish to the world, or give a broad hint in private, that he conceived himself fully on a par with Homer or Milton or Shakespear? It would be too much for a friend to say so of him. But artists suffer their friends to puff them in the true ‘King Cambyses’ vein’ without blushing. Is it that they are often men without a liberal education, who have no notion of any thing that does not come under their immediate observation, and who accordingly prefer the living to the dead, and themselves to all the rest of the world? Or that there is something in the nature of the profession itself, fixing the view on a particular point of time, and not linking the present either with the past or future?

Again, Salvator’s disregard for Raphael, instead of inspiring him with any thing like ‘vain and self-conceit,’ ought to have taught him the greatest diffidence in himself. Instead of anticipating a triumph over Raphael from this circumstance, he might have foreseen in it the sure source of his mortification and defeat. The public looked to find in his pictures what he did not see in Raphael, and were necessarily disappointed. He could hardly be expected to produce that which when produced and set before him, he did not feel or understand. The genius for a particular thing does not imply taste in general or for other things, but it assuredly presupposes a taste or feeling for that particular thing. Salvator was so much offended with the dryness, hardness, &c. of Raphael, only because he was not struck, that is, did not sympathise with the divine mind within. If he had, he would have bowed as at a shrine, in spite of the homeliness or finicalness of the covering. Let no man build himself a spurious self-esteem on his contempt or indifference for acknowledged excellence. He will in the end pay dear for a momentary delusion: for the world will sooner or later discover those deficiences in him, which render him insensible to all merits but his own.

Of all modes of acquiring distinction and, as it were, ‘getting the start of the majestic world,’ the most absurd as well as disgusting is that of setting aside the claims of others in the lump, and holding out our own particular excellence or pursuit as the only one worth attending to. We thus set ourselves up as the standard of perfection, and treat every thing else that diverges from that standard as beneath our notice. At this rate, a contempt for any thing and a superiority to it are synonymous. It is a cheap and a short way of showing that we possess all excellence within ourselves, to deny the use or merit of all those qualifications that do not belong to us. According to such a mode of computation, it would appear that our value is to be estimated not by the number of acquirements that we do possess, but of those in which we are deficient and to which we are insensible:—so that we can at any time supply the place of wisdom and skill by a due proportion of ignorance, affectation, and conceit. If so, the dullest fellow, with impudence enough to despise what he does not understand, will always be the brightest genius and the greatest man. If stupidity is to be a substitute for taste, knowledge, and genius, any one may dogmatise and play the critic on this ground. We may easily make a monopoly of talent, if the torpedo-touch of our callous and wilful indifference is to neutralise all other pretensions. We have only to deny the advantages of others to make them our own: illiberality will carve out the way to pre-eminence much better than toil or study or quickness of parts; and by narrowing our views and divesting ourselves at last of common feeling and humanity, we may arrogate every valuable accomplishment to ourselves, and exalt ourselves vastly above our fellow-mortals! That is, in other words, we have only to shut our eyes, in order to blot the sun out of heaven, and to annihilate whatever gives light or heat to the world, if it does not emanate from one single source, by spreading the cloud of our own envy, spleen, malice, want of comprehension, and prejudice over it. Yet how many are there who act upon this theory in good earnest, grow more bigoted to it every day, and not only become the dupes of it themselves, but by dint of gravity, by bullying and brow-beating, succeed in making converts of others!