It is a great fact in the constitution of man, that whatever affects the body, affects the manifestations of intelligence, and conversely, whatever affects intelligence affects the body. The body is the harp of a thousand strings, manifesting its intelligence by different degrees of vibration. If either the musician or his instrument is out of order, the music will be discordant. It is not necessary for me to argue that a man must be in perfect health to exhibit perfect mentality. But as perfect health is the exception and not the rule, we rarely find mentality even approximating perfection. We are obliged, in our estimate of the character of men, to allow for various bodily infirmities, in a word, for the eccentricities of disease. These diseases may be inherited or acquired since birth; they may be acute or chronic in their stages; they may be mild or malignant in type; they may produce long, continued illness, terminating in death, or they may be only what we call a temporary indisposition, like that of the country boy, who went to Boston for the first time to see the sights. As he wandered around he became hungry, and, entering a restaurant began to experiment with strange dishes. He ate first a porterhouse steak, then some fried oysters, then a lobster salad, a lot of pickles, ice cream, cake and bologna sausage, drank a bottle of champagne and retired to his lodgings, and dreamed that he was lying on Boston Common, and that the devil was sitting on his stomach, holding Bunker Hill monument in his lap.
If you eat an indigestible meal, you are unable to perform good brain-work after it. If you feed the body on material that will not nourish it, the brain refuses to work. If you are in the clutches of disease, we cannot expect of you a high measure of brain-power; in other words, the manifestations of the mind are weakened by the disorder of its instrument, the body.
The phrenologist, therefore, who essays to read your character, must be able to trace the signs of disease in your appearance. He must needs be an expert Physiologist and Anatomist. He must understand Pathology. He must have the diagnosing skill to detect disease and allow for it in his estimate of your mentality, or his delineation is worth less than nothing; nay, more, he may do you a positive damage, by advising you to adopt a course of life which would be disastrous to your constitution. He must be able to do all this and do it rapidly and with precision. Never trust yourself under the hands of a professed phrenologist unless you are confident of his skill in estimating and diagnosing your physical condition.
QUALITY.
The second step in a phrenological examination is the determination of the quality of the organization. Perhaps there is no branch of the science of phrenology which has received such crude treatment at the hands of phrenological writers as this subject of organic quality. Many use the term interchangeably with temperament, some confound it with temperament and hereditary disposition, others recognize it as a distinct modifying condition; but I know of no writer, except myself, who has yet attempted a classification of the subject, or who has dared to recognize its importance as a modifying condition of character.
Quality is the texture of organization, and in this respect must be regarded entirely independently of temperament. The latter is conceded to depend upon the preponderance or relative energy of some part of the system, anatomically or pathologically; but each of the conditions denominated as temperaments may exist, with widely different manifestations of the peculiar conditions we describe as quality, with a corresponding modification of the character of the subject in each case. Hence the necessity of a rational classification, based upon the independent observation of these modifications of quality as a distinct subject, in order to apply it as a distinct step in a phrenological examination.
The trees of the forest present distinct variations of quality, depending on the texture of the wood. The hickory is hard, the ash is brittle, the pine is soft, etc. An examination of the texture of the human organization will disclose variations, different, it is true, but some times strikingly analogous, and no less important in determining the fitness of the individual for particular purposes.
We determine quality by a critical inspection of the general contour of the body, its relative size, the adaptation of its parts to each other, the color and grain of the skin, the relative harmony of the features, the relative brightness of the eyes, the color and texture of the hair, the movements of the body, the tone of the voice, and the rapidity of mental process. To determine quality accurately may sometimes require a series of experiments on the individual, and the success of the examiner will of course depend on his own acuteness of perception and judgment.
Jack Langrishe.—Quality Strong.