The Phrenological Self: Charting the Mind’s Faculties

Erasmus Darwin

Zoonomia, or, The Laws of Organic Life (1794-1796)

1792 Portrait by Joseph Wright

Franz Joseph Gall(1758-1828)

Neuroanatomistand

Craniologist

Faculty PsychologyThomas Reid (1710-1796)

• Active Powers: self-esteem,

friendship, sexual affection, emulation, duty, veneration, beauty, imagination—35 in all

• Intellectual/Cognitive Powers: five senses, perception, size and novelty, memory, judgment and reason, abstraction, conception and moral taste.

Johann Caspar Lavater Essays on Physiognomy, designed to promote

the knowledge and the love of mankind

Published inGerman (1789-98)

Lavater’s physiognomy of the four temperaments

Gall’s Craniology

“On the Functions of the Brain and Each of its Parts:

With Observations on thePossibility of Determining the Instincts, Propensities, and Talents, or the Moral

And Intellectual Dispositions of Men and Animals, by the Configuration

of the Brain and Head”

Gall’s Principles• That moral and intellectual faculties are

innate.

• That their exercise or manifestation depends on organization.

• That the brain is the organ of all the propensities, sentiments and faculties.

• That the brain is composed of as many particular organs as there are propensities, sentiments, and faculties, which differ essentially from each other.

(Gall, Vol. 1, p. 55)

Dr. Gall’s Lecture

Depicted byThomas Rowlandson,

1756-1827

the instinct of generation (sexual instinct) love of offspring (philoprogenitiveness), attachment, self-defense, carnivorous instinct--likened to a disposition to murder, cunning, sense of property, pride, vanity and ambition, cautiousness, memory of things, sense of locality, recognition of persons, verbal memory, color-sense, talent for music, numerical ability, comparative ability, metaphysical abilities, wit, poetry, goodness, religious sensibility, and others.

A Selection of Gall’s 27 Faculties

Jean-Marie Pierre Flourens (1794-1867)

Contested Gall: conductedexperiments to show

that the brain acted as awhole

Phrenological Head With

Illustrated Faculties

Phrenology’s Popularizers:Johannes Gaspar Spurzheim

Toured England, 1814Toured America, 1832

Orson and Lorenzo Fowler, Phrenological Cabinet,

NYC, 1836

Diagram from W. Mattieu Williams, A Vindication of Phrenology. London, 1894. from http://pages.britishlibrary.net/phrenology/images.html

Partial List of Fowler’s 37Faculties

Chart of the relative size of organ and table of references.

1846

FOWLER’S HEAD

Fowler’s Practical Phrenology1846

Intellectual female

War Chief, Miami Indian

Murderer

Well-balancedHead

Fowler, 1846

Thief and a Liar

Indian Chiefs

Cunning and Roguish Cat

Hyena

Engineer

Fowler’s Phrenological Head

“It is plain then, that phrenologically the head of this Leviathan, in the creature’s living intact state, is an entire delusion. As for his true brain,

you can then see no indications of it, nor feel any. The whale, like all things that are mighty, wears a false brow to the common world.” Chapter 80

Herman Melville’s Moby Dick1851

Honoré Daumier, 1845

The Philanthropy of the Day

“Monsieur est trés voleur”

Rare Specimens of Comparative Craniology: An old Maid’s Skull Phrenologized

Bumpology:

“Pores o’er the Cranial map with learned eyes:Each rising hill and bumpy knoll descries,Here secret fires, and there deep mines of senseHis touch detects beneath each prominence.”

Bless Me, What a Bump!

William Heath 1795-1840

Localizing Phrenological Organs in Convolutions

Jerry FodorThe Modularityof Mind, 1983

Cognitive Psychology