IN THE consideration of the faculties and impulses --- of the prima mobilia of the human
soul, the phrenologists have failed to make room for a propensity which, although
obviously existing as a radical, primitive, irreducible sentiment, has been equally
overlooked by all the moralists who have preceded them. In the pure arrogance of the
reason, we have all overlooked it. We have suffered its existence to escape our senses,
solely through want of belief --- of faith; --- whether it be faith in Revelation, or faith in
the Kabbala. The idea of it has never occurred to us, simply because of its supererogation.
We saw no need of the impulse --- for the propensity. We could not perceive its
necessity. We could not understand, that is to say, we could not have understood, had the
notion of this primum mobile ever obtruded itself; --- we could not have understood in
what manner it might be made to further the objects of humanity, either temporal or
eternal. It cannot be denied that phrenology and, in great measure, all metaphysicianism
have been concocted a priori. The intellectual or logical man, rather than the
understanding or observant man, set himself to imagine designs --- to dictate purposes to
God. Having thus fathomed, to his satisfaction, the intentions of Jehovah, out of these
intentions he built his innumerable systems of mind. In the matter of phrenology, for
example, we first determined, naturally enough, that it was the design of the Deity that
man should eat. We then assigned to man an organ of alimentiveness, and this organ is
the scourge with which the Deity compels man, will-I nill-I, into eating. Secondly, having
settled it to be God's will that man should continue his species, we discovered an organ of
amativeness, forthwith. And so with combativeness, with ideality, with causality, with
constructiveness, --- so, in short, with every organ, whether representing a propensity, a
moral sentiment, or a faculty of the pure intellect. And in these arrangements of the
Principia of human action, the Spurzheimites, whether right or wrong, in part, or upon the
whole, have but followed, in principle, the footsteps of their predecessors: deducing and
establishing every thing from the preconceived destiny of man, and upon the ground of
the objects of his Creator.
It would have been wiser, it would have been safer, to classify (if classify we must)
upon the basis of what man usually or occasionally did, and was always occasionally
doing, rather than upon the basis of what we took it for granted the Deity intended him to
do. If we cannot comprehend God in his visible works, how then in his inconceivable
thoughts, that call the works into being? If we cannot understand him in his objective
creatures, how then in his substantive moods and phases of creation?
Induction, a posteriori, would have brought phrenology to admit, as an innate and
primitive principle of human action, a paradoxical something, which we may call
perverseness, for want of a more characteristic term. In the sense I intend, it is, in fact, a
mobile without motive, a motive not motiviert. Through its promptings we act without
comprehensible object; or, if this shall be understood as a contradiction in terms, we may
so far modify the proposition as to say, that through its promptings we act, for the reason
that we should not. In theory, no reason can be more unreasonable, but, in fact, there is
