Its principle regards our well-being and thus the desire to be well is excited simultaneously with its development.
The phrenological combativeness has for its essence, the necessity of self-defence. It will be said, I am aware, that when we persist in acts because we feel we should not persist in them, our conduct is but a modification of that which ordinarily springs from the combativeness of phrenology.īut a glance will show the fallacy of this idea. It is a radical, a primitive impulse-elementary. Nor will this overwhelming tendency to do wrong for the wrong's sake, admit of analysis, or resolution into ulterior elements. I am not more certain that I breathe, than that the assurance of the wrong or error of any action is often the one unconquerable force which impels us, and alone impels us to its prosecution. With certain minds, under certain conditions, it becomes absolutely irresistible.
In theory, no reason can be more unreasonable, but, in fact, there is none more strong. 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 the sense I intend, it is, in fact, a mobile without motive, a motive not motivirt. 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. 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? 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. 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. 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. Secondly, having settled it to be God's will that man should continue his species, we discovered an organ of amativeness, forthwith. 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. In the matter of phrenology, for example, we first determined, naturally enough, that it was the design of the Deity that man should eat. Having thus fathomed, to his satisfaction, the intentions of Jehovah, out of these intentions he built his innumerable systems of mind. The intellectual or logical man, rather than the understanding or observant man, set himself to imagine designs-to dictate purposes to God. It cannot be denied that phrenology and, in great measure, all metaphysicianism have been concocted a priori. What manner it might be made to further the objects of humanity, either temporal or eternal. 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 We saw no need of the impulse-for the propensity. The idea of it has never occurred to us, simply because of its supererogation. 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. In the pure arrogance of the reason, we have all overlooked it. 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. Notice: This pasta 4 pages and 2,400+ words.įile:Shortstory034 impoftheperverse dgf.ogg
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