“function” for the native activity of an organ, and to leave “faculty” for the expression of an acquired activity. “Faculty is properly limited to active power, and therefore is abusively applied to the mere passive affections of the mind” (Hamilton, Lectures, i. 177).
An attempt has been recently made by Dr Bernard Holländer to correlate the doctrines of phrenology with the modern physiological and pathological observations which bear upon the localization of function. In his works The Mental Functions of the Brain, under the sub-title “The Revival of Phrenology” (1901), and in Scientific Phrenology (1902), the author endeavours to bring Gall's clinical and pathological instances into line with more modern observations. He deprecates the craniology of Gall, as far as it deals with mere “bumps,” and honours him, with justice, as the recorder of many facts worth saving out of the wreck of his system; and he endeavours, though with doubtful success, to establish an unbroken connexion between phrenology, in the Greek sense, and our present knowledge of cerebral localization.
The substance of Holländer's first work is of two kinds. The one kind is a tabulated statement of many hundred cases of different forms of mania, with injury or disease limited to one portion of the brain; the other kind is a tabulated statement of cases of injury or disease of the brain, followed by perversion, or exaltation, or loss of some definite instinct or faculty of consciousness.
He divides the tabulated cases of mania into three groups: (i) Melancholia; (ii) Irascible Insanity, “Mania furiosa”; (iii) Mania with suspicion and delusions of persecution. For these three groups of cases he lays down the following rules: (i) Melancholia is especially associated with injury or disease of the parietal lobe of the brain, more particularly with injury or disease of the convolutions underlying the parietal eminences of the skull, i.e. the supramarginal and angular convolutions. (ii) Mania furiosa is especially associated with injury or disease of the central portion of the temporal lobe. (iii) Mania with suspicion and delusions of persecution is especially associated with injury or disease of the posterior portion of the temporal lobe.
The second kind of cases, where injury or disease of the brain, strictly localized to one part or another of its grey matter, was followed by perversion, exaltation or loss of some one instinct, habit or faculty, includes cases of kleptomania, cases of voracious hunger and thirst, cases of sexual desire exalted or lost, and cases of loss of certain special memories, as of words, tunes, numbers and the like.
These two collections of recorded cases, taken from a vast mass of clinical and pathological literature accumulated during the past century, have been arranged by Dr Holländer with great industry; so as to extend the limits of the study of cerebral localization, and to advance it from the observation of the motor areas and the special sense centres to the observation of the higher acts and states of consciousness. Modern physiology, from its objective point of view, is engaged over finer and finer issues of microscopic and experimental work; and, from its subjective point of view, is becoming more and more psychological, seeking a higher level of interpretation, and a statement of the departmental life of the brain in terms of ever-increasing complexity. The motor centres, governing the voluntary purposeful movements of the body, are considered to be not simply motor, but “psycho-motor”; the speech-centres are not homogeneous, but are on experimental grounds differentiated into subcentres for the utterance of words, the recognition of words and the understanding of words; the visual centres are in like manner subdivided according to the consciousness involved in the complete act of vision. There is room, therefore, for a “higher phrenology,” if it can show clear evidence in favour of the localization, in determinate regions of the brain, of the physical changes accompanying certain states of consciousness.
Of the two kinds of cases that Dr Holländer has tabulated, it cannot be said that the cases of mania are convincing. Some of them are altogether beside the mark; e.g. he quotes two cases of melancholia, after an injury over the left parietal bone, which were cured by an operation limited to the scalp (excision of a painful scar, removal of a small nerve-tumour of the scalp); in neither case was anything done to the skull or to the brain, but both patients were cured of their melancholy. Again, the acceptance of these rules as to the localization of these insane thoughts involves the localization of sane thoughts in the same areas of the brain, and this in turn involves assumptions that are wholly unwarranted by our present knowledge. Moreover, cases of mania are so common that it might be possible to find an equal number of cases to controvert his rules: we want consecutive, not picked cases. If 5000 consecutive fatal cases of these different kinds of mania, with the post mortem record of each case, were tabulated, we should then begin to stand on surer ground. Again, though Dr Holländer seems to argue well, where he says that the facial and other movements, induced by direct electrical stimulation of certain convolutions are such as express the mental states which he attributes to those convolutions, yet this argument is insecure, partly because Sherrington's recent work, on the motor area of the anthropoid apes, has rendered it necessary to reconsider the present localization of the motor area in man, and partly because the interpretation of facial and muscular movements as representing this or that state of the emotions is always precarious.
The second kind of cases, where injury or disease limited to one portion of the brain is followed by perversion, exaltation or loss of some special instinct or habit, is more valuable and more convincing; especially the cases of voracious hunger and thirst, those of true kleptomania, and those of the loss of certain special memories. It is not so easy to believe that the cerebellum is in any primary way associated with sexual desire: its position, its structure and its proved association with the co-ordination of muscular movements seem clearly to indicate that its work is wholly subordinate and complementary to the work of the cerebral hemispheres; and the evidence adduced in favour of its being the “seat” of the sexual impulses hardly amounts to more than a probability that it may transmit or co-ordinate the performance of the sexual act.
Practical Application.—“Die Schädellehre ist allerdings nicht so sehr Irrthum in der Idee als Charlatanerie in der Ausführung,” says one of its most acute critics. Even though no fault could be found with the physiology and psychology of phrenology, it would not necessarily follow that the theory could be utilized as a practical method of reading character; for, although the inner surface of the skull is moulded on the brain, and the outer surface approximates to parallelism thereto, yet the correspondence is sufficiently variable to render conclusions therefrom uncertain. The spongy layer or diploe which separates the two compact tables may vary conspicuously in amount in different parts of the same skull, as in the cases described by Professor Humphry (Journ. of Anat. viii. 137). The frontal sinus, that opprobrium phrenologicum, is a reality, not unfrequently of large size, and may wholly occupy the regions of five organs. The centres of ossification of the frontal and parietal bones, the muscular crests of these and of the occipital bones also, differ in their prominence in different skulls. Premature synostoses of sutures mould the brain without doing much injury to its parts. In such cases there are compensatory dilatations in other directions modifying sometimes to an extreme degree the relation of brain-surface to skull-surface. The writer has found such displacements in extremely scaphocephalic skulls; the same is true of accidental deformations due to pressure on the infantile skull before it consolidates. Artificial malformations alter the apparent skull shape considerably while they affect the relative development of the parts of the brain cortex but little. All these and other cogent reasons of a like kind, whose force can be estimated by those accustomed to deal with the component soft parts of the head, should lead phrenologists to be careful in predicating relative brain-development from skull-shape. Psychology, physiology and experience alike contribute to discredit the practical working of the system and to show how worthless the so-called diagnoses of character really are. Its application by those who are its votaries is seldom worse than amusing, but it is capable of doing positive social harm, as in its proposed application to the discrimination or selection of servants and other subordinate officials. It has even been proposed to use it for the purposes of the guarantee society and for the selection of parliamentary representatives. The sarcastic suggestion which originated with Christopher North of moulding children's heads so as to suppress the evil and foster the good was actually repeated in good faith by a writer on phrenology, but experience of the effects of malformation leads one to be sceptical as to the feasibility of this mode of producing a social Utopia.
Bibliography.—Prochaska, Functions of the Nervous System (tr. by Laycock, in Sydenham Society's series, 1851); Gall, Recherches sur le système nerveux, &c. (Paris, 1809), Anatomie et physiologie du système nerveux, &c. (Paris, 1810-1819), Traité des dispositions innées de l'âme et de l'esprit (Paris, 1811) and Sur les fonctions du cerveau (6 vols., 1825); Beryk, Bemerkungen u. Zweifel über die Schädellehre des Dr Galls (Leipzig, 1803); Marton, Leichtfassliche Darstellung der Gehirn- und Schädellehre (Leipzig, 1803); Metzger, Ueber den menschlichen Kopf (Königsberg, 1803); Walther, Neue Untersuchungen der Gall'schen Gehirn- und Schädellehre (Munich, 1804); Kessler, Prufung des Gall'schen Systems (Jena, 1805); Bischoff, Darstellung def Gall'schen Gehirn- und Schädellehre, &c. (Berlin, 1805); Ackermann, Die Gall'sche Gehirnlehre widerlegt (Heidelberg, 1806);
