An introduction to phrenology, in the form of question and answer. With an appendix, and copious illustrative notes / By Robert Macnish.

  • Robert Macnish
Date:
1836
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: An introduction to phrenology, in the form of question and answer. With an appendix, and copious illustrative notes / By Robert Macnish. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    86/180 page 68
    Salvator Rosa among painters; Thorwaldsen and Flax- man among sculptors. The works of these great men dis- play the faculty in all its vigor. What is the character of a person who has a great en- dowment of Ideality ? His language is generally elevated, his conceptions flow from him rapidly and eloquently, his conversation displays much richness, his illustrations are copious and varied, and he abounds in figurative language. This is peculiarly the case where the organs of Language and Comparison are also large. Ideality also gives refinement of manners. When the organ is small, is the character materially different ? Yes. The manners are homely. The person seldom or never uses poetical language. Grand or beautiful ob- jects do not strike him forcibly, or throw him into rap- tures. He isa plain, matter-of-fact man, who boasts largely of his common sense, and affects a great contempt for po- etry, and other imaginative productions. The organ is small in the heads of Locke, Joseph Hume, and Cobbett.*? 42 Cobbett?s remarks on Milton are ludicrously characteristic of his deficient Ideality. ‘It has,’? says he, ‘‘become of late years the fashion to extol the virtues of potatoes, as it has been to admire the writings of Milton and Shakspeare. God? almighty and all fore-seeing, first permitting his chief ange] to be disposed to rebel against him; his permitting him to enlist whole squadrons of angels under his banners ; his permitting the devils to bring cannon into this battle in the clouds ; his permitting one devil or angel, I forget which, to be split down the middle, from crown to crotch, as we split a pig; his permitting the two halves, intestines and all, to go slap up together again; and become a perfect body; his then permitting all the devil host to be tumbled headlong into a place called hell, of the local situation of which, no man can have an idea; his causing gates (iron gates, too,) to be erected to keep the devil in ; his permitting him to get out, nevertheless, and to come and destroy the peace and happiness of his new creation ; his permitting his son to take a pair of compasses out of a drawer, to trace the form of the earth ; all this, and, indeed, the whole of Milton’s poem, is such barbarous trash, so outra- geously offensive to reason and to common sense, that one is naturally led to wonder, how it can have been tolerated by a people, amongst whom astronomy, navigation and chemistry are understood. But it is the fashion to turn up the eyes when ‘ Paradise Lost’ is mentioned ; and if you fail herein you want taste ; you want judgment even, if you do not admire this absurd and ridiculous stuff, when, if one of your relations were to write a Jetter in the same strain, you would send him to a mad-house, and take his estate.”’
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