tion
much of what is arbitrary and sciolistic?

It is to be regretted, that no person skilful in metaphysics, or the
history of the human mind, has taken a share in this investigation. Many
errors and much absurdity would have been removed from the statements
of these theorists, if a proper division had been made between those
attributes and propensities, which by possibility a human creature may
bring into the world with him, and those which, being the pure growth
of the arbitrary institutions of society, must be indebted to those
institutions for their origin. I have endeavoured in a former Essay(41)
to explain this distinction, and to shew how, though a human being
cannot be born with an express propensity towards any one of the
infinite pursuits and occupations which may be found in civilised
society, yet that he may be fitted by his external or internal structure
to excel in some one of those pursuits rather than another. But all this
is overlooked by the phrenologists. They remark the various habits and
dispositions, the virtues and the vices, that display themselves in
society as now constituted, and at once and without consideration trace
them to the structure that we bring into the world with us.

(41) See above, Essay II.

Certainly many of Gall's organs are a libel upon our common nature. And,
though a scrupulous and exact philosopher will perhaps confess that he
has little distinct knowledge as to the design with which "the earth and
all that is therein" were made, yet he finds in it so much of beauty
and beneficent tendency, as will make him extremely reluctant to believe
that some men are born with a decided propensity to rob, and others
to murder. Nor can any thing be more ludicrous than this author's
distinction of the different organs of memory--of things, of places, of
names, of language, and of numbers: organs, which must be conceived to
be given in the first instance long before names or language or
numbers had an existence. The followers of Gall have in a few instances
corrected this: but what their denominations have gained in avoiding
the grossest absurdities of their master, they have certainly lost in
explicitness and perspicuity.

There is a distinction, not unworthy to be attended to, that is here
to be made between Lavater's system of physiognomy, and Gall's of
craniology, which is much in favour of the former. The lines and
characteristic expressions of the face which may so frequ