tual being, the product of severe study, with very little of corporeal stamina, and still less of the affective faculties, a merely selfish, literary gourmand; and with another, whose life, devoted to bodily exercise and hard labour, has been productive of little development of mind; and yet as far as can be ascertained, the brain of each is the same both in respect to its quantity and configuration.

Yet although we consider the hypothesis which assumes the plurality of the brainular organs as unproven, as unnecessary, and as improbable, we are not prepared to deny their existence. In fact, so long as it remains a merely speculative error, an ingenious imagination; so long as the entire subserviency of the organ to the governing, presiding, immaterial principle be steadily kept in view, it signifies not whether that brain be a single organ, performing a variety of complicated functions; or whether it be composed of many separate organs united by one common tissue, communicating with one common centre, and obedient to one common lawgiver. We may

form our opinion, and we may smile at the efforts of those, who have more powerful fancies than ourselves: we may even perhaps deplore, the poverty of our own imagination, which prevents our entering into their enthusiasm; and we may perchance sometimes almost pity their strenuous advocacy of a system, which, possibly from the above defect in our organisation, we might consider as of very inadequate importance; yet we

VOL. I.

S

would not lift a pen, or say one word, which might probably break the spell of the enchantment by means of which they are lost in their own reveries.

But when we are told that the manifestations of mind are to be discovered by detecting certain bumps and prominences on the cranium, with which they are coincident; that the strength of the organ is determinable by its size; that is, by the quantity of brain which may be found in particular situations; that the manifestations of mind are subservient to the strength of the organ, that is, to its relative size; and that legislators should proportion their punishment of crime, as of theft for instance, accordingly as the individual accused, shall possess the organ of covetiveness in a greater or less degree; since in the one case, the propensity to crime might be irresistible, or partly voluntary, or wholly gratuitous: and consequently, that the Supreme Governor of the universe should contemplate in his creatures, the same act as criminal or not, deserving of his wrath or not, according to the proportion of brain with which He had endowed them,-thus destroying every specific standard of right and wrong, and rendering man no longer the entire master of his own actions: why then indeed we say, that reason and fact, experience and religion, are against such absurd and untenable hypotheses. It has never yet been proven, that the prominences of the cranium have actually corresponding prominences of the brainular substance; or

that, in fact, they are not produced, by having been the centres of ossification of the foetal cranium, from which the radii of bone have emanated it has been shewn, that the amount of intelligence is not in proportion to the absolute size of the brain; and consequently, that as the whole is constituted of parts, so neither can the energy of any one portion be characterized by its quantity; it has been shewn, that the brain is entirely under the government of the immaterial principle, and therefore cannot itself give laws to the latter; and finally, that all moral, legislative, and religious inferences drawn from the opposite premises, must be utterly false and groundless.

260

CHAP. III.

THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED-OF THE TEMPERAMENTS-THEIR INFLUENCE UPON THE MANIFESTATIONS OF MIND-THE SANGUINEOUS—THE PHLEGMATIC-THE CHOLERIC-THE MELANCHOLIC TEMPERAMENT-THEY ARE SELDOM SEEN IN THEIR STATE OF SIMPLICITY AND PURITY—VARIETIESINFLUENCE OF THE TEMPERAMENTS UPON THE INTELLECTUAL FACULTIES, AND UPON THE CONDUCT OF THE LIFE.

It has been already most distinctly avowed, that the manifestations of mind, will be influenced by the medium through which they pass; and according to the particular circumstances of the brain-its original disposition-or the aptitudes impressed upon it as the result of educational processes; yet without changing their nature, and without losing their entire subjection to the spiritual principle, and to the higher motives which govern it. Analogous operations in external nature may be noticed around us. Light and heat are modified in their impression and apparent qualities by the medium through which they pass, without in any degree changing their nature; the food of plants is received into their simple system, is converted into sap, and without any

change of its nature, manifests itself in the development of leaves, and flowers, and fruits of ten thousand different characters; the blood which circulates in the human system is shewn in the form of a variety of secretions, without any other change than that impressed upon it by the medium through which it passes. And if this be the case with material objects, surely it is not too much to assert that the will, the direction, the operation of the immaterial principle remain unchanged in their nature, however its external manifestations may have been modified by the peculiar state of its material organ. It will be necessary to consider shortly a few of those general characteristics, which are usually thought to be dependent on the brain, and which have been commonly denominated temperaments.

The preponderance of one or more of these temperaments, impresses a very decided difference on the manifestations of mind, according to the prevalence of that which has been designated the sanguineous, the phlegmatic, the choleric, the melancholic temperament, and their several modifications and combinations,

1. The sanguineous temperament is characterized by the vivacity with which impressions are received and communicated; by the quickness with which desires are manifested; by the rapidity with which ideas are elaborated, and by their instantaneous and often fanciful association, from points of affinity scarcely, if at all discernible by other individuals possessing colder