Buchanans Journal of Man, February 1887 | Page 8

recognition of error, even by the best educated classes. The realm of opinion is ever in chaos. Contradictory opinions are ever clashing; no supreme arbiter is known; no law of reason, like the laws of mathematics, comes in to dissipate error and delusion.
Why is this? Anthropology replies that reason is as positive, clear, and imperative as mathematical principles, but that men have not been educated to exercise and to obey the faculty of reason, as they have been to measure and to count. In matters of opinion, feeling and impulse are allowed to dominate over reason, and to hug the delusions which reason would dispel. We have no educational system, no college, in which the art of reasoning is properly taught, although the shallow pedantry of Aristotelian logic has assumed to teach the art of reasoning. The faculties themselves of our colleges do not understand or practice the true art of reasoning, for if they did, they would harmonize in opinion as mathematicians harmonize in calculations, and would lead the onward march of mind continually, making or accepting discoveries of the highest importance, instead of standing, as they do, impregnable castles of ancient error in matters of opinion, though moderately progressive in physical science.
It is for these reasons that popular opinions and opinions of universities are of little value. Everything else but reason dominates them. The gift of a founder, the decree of a king, parliament, or pope, the decision of some ancient conclave of the superstitious and ignorant, or the imperious will of some interested body of lords, plutocrats, monks, or political usurpers, establishes the mould in which opinions are cast; and the soft brains of inexperienced and unreflective youth are easily compressed into the form of the established mould, and from that deformed condition they seldom or never entirely recover true symmetry. Never taught to reason deeply or accurately, they yield to the sympathetic mesmeric control of social opinions and impulses, without looking to their origin, Hence the lamentable fact that in matters of opinion or philosophy, as in social amusements and fashions, the animal instinct of gregariousness rules, and men move in masses like herds of sheep or buffaloes.
These considerations prepare us to appreciate justly the value of former and contemporary opinions in reference to the science of the brain.
The mystery that surrounded its anatomy was dispelled by Dr. Gall, and modern scientists have been building upon the foundation laid by him. It is not necessary now to dwell upon his protracted and careful study of the comparative development of the brain in men and animals. Suffice it to say no naturalist was ever more diligent, fearless, and successful, in the study of nature; and the conclusive evidence of his success is the fact that no student of nature who travelled after his footsteps has failed to see what he saw, and recognize Gall as a grand, original teacher.
Why is it, then, that the reputation of Gall and his discoveries of mental organs in the brain has been so fluctuating? Why have the discoveries that came forward with so imposing a prestige at the beginning of this century so entirely lost that prestige in the colleges in sixty years, that the writings of Gall and his disciples are generally neglected? Vague, unscientific speculations have taken their place; the colleges and literati are groping in darkness, and, like plants in a cellar which reach out to the dim windows, they look anxiously for the information that may come from laboratories and anatomical halls, where animals by thousands are tortured to find the sources of physical functions, forgetful of the fact that the human brain is a psychic organ, and that a whole century of such investigations would leave the grand problems of conscious life and character in primeval darkness!
Have they no respect for the labors and honorable observations of clear-headed scientists fifty to eighty years ago? Were the anatomists Reil and Loder deceived when they testified to Gall's wonderful discoveries in anatomy? Were Andral, Broussais, Corvsart, and others, who stood at the head of the medical profession in France, deceived when they were followers of Gall? Was Dr. Vimont deceived when the study of the animal kingdom converted him from an opponent to a supporter of Gall? Were Elliotson and Solly of London, the Combes of Scotland, Macartney of Ireland, and a full score of others in the highest ranks of medical science deceived in giving their testimony that the anatomy of the brain, its development in the healthy, its amply recorded pathology, revealed in hospitals, and its phenomena in the insane asylums and prisons, supported the doctrines of Gall?
They were not deceived, and they were not blind. They were observers. Their successors, sinking into the agnosticism of pseudoscience, have thus sunk because they have abandoned the methods