ate
meditation of his system, before he began to promulgate it. Be that as
it will, its most striking characteristic is that of marking out the
scull into compartments, in the same manner as a country delineated on
a map is divided into districts, and assigning a different faculty or
organ to each. In the earliest of these diagrams that has fallen
under my observation, the human scull is divided into twenty-seven
compartments.

I would say of craniology, as I have already said of physiognomy, that
there is such a science attainable probably by man, but that we have yet
made scarcely any progress in the acquiring it. As certain lines in
the countenance are indicative of the dispositions of the man, so it
is reasonable to believe that a certain structure of the head is in
correspondence with the faculties and propensities of the individual.

Thus far we may probably advance without violating a due degree of
caution. But there is a wide distance between this general statement,
and the conduct of the man who at once splits the human head into
twenty-seven compartments.

The exterior appearance of the scull is affirmed to correspond with the
structure of the brain beneath. And nothing can be more analogous to
what the deepest thinkers have already confessed of man, than to suppose
that there is one structure of the brain better adapted for intellectual
purposes than another. There is probably one structure better adapted
than another, for calculation, for poetry, for courage, for cowardice,
for presumption, for diffidence, for roughness, for tenderness, for
self-control and the want of it. Even as some have inherently a faculty
adapted for music or the contrary(40).

(40) See above, Essay II.

But it is not reasonable to believe that we think of calculation with
one portion of the brain, and of poetry with another.

It is very little that we know of the nature of matter; and we are
equally ignorant as to the substance, whatever it is, in which the
thinking principle in man resides. But, without adventuring in any
way to dogmatise on the subject, we find so many analogies between the
thinking principle, and the structure of what we call the brain, that
we cannot but regard the latter as in some way the instrument of the
former.

Now nothing can be more certain respecting the thinking principle, than
its individuality. It has been said, that the mind can entertain but one
thought at one time; and certain it is,