Mental Culture Or the Means of Developing the Human Faculties
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. THE TEMPERAMENTS, AND THEIR INFLUENCE ON SIZE. The preceding remarks on the general anatomy of the brain lead us to consider two important facts : first, that the difference in the size of the posterior, middle, and anterior lobes, and the very marked difference in the relative proportions of the convolutions composing the lobes, in every individual, will account for the great diversity of moral and intellectual capacity, through which each person becomes individualized. This proposition is incontrovertible, as we shall subsequently prove in our analysis of the organs, and of the particular functions they manifest. Secondly, it is important to guard the tyro in physiology against a very common, but erroneous conclusion, when examining the relative proportions of a head of a skull, that the size
...alone (whether of the whole brain or of the separate organs) is the only condition of functional power. Phrenologists speak of the size of the head as indicating relative power, and of single extreme faculties after the same rule: but in this statement we do not consider that absolute size of the brain is the only necessary condition of power, because experience proves that some brains are coarser than others. In the same manner, and for the same reason, it does not follow that a large muscular man should invariably have a relative intensity of uiuscular strength, for the muscles may be flabby and not compact: but in neither case ought we to conclude these examples to be exceptions to an universal law, that size is the standard of power. For it is demonstrable that, both as regards the brain and nervous system, and the muscular system, if there is a healthy condition, and the temperament is naturally active, then the size of the organs in each system will be the measure of...
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