I return to Gall.
Those who wish to learn Gall’s doctrine, will always go up to Gall himself. Spurzheim already alters the spirit of that doctrine, and Gall complains of it. “M. Spurzheim,” says he, “knows my discoveries better than any body else, but he tries to introduce among them a spirit quite foreign to that in which they were begun, continued and perfected.”[183]
Gall, moreover, was a great anatomist. His idea of tracing the fibres of the brain is, as to the anatomy of that organ, the fundamental idea. The idea is not his own: two French anatomists, Vieussens and Pourfour du Petit, had admirably understood it long before his time; but at the period of his appearance it had been long forgotten. The brain was not then dissected by any one: it was cut in slices.
It was a great merit in Gall to have recalled the true method of dissecting the brain; and there was still greater address on his part, in connecting with his labours in positive anatomy, his doctrine of independent faculties and multiple brain.
This strange doctrine has had a fortune still more strange. Gall and Spurzheim forgot to place curiosity among their primary faculties. They were wrong. But for the credulous curiosity of mankind, how could they have explained the success of their doctrine?
Fortunately, a system never lives otherwise than as a system lives. That of the moment is abandoned for the sake of another: and almost always for a perfectly opposite one. Systems multiply and pass away; and we are indebted to the systems themselves for an escape from the mischiefs of systems.