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Ralph Waldo Emerson
on phrenology
“I know the mental proclivity of the physicians. I hear the chuckle of the phrenologists. Theoretic kidnappers and slave-drivers, they esteem each man the victim of another, who winds him round his finger by knowing the law of his being, and by such cheap signboards as the color of his beard, or the slope of his occiput, reads the inventory of his fortunes and character. The grossest ignorance does not disgust like this impudent knowingness.... I saw a gracious gentleman who adapts his conversation to the form of the head of the man he talks with!
I had fancied that the value of life lay in its inscrutable possibilities.... I see not, if one be once caught in this trap of so-called sciences, any escape for the man from links of the chain of physical necessity. Given such an embryo, such a history must follow. On this platform, one lives in a sty of sensualism, and would soon come to suicide.” Ralph Waldo Emerson. 1890 [1856]. “Experience” in Essays by R.W. Emerson: Second Series. David McKay, Publisher, Philadelphia.