24



premacy which they were designed to occupy.        Perhaps it
would be nearer the exact truth to say, that this philosophy, in
its modern form, consists in the absolute supremacy of spiritual
good over all conventional and material good; apd then in the
subordination of all intellectual power and attainment, and of
all the selfish desires to the higher sentiments. The chief er-
ror of the philosophy lies in its partial and one-sided view of
human nature. Its mysticism arises, mostly, from the same
causes which have always rendered metaphysics so unintelligi-
ble to the great mass even of educated and thinking men. In
the first place, the expounders of this philosophy have not ac-
quired that clear and distinct conception of the number, and na-
ture, and relations of the primary faculties, in whose development
and ascendency their system consists, which the true science of
mind would enable them to attain; and, in the second place,
there is a corresponding want of definiteness in the language in
which many of their opinions and principles are set forth.
  Phrenology has, long ago, recorded its conviction of the im-
portance of the principle, thus forming, as it seems to me, the
basis of transcendentalism.   These disinterested sentiments,
whose high sovereignty it advocates, constitute, more than the
understandin g, the loftiest grade of character.  These it is
which have made the true heroes of history; these it is which
have made the martyrs of religion and liberty; these it is which
lie at the bottom of all earnestness,-they are the fountain of
all enthusiasm. Immensely, unspeakably as a powerful intel-
lect may benefit, by its researches and discoveries, the human
race, adding to its comforts and increasing its knowledge, it can
never, by its own unaided strength, infuse itself into the univer-
sal consciousness of humanity. Art may, indeed, inscribe the
name of its possessor on marble and adamant; science may write
it across the sky, so that the world cannot help but read it,
and the reading, nevertheless, shall not warm, in any degree,

 Nowhere, in the professed works on Phrenology, can there be found a truer
definition of the nature of veneration, or a more powerful vindication of its
worth, than in the commencement of M. Carlyle's third article on Gotehe, in the
Foreign Quarterly Review for August, 1832.