FOOTNOTES:[38]This chapter, and the chapter onTruth in our Intercourse with the Sick, appeared some years since in the New Englander.[39]It is often difficult to determine definitely what are the real sentiments of phrenologists on this subject. But that some of them, if not actually and fully materialists, are very near it, there is no sort of doubt, if language is to be understood as used by them in the same way that it ordinarily is. They not only strip man of all the elements of moral character, and consider him, as one of them expresses it, as ‘a bundle of instincts,’ thus making him but a brute of a higher order; but the material organization is exalted in their view above all those spiritual qualities or powers, which they seem to consider either as attached to it, or resulting from it, or at least as being in no sense independent of it. If this be not materialism, it comes very near to it.
[38]This chapter, and the chapter onTruth in our Intercourse with the Sick, appeared some years since in the New Englander.
[38]This chapter, and the chapter onTruth in our Intercourse with the Sick, appeared some years since in the New Englander.
[39]It is often difficult to determine definitely what are the real sentiments of phrenologists on this subject. But that some of them, if not actually and fully materialists, are very near it, there is no sort of doubt, if language is to be understood as used by them in the same way that it ordinarily is. They not only strip man of all the elements of moral character, and consider him, as one of them expresses it, as ‘a bundle of instincts,’ thus making him but a brute of a higher order; but the material organization is exalted in their view above all those spiritual qualities or powers, which they seem to consider either as attached to it, or resulting from it, or at least as being in no sense independent of it. If this be not materialism, it comes very near to it.
[39]It is often difficult to determine definitely what are the real sentiments of phrenologists on this subject. But that some of them, if not actually and fully materialists, are very near it, there is no sort of doubt, if language is to be understood as used by them in the same way that it ordinarily is. They not only strip man of all the elements of moral character, and consider him, as one of them expresses it, as ‘a bundle of instincts,’ thus making him but a brute of a higher order; but the material organization is exalted in their view above all those spiritual qualities or powers, which they seem to consider either as attached to it, or resulting from it, or at least as being in no sense independent of it. If this be not materialism, it comes very near to it.