Supposed Mental Faculties
Phrenologists believed that the human mind has a set of different mental faculties, with each particular faculty represented in a different area of the brain. For example, the faculty of "philoprogenitiveness", from the Greek for "love of offspring", was supposed to be located centrally at the back of the head (see illustration of the chart from Webster's Academic Dictionary).
These areas were said to be proportional to a person's propensities, and the importance of the given mental faculty. It was believed that the cranial bone conformed in order to accommodate the different sizes of these particular areas of the brain in different individuals, so that a person's capacity for a given personality trait could be determined simply by measuring the area of the skull that overlies the corresponding area of the brain.
An older notion was that personality was determined by the four humors.
Phrenology, which focuses on personality and character, is distinct from craniometry, which is the study of skull size, weight and shape, and physiognomy, the study of facial features.
Read more about this topic: Phrenology
Famous quotes containing the words supposed, mental and/or faculties:
“I think what everybody calls a miracle is just common sense.... You can look at the attitudes when people come in. That’s why they call it a miracle. These are black kids and they’re not supposed to know the things they know and achieve the way they are achieving.”
—Marva Nettles Collins (b. 1936)
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“The Good of man is the active exercise of his soul’s faculties in conformity with excellence or virtue.... Moreover this activity must occupy a complete lifetime; for one swallow does not make spring, nor does one fine day; and similarly one day or a brief period of happiness does not make a man supremely blessed and happy.”
—Aristotle (384–322 B.C.)