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 had heard so much about how hard it was supposed to be that, when they were little, I thought it would be horrible when they got married and left. But that’s silly you know. . . . By the time they grow up, they change and you change. Eventually, they’re not the same little kids and you’re not the same mother. It’s as if everything just falls into a pattern and you’re ready.”
—Anonymous Mother. As quoted in Women of a Certain Age, by Lillian B. Rubin, ch. 2 (1979)
“Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigour, and moral courage which it contained.”
—John Stuart Mill (1806–1873)
“Is boredom anything less than the sense of one’s faculties slowly dying?”
—John Berger (b. 1926)