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:
“They had supposed their formula was fixed.
They had obeyed instructions to devise
A type of cold, a type of hooded gaze.
But when the Negroes came they were perplexed.
These Negroes looked like men....”
—Gwendolyn Brooks (b. 1917)
“To a first approximation, the intentional strategy consists of treating the object whose behavior you want to predict as a rational agent with beliefs and desires and other mental states exhibiting what Brentano and others call intentionality.”
—Daniel Clement Dennett (b. 1942)
“It is very rare that you meet with obstacles in this world which the humblest man has not faculties to surmount. It is true we may come to a perpendicular precipice, but we need not jump off, nor run our heads against it. A man may jump down his own cellar stairs, or dash his brains out against his chimney, if he is mad.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)