4/17/2023 0 Comments Imp of the perverse fashionWe have a task before us which must be speedily performed. The impulse increases to a wish, the wish to a desire, the desire to an uncontrollable longing, and the longing is indulged. The speaker is aware that he displeases, he has every intention to please he is usually curt, precise, and clear the most laconic and luminous language is struggling for utterance upon his tongue it is only with difficulty that he restrains himself from giving it flow he dreads and deprecates the anger of him whom he addresses yet, the thought strikes him, that by certain involutions and parentheses this anger may be engendered. There lives no man who at some period has not been tormented, for example, by an earnest desire to tantalize a listener by circumlocution. It is not more incomprehensible than distinctive. No one who trustingly consults and thoroughly questions his own soul, will be disposed to deny the entire radicalness of the propensity in question. It follows, that the desire to be well must be excited simultaneously with any principle which shall be merely a modification of combativeness, but in the case of that something which I term perverseness, the desire to be well is not only aroused, but a strongly antagonistical sentiment exists.Īn appeal to one’s own heart is, after all, the best reply to the sophistry just noticed. Its principle regards our well-being and thus the desire to be well is excited simultaneously with its development. The phrenological combativeness has, for its essence, the necessity of self-defence. But a glance will show the fallacy of this idea. It will be said, I am aware, that when we persist in acts because we feel we should not persist in them, our conduct is but a modification of that which ordinarily springs from the combativeness of phrenology. It is radical, a primitive impulse – elementary. Nor will this overwhelming tendency to do wrong for the wrong’s sake, admit of analysis, or resolution into ulterior elements. I am not more certain that I breathe, than that the assurance of the wrong or error of any action is often the one unconquerable force which impels us, and alone impels us to its prosecution. With certain minds, under certain conditions it becomes absolutely irresistible. In theory, no reason can be more unreasonable but, in fact, there is none more strong. Through its promptings we act without comprehensible object or, if this shall be understood as a contradiction in terms, we may so far modify the proposition as to say, that through its promptings we act, for the reason that we should not. In the sense I intend, it is, in fact, a mobile without motive, a motive not motivirt. Induction, a posteriori, would have brought phrenology to admit, as an innate and primitive principle of human action, a paradoxical something, which we may call perverseness, for want of a more characteristic term. If we cannot comprehend God in his visible works, how then in his inconceivable thoughts, that call the works into being? If we cannot understand him in his objective creatures, how then in his substantive moods and phases of creation? Man usually or occasionally did, and was always occasionally doing, rather than upon the basis of what he took it for granted the Deity intended him to do. It would have been wiser, it would have been safer, to classify upon the basis of what And in these arrangements of the principia of human action, the Spurzheimites, whether right or wrong, in part, or upon the whole, have but followed, in principle, the footsteps of their predecessors deducing and establishing everything from the preconceived destiny of man, and upon the ground of the objects of this Creator. And so with combativeness, with ideality, with causality, with constructiveness, – so, in short, with every organ, whether representing a propensity, a moral sentiment, or a faculty of the pure intellect. Secondly, having settled it to be God’s will that man should continue his species, we discovered an organ of amativeness, forthwith. We then assigned to man an organ of alimentiveness, and this organ is the scourge with which the Deity compels man, will-I nill-I, into eating. In the matter of phrenology, for example, we first determined, naturally enough, that it was the design of the Deity that man should eat. Having thus fathomed, to his satisfaction, the intentions of Jehovah, out of these intentions he built his innumerable systems of mind. The intellectual or logical man, rather than the understanding or observant man, set himself to imagine designs – to dictate purposes to God. That phrenology and, in great measure, all metaphysicianism have been concocted a priori.
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