Psychological Gossip
Authors: J. H.  
Published: August 2008

In Dr. Conolly's early treatise on the Indications of Insanity, there is a charming chapter, on the “Modifications of intellectual power and activity, by various stimuli.” It abounds in anecdote, is very suggestive and full of instruction. If any reader of the Asylum Journal is unacquainted with the volume, he will obtain a rich treat by the perusal of its classic pages. Its facts will instruct him, even if he may demur to the theory which is based upon them. It has suggested to one mind, an hypothesis transient, it may be, as an April sunbeam, but which nevertheless seeks a written utterance in the Asylum Journal; and if meriting no better name, let it pass under the title of psychological gossip—for the writer has a strong suspicion, that this is its correct definition, more especially as in its elucidation some facts -will be reiterated, and some statements made, which have been used for other, if not for higher purposes elsewhere. The hypothesis consists in the supposition that the science of Phrenology, if not the art of Craniology is based upon truth, but that the special faculties of the mind are not produced simply and exclusively by an inherent power or impulse, but require for their education some appeal from the external senses; that Locke was not right in regarding the mind as a ‘tabula rasa’ until written upon by the senses; or Cabanis, Gall, and their successors, in supposing that the manifestation of special genius in individuals was dependent solely upon a particular cerebral organization, and altogether independent for its action of external incidents. In other words, that the faculties of the mind are evoked by an appeal from the senses, each mind responding to some peculiar excitement, as the highly toned instrument echoes back the note which is struck from without, provided it is in accordance with its own pitch or tensity. There is a dual action between the organs of sense and the brain, in the first awakening of the mind to a special pursuit; thus the genius of Ebenezer Elliott, the stern and powerful “Corn Law Rhymer,” appears ever to have required some such appeal from without, for in his autobiography he tells us, that “time has developed in me not genius, but powers which exist in all men, and lie dormant in most. I cannot, like Byron and Montgomery, pour poetry from my heart as from an unfailing fountain; and of my inability to indentify myself, like Shakespeare and Scott, with the characters of other men, my abortive ‘Kerhonah,’ ‘Taurepeds' and similar rejected failures are melancholy instances. My thoughts are all exterior. My mind is the mind of my own eyes. A primrose is to me a primrose and nothing more. I love it because it is nothing more. There is not in my writings one good idea that has not been suggested to me by some real occurrence, or by some object actually before my eyes, or by some remembered object or occurrence, or by the thoughts of other men heard or read. If I possess any power at all allied to genius, it is that of making other men's thoughts suggest thoughts to me, which, whether original or not, are to me new. Some years ago, my late excellent neighbour John Heppenstel, after showing me the plates of Audubon's “Birds of America,” requested me to address a few verses to the author. With this request I was anxious to comply, but I was unable to write a line, until a sentence in Rousseau suggested a whole poem, and coloured all its language. Now in this case I was not like a clergyman seeking a text, that he may write a sermon; for the text was not sought but found, or it would have been to me a lying and barren spirit.” This experience of Elliott would be regarded by some as an apt illustration of the sensational theory of mind, while the phrenologist might consider it as an example of the development of the perceptive faculties equalling if not dominating over the organ of ideality. It appears to the writer, generic and typical of all mental arousings to a specific pursuit; certain is it, that Byron is no exception, as the Corn Law Rhymer would have us believe, for the bright world around him with its ever varying incidents was the inspiration of his muse. It was on the lake of Geneva, that he composed the most beautiful portions of Childe Harold. The stillness and the loveliness of the place, seemed to imbue his mind with corresponding placidity, for in the eighty fifth verse of the third canto, he thus writes:—