The Love of Life
Authors: Maudsley Henry 
Published: August 2008

What a painfully distressing feeling must that be which one who has faith in the doctrines of phrenology, and experience in the art of it, is compelled continually to undergo! In his converse with men, the most disagreeable suspicions with regard to their feelings, their motives, their abilities, and their whole characters must ever be obtruding their dark shadows over the serenity of his mind. As a judge on the bench, a counsel at the bar, or the foreman of a jury, it will be to him an irresistible conviction that no reliance can be placed on the evidence of that witness in the box, forasmuch as, on the top of his head, in the place where should gently rise a veneration-swelling, there appears a most palpable pit, in which clearly all faith in the sanctity of oath may be hopelessly buried. What a cold sweat of agony, too, must ooze out over the phrenologist's body, when, prostrate on the bed of heavy sickness, he sees written on the fore-head of the being into whose hands the event of his recovery seems placed, that there is no power there of tracing out the causes of his ill, no faculty there for comparing and judging the value of symptoms and remedies! And then to be so often obliged to feign an intimate intercourse or to transact confidential business with one whose cranial conformation proclaims that no intimacy, no confidence, no security can abide. Verily, if phrenological knowledge be true, it is a blessed want to be without it. Conceive, if possible, the angry consternation of a future mother-in-law, if, before definitely proposing for her daughter's hand, a polite but resolute claim was put forward to a careful phrenological examination of her daughter's head. And yet that would be the bounden duty of a faithful phrenologist. Nor would accurate craniological knowledge be any great blessing to the individual, as regarded his personal welfare. For, inasmuch as the majority of men are foolish, and a great proportion of them very foolish, it is evident that a great many heads must be of indifferent conformation. What, then, would be the result of a general knowledge of this? Why, the vacillator would be surely confirmed in his vacillation, for he would fancy he saw his want of firmness to be in the purpose of the universe; the sensualist would wallow deeper in the mire of sensuality, for he would challenge the fate of a necessity in his acts; the thief would steal with greater abandonment and more industrious infamy, for he would consciously bow before the inexorable tyranny of organization; and the atheist might, with a scoff, silence for a moment his antagonist, by summoning in the effect the testimony of a cause in which he dreamed that he disbelieved. It appears to be the right fulfilment of an individual's destiny upon earth not to trouble himself greatly about deciding what he can do, but to do what he can. No advantage ever comes to any one from an excessive attention to the elements of his own character, or the phenomena of his own mind. Great self-consciousness is more or less of a disease; and that which is appointed to each one is to do with all his might that which lies before him to do—to work with earnest, sincere, moral, and intelligent labour in harmony with nature's laws. It is of such labour that it has been said, laborare est orare; and to one so working there need be no fear of failure, for the laws of the universe are his support; beneath him are “the everlasting arms.”