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Minds Intensely Unsettled: Phrenology, Experience, and the American Pursuit of Spiritual Assurance, 1830–1880

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2018

Christopher G. White
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Abstract

Starting in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, a group of American Christians rejected their parents’ Calvinism and fashioned new views of sin, the self, and spiritual growth. These believers were aided in this process by new, psychological sciences such as phrenology, sciences that pointed to the existence of powerful spiritual faculties in the self and new ways of using and measuring them. Especially for those who felt paralyzed by sensibilities of sinfulness and moral impotence, phrenology was a liberation. But phrenology appealed to Americans for other reasons as well. By linking mental and spiritual states to physiological structures, phrenology brought the mysterious emotions and dispositions of faith to the surfaces of the self, where they could be more easily understood and reflected upon. Inner conditions could be discerned in bumps and contours of the head and body or even in one's characteristic postures and gestures. In short, the new science made confounding inner spaces visible again. This article explores the spiritual struggles of a wide range of believers who used phrenology to develop more sober and measured, and therefore more certain, forms of spiritual assurance. It argues that, beginning in the early nineteenth century, a broad coalition of religious liberals used these new, scientific psychologies such as phrenology to find in external, especially bodily, conditions signs of inner spiritual states.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religion and American Culture , Volume 16 , Issue 2 , Summer 2006 , pp. 227 - 261
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture 2006

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References

Notes

The author wishes to thank David Hall, Leigh Schmidt, and Ann Taves for comments on earlier versions of this article.

1 Sizer, Nelson, Forty Years in Phrenology; Embracing Recollections of History, Anecdote, and Experience (New York: Fowler and Wells Co., 1888), 54–55 Google Scholar. It is clear that ministers and lecturers collaborated at local churches and that pastors used phrenological categories to talk about human nature and salvation. See Sizer, Forty Years, 172–74 and passim, and Davies, John D., Phrenology: Fad and Science; A 19th-Century American Crusade (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955 Google Scholar; repr.: Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1971), 149–58.

2 For more on itinerant lecturing and preaching in this period, a good starting point is Benes, Peter, ed., Itinerancy in New England and New York (Boston: Boston University, 1986 Google Scholar); earlier studies include Wright's, Richard Hawkers and Walkers in Early America (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1927 Google Scholar) and Neville Jackson's, E. Silhouette (New York: Scribners, 1938)Google Scholar. Timothy Hall recently has written an excellent study on a slightly earlier period called Contested Boundaries: Itinerancy and the Reshaping of the Colonial American Religious World (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994).

3 Quoted in Hatch, Nathan, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 10, 170–73Google Scholar. The recent literature on revival in this period is extensive. I have relied mostly on sources that focus on ecstatic experiences, including Taves, Ann, Fits, Trances, and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999)Google Scholar; Rabinowitz, Richard, The Spiritual Self in Everyday Life: The Transformation of Personal Religious Experience in Nineteenth-Century New England (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1989)Google Scholar; and Cross, Whitney, The Burned- Over District: Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York, 1800–1850 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1950)Google Scholar.

4 Schaff, Philip, The Principle of Protestantism as Related to the Present State of the Church (Chambersberg, Pa.: German Reformed Church, 1845), 25 Google Scholar. Similar accounts can be found in the writings of Tocqueville, the English visitors Robert Collyer and Frances Trollope, and many others.

5 Of this “vast army,” Baird wrote further that “although to the inexperienced eye such an army as it moves onward against the enemy may have a confused appearance, the different divisions of infantry being arranged separately … to the mind of Him all is systematic order where the uninitiated sees nothing but confusion.” Baird, Robert, Religion in America, or an account of the origin, relation to the state, and present condition of the evangelical churches in the United States (New York: Harper, 1844), 536–39.Google Scholar

6 Baird, , Religion in America, 578, 583Google Scholar.

7 See Hatch, , Democratization of American Christianity, 71 Google Scholar.

8 Henry Ward Beecher to Harriet Beecher Stow, undated (perhaps 1848), Henry Ward Beecher Papers, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.

9 Many contemporaries of Sunderland were similarly confused by the cacophony of inspired utterances. When remembering his first vision (1820), Joseph Smith confirmed that his “mind at times was greatly excited, the cry and tumult were so great and incessant. The Presbyterians were most decided against the Baptists and Methodists, and used all the powers of both reason and sophistry to prove their errors, or, at least, to make people think they were in error… . In the midst of this war of words and tumult of opinions, I often said to myself, what is to be done?” Joseph Smith, quoted in Roberts, B. H., ed., History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, vol. 1 (Salt Lake City: Deseret Books, 1964), 4–6 Google Scholar.

10 Like Beecher, Sunderland experimented with phrenology and mesmerism. See Taves, , Fits, Trances, and Visions, 130–40Google Scholar. Revivals were not the only reason for intense interest in mind and spirit. Reformed churches (and their liberal offshoots) were sustaining a continuous debate over the mind, sin, and salvation. The best overviews are Shelton Smith, H., Changing Conceptions of Original Sin (New York: Scribners, 1955)Google Scholar; Howe, Daniel W., The Unitarian Conscience: Harvard Moral Philosophy, 1805–1861 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1970)Google Scholar; and Brooks Holifield, E., Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003)Google Scholar.

11 McGiffert, Michael, ed., God's Plot: Puritan Spirituality in Thomas Shepard's Cambridge (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), 145 Google Scholar.

12 The assault on orthodoxy was increasingly widespread in American culture, and the literature on this assault and its aftermath is voluminous. For how this assault figures in the emergence of liberal religious sensibilities, see, for example, Howe, Daniel Walker, “The Decline of Calvinism: An Approach to Its Study,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 14, no. 3 (June 1972): 306–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Foster, Charles H., The Rungless Ladder: Harriet Beecher Stowe and New England Puritanism (New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 1970 Google Scholar); Hatch, Democratization of American Christianity; and Taves, Fits, Trances, and Visions.

13 Mann's complaint juxtaposes an arid Calvinism with newer formulations relying on intuition and feeling. Moderates and liberals developed theologies of feeling and intuition in the same period. Mann, Mary, Life of Horace Mann (Boston: Lee and Shepard Pub., 1891), 13 Google Scholar.

14 Mann, , Life, 13–14 Google Scholar.

15 Henry Ward Beecher, as quoted in “Henry Ward Beecher,” Littell's Living Age, April 27, 1872, 198. The “gloomy, ascetic piety” quotation is from Fowler, Orson, Religion; Natural and Revealed; or, the natural theology and moral bearings of phrenology and physiology, 10th ed. (New York: Fowler and Wells, 1848), 65 Google Scholar. The same language is ubiquitous in popular progressive evangelical periodicals of the time such as the Christian Union and the Independent.

16 Davis, Andrew Jackson, The Great Harmonia, vol. 2 (Boston: B. B. Mussey, 1855), 26–27 Google Scholar.

17 Two excellent accounts are Sklar, Kathryn Kish, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New York: Norton, 1976)Google Scholar, and Caskey, Marie, Chariot of Fire: Religion and the Beecher Family (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978)Google Scholar.

18 Catharine Beecher to Henry Ward Beecher, February 27, 1860, Henry Ward Beecher Papers, Yale University, New Haven. The same letter shows that these dilemmas were passed to succeeding generations. Catharine asked Henry for spiritual help with their niece, Hatty. “But there is a class of the weak—the discouraged, the lambs of the fold, who are torn and wounded by the thorns of Calvinism and it is for these I plead. Among these you will find sister Harriet's oldest daughter Hattie and I could find you many more.” What to do with such “sensitive” souls? The child had said that “Uncle Henry says that ‘when I realize the goodness of Christ his helpfulness, his lenient forgiving, sympathizing spirit, I have faith.’ … He says again I must ‘believe that Christ is willing to save’ me. How can I believe it when I do not know that I shall be saved. He never told me he should save me. If he is willing why don't he do it, for I am sure I do not know what to do.” Uncle Henry was explaining this in one way and “all the Professors” were explaining it in another, with the result that it was “all a dreadful mess!”

19 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, Men of Our Times, or leading patriots of the day (Hartford, Conn.: Hartford Publishing Co., 1868), 532 Google Scholar. Beecher talked about his religious difficulties in different ways during the course of his life, and, in reconstructing them, one has to proceed cautiously. He did not fill his journal with extensive ruminations on these subjects; but he does take up these issues in detail in correspondence with his sister. Her recollections are quoted above. See “Henry Ward Beecher,” 198; Clark, Clifford, Henry Ward Beecher: Spokesman for a Middle-Class America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978), 24–25 Google Scholar; and Caskey, , Chariot of Fire, 213–17Google Scholar.

20 Henry Ward Beecher to Harriet Beecher Stowe, n.d. [1848?], Henry Ward Beecher Papers, Yale University, New Haven. His emphasis. The atmosphere at his frontier seminary (Lane) did not help matters, for there he witnessed revivalists and antirevivalists, Calvinists and Arminians, clashing and had to endure the spectacle of his father's heresy trial. “How I despised and hated this whirling abyss of controversies,” he said. This was precisely the time when his mind was “intensely unsettled.” In Caskey, , Chariot of Fire, 214–15Google Scholar.

21 From Henry Ward Beecher to Harriet Beecher Stowe, n.d. [1848?], Henry Ward Beecher Papers, Yale University, New Haven. On Henry's interest in nature as a “symbol of invisible spiritual truth,” see McLoughlin, William, The Meaning of Henry Ward Beecher: An Essay on the Shifting Values of Mid-Victorian America, 1840–1870 (New York: Knopf, 1970), 58 Google Scholar.

22 He learned to trust these illuminations, finally believing that “the soul seeks and sees God through nature” and that, when nature is seen in this way, it “changes its voice, speaking no longer of mere material grandeur and beauty.” Nature was “a symbol of invisible spiritual truths, the ritual of a higher life, the highway upon which our thoughts are to travel toward immortality.” McLoughlin, , Meaning of Henry Ward Beecher, 58–59 Google Scholar.

23 Beecher was not alone in keeping notes on character and on “outlines of the lives who have made themselves or have attained any great end by decision of character.” Caskey, , Chariot of Fire, 161, 212–13.Google Scholar

24 The argument was not so different from the natural religion arguments of earlier liberals like Francis Bowen, who reasoned from the mind and its structures to God and God's qualities. The difference was that Unitarians like Bowen and Henry Ware did not pursue precise bodymind correspondences. Employing an introspective (and metaphysical) philosophy, they argued quite simply that our conscience—that is, our ability to know right from wrong—proved the existence of God, who had this capacity and gave it to us. The argument for the existence of God from the mind, they thought, was “even more direct, logical and convincing” than the argument from nature. Howe, , Unitarian Conscience, 94–95 Google Scholar. Howe's book also deals with the history of the faculty psychology before phrenologically minded liberals transformed its metaphorical “high” and “low” faculties into specific brain areas. See Howe, , Unitarian Conscience, 40–41, 54–64.Google Scholar

25 There is a longer history to be told about localization of mental functions in the brain and how phrenology fits into this story. Harrington, Anne tells this story succinctly in her Medicine, Mind, and the Double Brain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 6–10 Google Scholar. I have relied on her account and on Robinson, Daniel, An Intellectual History of Psychology (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

26 Various ways of localizing mental function in the brain were pursued by religious and nonreligious thinkers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. See Robert M. Young, “The Functions of the Brain: Gall to Ferrier (1808–1886),” Isis 59, no. 3 (Autumn 1968): 250–68; and Magoun, H. W., “Early Development of Ideas Relating the Mind with the Brain,” in Neurological Basis of Behavior, ed. Wolstenholme, G. E. W. and O’Connor, C. M. (London: Churchill, 1958)Google Scholar.

27 Clark, Beecher, 16–18. Though I am sure that Lyman would have disapproved of Henry's new science, I do not feel, as William McLoughlin did, that the “new science of phrenology” “provided a foil to the rigid evangelical theology of [Henry’s] father and professors.” My sense is that Lyman's faith was less rigid and Harry's less pugnacious. Like other liberals, Harry had an irenic personality and moved slowly to new positions. He remained especially aware of displeasing his father and would not talk openly with him about his new ideas. McLoughlin, Meaning of Henry Ward Beecher, 16–18.

28 [No title or author], American Journal of Phrenology 24 (1856): 131.

29 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, Eighty Years and More: Reminicences, 1815–1897 (New York: European Pub. Co., 1898 Google Scholar; repr., Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1993), 40–44; Clarke, James Freeman, Autobiography, Diary, and Correspondence, ed. Hale, Edward E. (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1968), 49 Google Scholar. Phrenology saved by providing other comforts as well. “Phrenology saved me from the rock of infidelity; when I saw that mind was constitutionally adapted to the great principles of Christianity I was enabled to comprehend the fallacy of the base doctrines of the infidel.” Phrenology turned people away from skepticism, confusion, and the babble of the sects. See Davies, , Phrenology, 157–58.Google Scholar

30 Weaver, George, Lectures on Mental Science According to the Philosophy of Phrenology (New York: S. R. Wells and Co., 1880), 18–23 Google Scholar; Howe, Samuel Gridley, Address to the Boston Phrenological Society (Boston, 1836), 18 Google Scholar. See also Davies, , Phrenology, 163 Google Scholar. Phrenology was part of a broader curiosity in America about how material forms reflected deeper spiritual realities. This curiosity was manifested in American visual culture and especially in speculation about emotion and how emotion influenced the contours of the face and head. For more on how this played out in American Protestantism, see David Morgan, Protestants and Pictures: Religion, Visual Culture, and the Age of American Mass Production (New York: Oxford, 1999), 277–79. The nineteenth-century story I am telling here could be contextualized in much larger debates about the somatic signs of authentic religious experience. For these larger debates, see Schmidt, Leigh, Holy Fairs: Scotland and the Making of American Revivalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), xx–xxviii Google Scholar; Schmidt, Leigh, Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002)Google Scholar; and Taves, Fits, Trances, and Visions.

31 For this quotation and a good overview of these problems, see Robinson, , Intellectual History, 337–41Google Scholar. Herbert Spencer was so taken with the science that he designed a “cephalograph” to measure the dimensions of skulls more precisely. Instructions on how to use the cephalograph are in his Autobiography (London 1904), v. 1, app. H. See also McLaren, Angus, “Phrenology: Medium and Message,” Journal of Modern History 46, no. 1 (March 1974): 89 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 Bain, Alexander, The Emotions and the Will (London: J. W. Parker, 1859), 568, 570CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 It is hard to know precisely how popular, and how respected among intellectuals, this science was on into the second half of the century. Sources disagree. But there is no doubt that it remained powerful in popular cultures; the major phrenological organ, the American Phrenological Journal, had a remarkable run, from 1838 to 1911, especially when we compare it with denominational journals from the period. See Davies, , Phrenology, 164 Google Scholar.

34 Colbert, Charle, A Measure of Perfection: Phrenology and the Fine Arts in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 23–25 Google Scholar.

35 See Stern, Madeleine, Heads and Headlines: The Phrenological Fowlers (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971), 108, 236Google Scholar; and Davies, , Phrenology, 119, 123–24Google Scholar. See also Hungerford, Edward, “Walt Whitman and His Chart of Bumps,” American Literature 2, no. 4 (January 1931): 350–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

36 See Quinn, Michael D., Early Mormonism and the Magic World View (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1987)Google Scholar; Cross, Burned-Over District; and Davies, Phrenology. Positive reviews were common in periodicals popular in the urban (often Congregationalist) northeast, especially in the progressive Christian Union. Unitarian, Universalist, and other liberal periodicals (Christian Register, Christian Examiner, The Dial) and anti- Calvinist oriented journals also showed interest in the new science. Methodist and Baptist theological journals (Methodist Review, Baptist Quarterly) offered mixed views; Presbyterians generally were more critical in their Princeton Review and Presbyterian and Reformed Review; and Congregationalists were more positive, especially in the (Chicago) Advance, the Congregationalist, and the Boston Recorder.

37 Beecher's comments on Bain (and other psychologists) are in his Yale Lectures on Preaching (New York: J. B. Ford, 1872), 90–92, 96.

38 Quoted in Stern, , Heads and Headlines, 81 Google Scholar.

39 James Freeman Clarke, quoted in Davies, , Phrenology, 162–63Google Scholar.

40 Europeans argued that older philosophies of mind fell down in quite specific ways—that, in particular, philosophy had given no account “of the influence of the material organs on the mental powers” nor of the “progress of the mind from youth to age”; it had not explained phenomena like “sleep, dreaming, idiocy, and insanity”; it was unable to document and classify accurately the various faculties and powers of the mind; and it had not been able to shed light on the nature and effects of combinations of mental faculties (George Combe). In reviewing these charges, Alexander Bain agreed that older ways of thinking about the mind were muddled and said new sciences that linked the mind to the brain and nervous system held out the most promise. Combe and Bain quoted in Bain, Alexander, On the Study of Character, Including An Estimate of Phrenology (London: Parker, Son, and Bourn, 1861), 14–17 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41 “Rev. G. S. Weaver,” American Journal of Phrenology 20, no. 2 (August 1854): 28–29; and Weaver, , Lectures on Mental Science, 20–22 Google Scholar.

42 Weaver, , Lectures on Mental Science, 63 Google Scholar.

43 Hecker, John, The Scientific Basis of Education Demonstrated by an Analysis of the Temperaments and of Phrenological Facts … (New York, 1868), 30–31, 47–48, 112–18.Google Scholar

44 Ibid., 30–31, 103.

45 Fowler, Orson S., Religion; Natural and Revealed: or, the Natural Theology and Moral Bearings of Phrenology and Physiology: Including the Doctrines Taught and Duties Inculcated Thereby, Compared with Those Enjoined in the Scriptures (New York: O. S. Fowler, 1840), xiii, 26, 163.Google Scholar

46 Fowler, , Religion, 111, 114, 163–65Google Scholar

47 Rev. T. G. Steward, “Conversion Scientifically Considered,” Christian Recorder (Philadelphia), November 15, 1877.

48 See as well Alfred Lorraine, “Phrenology,” Ladies Repository 2, no. 9 (September 1842), 263–64; and Weaver, Lectures on Mental Science, 18–23, 60–63, 273.

49 “Phrenological Facts,” American Journal of Phrenology 7, no. 1 (January 1845): 19.

50 The deacon's story is in Sizer, Forty Years in Phrenology, 330 (see also 31, 93, 244, and 306). Other accounts are in the American Journal of Phrenology 4 (1842): 107–19; 11 (1849): 326; and 24 (October 1856): 87.

51 Sizer, , Forty Years in Phrenology, 204–5Google Scholar.

52 “Phrenology Exemplified,” Newport Mercury, December 8, 1838, 2.

53 Quoted in Bressler, Ann Lee, The Universalist Movement in America, 1770–1880 (New York: Oxford, 2001), 101 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

54 Sizer, Forty Years in Phrenology, 130–33, has an interesting episode illustrating this.

55 James L. Corning, Sr., “Personal Recollections of Henry Ward Beecher” (1903), 11–12, Henry Ward Beecher collection, Yale University Archives.

56 This dialogue is summarized in Beecher, Henry Ward, Eyes and Ears (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1862), 20–5Google Scholar. Beecher is also quoted from Yale Lectures on Preaching, 93–94.

57 Wickes, Edward Zeus Franklin, Improved Phreno-Chart and Compass of Life (New York: Mutual Benefit Pub., 1882), 19, 136–38Google Scholar.

58 Ibid., 5, 8–9.

59 Davis's harsh condemnation of orthodoxy is in Taves, Fits, Trances, and Visions, 183. His assurances that he and others had tried older systems is from Davis, Andrew Jackson, The Magic Staff: An Autobiography of Andrew Jackson Davis (Boston: William White, 1871), 490.Google Scholar

60 Davis called it “unsound and insufficient.” Quoted in Robert Delp, “A Spiritualist in Connecticut: Andrew Jackson Davis, the Hartford Years, 1850–1854,” The New England Quarterly 53, no. 3 (September 1980): 353. For more on Davis's theology and his conflicts with orthodox theologians, see Delp, “Spiritualist in Connecticut,” 350–56.

61 A number of other religious liberals experimented with these systems. For example, the physician and writer Joseph R. Buchanan, drawing on neurophysiological research, phrenological charts, and his own mesmeric experiments, devised extensive systems of correspondences that mapped how the brain and body might be influenced by nonphysical energies. Buchanan hoped that a suitably enlarged scientific method could demonstrate the existence of ambient spiritual forces, and he thought that this discovery might lay the groundwork for a new nondogmatic religion. Buchanan agreed with Davis that various techniques could be developed to cultivate one's spiritual impressions and balance the vital forces in the self. These harmonial systems adumbrated the ideas of later New Thought writers like Warren Felt Evans, men and women who also linked outer conditions to inner ones as ways of overcoming the confounding inwardness of Calvinism. See American National Biography, 1999, s.v. “Buchanan, Joseph R.” See also Laurence Moore, R., In Search of White Crows: Spiritualism, Parapsychology, and American Culture (New York: Oxford, 1977), 10–13 Google Scholar; and, for information on Warren Felt Evans and other New Thought figures, Parker, Gail Thain, Mind Cure in New England: From the Civil War to World War I (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1973)Google Scholar.

62 In Taves, Fits, Trances, and Visions, 169–70. For figure 3 and more information, see Davis, Andrew Jackson, Present Age and Inner Life: Ancient and Modern Spirit Mysteries Classified and Explained (Boston: William White and Co., 1869)Google Scholar.

63 Henry Ward Beecher, “The Progress of Thought in the Church,” North American Review 135 (August 1882): 106–17, 116–17.

64 See Taves, , Fits, Trances, and Visions, 134–35, 202–5.Google Scholar

65 Many on both sides addressed this question. Orthodox Christians linked phrenology to materialism and infidelity, and phrenologists, too, were sensitive to this problem. See Harold Schwartz, “Samuel Gridley Howe as Phrenologist,” The American Historical Review 57, no. 3 (April 1952): 645; and Davies, Phrenology, 149–58. The Hecker references are in Scientific Basis, 17.

66 Delp, “Spiritualist in Connecticut,” 347, 354.

67 Beecher, Yale Lectures on Preaching, 93–94.

68 On the cultural history of phrenology and its relationship to the new, scientific psychology, see Hartley, Lucy, Physiognomy and the Meaning of Expression in Nineteenth-Century Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 1–14, 180–88.Google Scholar