Abstract
In the Proportion that Credulity is a more peaceful Possession of the Mind than Curiosity, so far preferable is that Wisdom, which converses about the Surface, to that pretended Philosophy which enters into the Depth of Things, and then comes gravely back with Informations and Discoveries, that in the inside they are good for nothing.
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Notes
- 1.
W. Shakespeare (1976) Hamlet, L. B. Wright and V. LaMar (eds) (New York: Simon & Schuster), p. 125.
- 2.
(1965) A Tale of a Tub with Other Early Works 1696–1707, H. Davis (ed.) (Oxford: Basil Blackwell), p. 109.
- 3.
(1851) The Human Body and its Connection with Man, Illustrated by the Principal Organs (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo and Co.), p. 42. Franz Joseph Gall, known as the ‘“inventor” of phrenology’, was born in Germany in 1757 and trained in Vienna. When his lectures on his ‘new theory of the brain’ and its visual manifestations on the skull were banned by Emperor Francis I in 1801, he and his assistant Johann Gaspar Spurzheim (who himself would go on to further popularize phrenology) embarked on a lecture tour of Europe that concluded in Paris in 1807, where he ‘remained writing, lecturing, and carrying on a highly respectable medical practice until his death’ in 1828. See R. Cooter (1984) The Cultural Meaning of Popular Science: Phrenology and the Organization of Consent in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 283.
- 4.
(1928) The Skull of Swift: An Extempore Exhumation (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company), pp. 4–5.
- 5.
The Cultural Meaning of Popular Science, p. 15. M. Foucault (1977) ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, in D. Bouchard (ed.), D. Bouchard and S. Simon (trans.), Language, Counter-Memory, Practice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press), p. 154.
- 6.
For Wilkinson, phrenology and its forbear, physiognomy, are forms of aesthetic expression: ‘The representation of the man by his head had always been vaguely felt, and the best sculptors and poets had imagined their gods and heroes with phrenological truth. […] The thing signified by the organ of form is form, and not a piece of cerebrum: love is meant by the protuberance of amativeness, and not the cerebellum.’ The Human Body and its Connection with Man, p. 42.
- 7.
M. P. Lorch (2006) ‘Phrenology and Methodology, or “playing tennis with the net down”’, Aphasiology, 20:9, 1059–71 (p. 1060).
- 8.
Swift’s example served medicine’s purposes in a variety of other ways. William Osler’s 1892 textbook Principles and Practice of Medicine (1892) analyses Swift’s final illness in order to refute the autopsy’s conclusion that Swift died of hydrocephalus. ‘A question on a humorous examination paper based on Osler’s textbook was published in the St. Thomas’s Hospital Gazette (London) in 1902 and reprinted in American Medicine, 1902: “Who made an autopsy on Dean Swift and what did he report?”’ M. Lorch (2006) ‘Language and memory disorder in the case of Jonathan Swift: considerations on retrospective diagnosis’, Brain, 129, 3127–37 (p. 3133).
- 9.
Tale of a Tub, p. 109. Houston quoted in Lorch, ‘Phrenology and Methodology’, p. 1062.
- 10.
The book’s epigraph, on the title page, is St. Paul’s ‘I am not mad, most noble Festus.’
- 11.
(1849) The Closing Years of Dean Swift’s Life (Dublin: Hodges and Smith, Grafton Street), p. 53. Wilde’s note to this passage indicates that the ‘ossified fragments’ of the larynx ‘were abstracted by a bystander, a countryman of Swift’s and are now, we believe, in the city of New York, U.S.’
- 12.
Anon (1834) ‘Account of the skull of Dean Swift, recently disinterred at Dublin’, Phrenological Journal and Miscellany, 9, 466–71 (p. 467). This record of the examination, dictated by Houston to George Combe, attributes Swift’s ‘extraordinary powers of mind’ to ‘diseased activity’, including ‘amativeness large’ and ‘wit small’ on a chart of measurements (p. 467). Fascinatingly, this account confirms its conclusions with the evidence of Walter Scott’s 1814 critical biography of Swift. See also Wilde, pp. 55–56.
- 13.
Quoted in Lorch, ‘Phrenology and Methodology’, p. 1063.
- 14.
Quoted in Lorch, ‘Phrenology and Methodology’, p. 1063.
- 15.
Closing Years of Dean Swift’s Life, p. 59. The practice of phrenology both in private examinations and in public lectures depended on the collection and display of a variety of skulls, both in travelling collections and phrenology museums. See, for example, Steven Shapin (1979) ‘The Politics of Observation: Cerebral Anatomy and Social Interests in the Edinburgh Phrenology Disputes’, in R. Wallis (ed.), On the Margins of Science: The Social Construction of Rejected Knowledge (Keele: University of Keele), pp. 139–78, and for phrenology and anatomy’s fascination with the exotic, see H. Macdonald (2010) Possessing the Dead: The Artful Science of Anatomy (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press), especially pp. 125–51.
- 16.
Quoted in Lorch, ‘Language and Memory Disorder’, p. 3133.
- 17.
Quoted in Lorch, ‘Language and Memory Disorder’, p. 3132.
- 18.
Quoted in Lorch, ‘Language and Memory Disorder’, p. 3133.
- 19.
Tale of a Tub, p. 104.
- 20.
Anonymous review attributed by G. Combe to and claimed by D. Skae (1846) The British Quarterly Review, 8, 397–419 (pp. 413, 408). In a later 1847 response to Combe, Skae would compare the phrenologists to ‘the monkey who got his tail chopped off trying to persuade his companions that he knew the fashions’ (quoted in Lorch, ‘Phrenology and Methodology’, p. 1068).
- 21.
Quoted in Lorch, ‘Phrenology and Methodology’, p. 1065.
- 22.
Lorch, ‘Phrenology and Methodology’, p. 1060. M. P. Lorch (2007) ‘Explorations of the Brain, Mind and Medicine in the Writings of Jonathan Swift’, in H. Whitaker, C. U. M. Smith, and S. Finger (eds), Brain, Mind and Medicine: Essays in Eighteenth-Century Neuroscience (New York: Springer U.S.), pp. 345–52.
- 23.
Lorch, ‘Language and Memory Disorder’, pp. 3135–36.
- 24.
(1786) ‘On Fashionable Diseases’, in Medical Cautions for the Consideration of Invalids; Those Especially Who Resort to Bath: Containing Essays on Fashionable Diseases (Bath: R. Crutwell), p. 14. See Tale of a Tub, p. 108: ‘when Imagination is at Cuffs with the Senses, and common Understanding, as well as Common Sense, is Kickt out of Doors’. In another apparent allusion to Swift’s satire on both Henry IV’s zeal for ‘universal monarchy’ and Louis XIV in his ‘Digression on Madness’, Adair blames the latter French king’s ‘vanity and ambition to attempt universal empire’ (p. 10) for French fashion’s dominance over John Bull. See J. Marshall, cited in Lorch, ‘Phrenology and Methodology’, p. 1069.
- 25.
R. Cooter (1984), The Cultural History of Popular Science, building on the work of Steven Shapin, ‘The Politics of Observation’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 9. For the false Whig history of phrenology, see pp. 16–22.
- 26.
Swift, Tale of a Tub, p. 99.
- 27.
G. W. F. Hegel (1977) Phenomenology of Spirit, A. V. Miller (trans.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 201.
- 28.
H. Williams (ed.) (1958) The Poems of Jonathan Swift, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press), II, p. 530, lines 131–32. The scatological poems of which this is a prominent example are Swift in Hamlet’s mode of address to Yorick: ‘Now get you to my lady's chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favor she must come; make her laugh at that.’ (Act V, sc. i. lines 185–88, p. 128)
- 29.
(1963) ‘A Letter to a Young Gentleman, Lately Entered into Holy Orders’ (9 January 1719–1720) H. Davies (ed.) (1963) Irish Tracts: 1720–1723 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell), p. 65.
- 30.
J. Traugott (1967) ‘Swift, Our Contemporary,’ Irish University Review, 4:1, 11–34 (p. 18).
- 31.
Tale of a Tub, pp. 109, 110.
- 32.
Phenomenology, p. 208. I am indebted to J. Noggle (2001) The Skeptical Sublime: Aesthetic Ideology in Pope and the Tory Satirists (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 76, who first makes the connection to Hegel via Slavoj Zizek. Noggle does not note that Hegel is in fact refuting phrenology in this section of the Phenomenology, though he draws upon it in his Aesthetics. See S. Decaroli (2006) ‘The Greek Profile: Hegel’s Aesthetics and the Implications of a Psuedo-Science’, Philosophical Forum, 37:2, 113–151.
- 33.
(1939) Perilous Balance: The Tragic Genius of Swift, Johnson, & Sterne (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), pp. 1–24.
- 34.
The Skull of Swift, pp. 9–10.
- 35.
Psalm 105:18, in the King James Version, ‘he was laid in iron’. The literal meaning of the Hebrew is ‘his soul entered into iron’, also rendered in the Episcopal Prayer book as ‘the iron entered into his soul’. http://biblehub.com/psalms/105-18.htm (accessed 19 November 2015). http://biblehub.com/commentaries/psalms/105-18.htm (accessed 19 November 2015).
- 36.
Letter to Geoffrey Faber (25? August 1927) (2011) V. Eliot and Hugh Haughton (eds) The Letters of T.S. Eliot (New Haven: Yale University Press), 5 vols, J. Haffenden (general ed.), II, pp. 659–61. See note 2 on p. 659 for Eliot on Pascal vs. Swift. A typo in note 3 refers to Eliot’s review of Leslie’s The Soul of Swift, as if soul and skull were one and the same, as if the spirit really were a bone.
- 37.
‘The result of Gall’s theories was to wrest psychology out of the grasp of the philosophers and deliver it to the anatomists and physiologists.’ T. M. Parssinen (1974) ‘Popular Science and Society: The Phrenology Movement in Early Victorian Britain’, Journal of Social History, 8:1, 1–20 (p. 4). The soul, many believed, was jeopardized in the process.
- 38.
Traugott, ‘Swift Our Contemporary’, p. 18.
- 39.
(2002) Gulliver’s Travels, A. J. Rivero (ed.) (New York: W.W. Norton), p. 250.
- 40.
For a brilliant essay on the critical focus on Swift’s body as a response to the embodied nature of his wit, see A. Reddick (1998) ‘Avoiding Swift: Influence and the Body’, in A. Douglas, P. Kelly and I. Campbell Ross (eds), Locating Swift: Essays from Dublin on the 250th Anniversary of the Death of Jonathan Swift 1667–1745 (Dublin: Four Courts Press), pp. 150–166.
- 41.
See, for example, T. H. Bewley (1998) ‘The Health of Jonathan Swift’, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 91, 602–5.
- 42.
(1983) Swift: The Man, His Works, and the Age, 3 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), III: Dean Swift, p. 915. Orrery claims that Swift left his last poem, ‘The Legion Club’ (1736), unfinished due to the ‘dreadful effects’ (whether on the poem or himself or both is unclear) of terrible ‘giddiness’, a statement denied by Ehrenpreis. J. Boyle, 5th Earl of Cork and Orrery (2000) Remarks on the Life and Writings of Dr. Jonathan Swift, J. Froes (ed.) (Newark: University of Delaware Press), pp. 270–71. See note 14 for scholarly disputations of the truthfulness of this statement.
- 43.
Johnson’s portrait of the astronomer is included in R. Hunter and I. Macalpine (eds) (1982) Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry (Hartsdale, NY: Carlisle Publishing), p. 417.
- 44.
F. Brady and W. K. Wimsatt (eds) (1977) Samuel Johnson: Selected Poetry and Prose (Berkeley: University of California Press), p. 66, lines 317–18.
- 45.
For rumours of Swift on show, see L. Damrosch (2013) Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World (New Haven: Yale University Press), p. 467. For the persistence through the twentieth century of the error of Swift as an inmate of the hospital, see Bewley, ‘Health of Jonathan Swift’, p. 602.
- 46.
(1911) The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons), pp. 178–79.
- 47.
In K. Williams (ed.) (1970) Swift: The Critical Heritage (New York: Barnes & Noble, Inc.), pp. 179, 180.
- 48.
Gulliver’s Travels, p. 204.
- 49.
(1934) Swift or The Egotist (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd), pp. 371–72.
- 50.
(1997) Selected Letters of Edith Sitwell, R. Greene (ed.) (London: Virago), pp. 208–9.
- 51.
Dean Swift, p. 918.
- 52.
(1996) in Selected Poems and Four Plays of William Butler Yeats, M. L. Rosenthal (ed.) (New York: Scribner), p. 170.
- 53.
In Poems of Jonathan Swift, II, p. 572, lines 479–84.
- 54.
Hamlet Act II, sc. ii, lines 323–24, p. 50.
- 55.
Remarks on the Life and Writings of Jonathan Swift, p. 273.
- 56.
Ehrenpreis, Swift: The Man, His Work, and the Age, III, p. 918. I owe to Vincent Caretta the observation that these last words, paradoxically resonating with Wilde’s quotation of St. Paul’s denial of madness, might also allude to St. Paul. Colossians 1: 23: ‘I speak as a fool’ is one of many possible examples.
Bibliography
Leslie, S. (1928) The Skull of Swift: An Extempore Exhumation (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company).
Wilde, O. (1849) The Closing Years of Dean Swift’s Life (Dublin: Hodges and Smith, Grafton Street).
Wilkinson, J. J. G. (1851) The Human Body and its Connection with Man, Illustrated by the Principal Organs (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo and co.).
Chua, K. (2012) ‘Girodet and the Eternal Sleep’, in H. Deutsch and M. Terrall (eds), Vital Matters: Eighteenth-Century Views of Conception, Life, and Death (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), pp. 57–92.
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Deutsch, H. (2016). ‘Alas, poor Yorick!’: Jonathan Swift, Madness and Fashionable Science. In: Ingram, A., Wetherall Dickson, L. (eds) Disease and Death in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59718-2_12
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