I FIRST saw Mr. Alcott in New Haven, Conn., in the winter of 1856-1857, when I had completed the first term of my junior year at Yale College. An acquaintance of mine who was interested in a series of conversations that had been arranged for Mr. Alcott invited me to attend, and I did so. I found something quite congenial to me. I had begun to inquire after the foundations of customary belief, and, as a natural consequence, was in a state of protest against many of the habits and practices that existed around me. I had been attracted to phrenology; had adopted the diet of the vegetarians; was an ardent advocate of the spelling reform; looked at gymnastics, water-cure, dress reform, mesmerism, and spiritualism as promising a new and better order of things. I was, in short, in that stage of clearing-up" which the Germans call Die Aufklärung. It is an epoch of negation, necessary al

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ridging this epoch of

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te to ind, in his own reason,

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Funily, Civil Society, and

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The distinction

her powers of cognition cac Mr. Alcott announced zecca between percep

phenology,—the reand comparison."

252 as taught by Spurz

er of discriminating

highest reach should

ty of things, — the

environment. This

her arm, is that of the phe

For if all things are rela

tive, and exist only in a state of dependence on others, then it follows that they are only manifestations of essences or powers hidden behind them, or rather, revealed in them.

The faculty of "causality was understood by Spurzheim to be a power of discerning causes, and thus a peculiar function of the more general faculty which he had named "comparison." (Gall had called it comparison - the faculty of analogy; Spurzheim's" causality" was what Gall had named the faculty of Metaphysics.) It would seem that comparison, as perception of relations, would culminate in a perception of the phenomenality of all things ("all things are relative"); and that this culmination would be the faculty of causality. For what is the perception of cause but the perception of the phenomenality of some object? I see that this object is not through itself, but through another, — namely, its cause. The cause possesses essential being; the effect only phenomenal or derivative being.

I mention in detail this phrenological distinction, in order to explain the newness in Mr. Alcott's view of the mind as I first heard it in New Haven. For the phrenologists, one and all, fail to see the consequence of their own definition of faculties. They are so engrossed with making out the map of protuberances on the cranium, that they give