314 Thurs
viewed as highly restrictive. Phrenological advocates widely claimed that
their favorite science regarded a fact “as worth a million” theories, and its
practitioners took “great care... to avoid everything hypothetical.” Once
the facts were in hand, they often guided the process of discovery. Some
claimed to let “the facts classify themselves”—that is, to proceed “wholly
by induction.”^22 However, the facts valued by phrenologists varied widely
from the results of brain dissections to anecdotes about famous historical
fi gures to the depictions of skulls in art, particularly ancient Greek and Ro-
man sculpture. Popular invocation of induction and the infl uence of Ba-
con were also open enough to include such additional approaches as ana-
logical reasoning. Orson Fowler “boldly” asserted “that all real ‘analogy’
is an unerring guide to truth.”^23 In fact, he claimed elsewhere, phrenology
deserved the label Baconian because it depended on analogy. When one
had learned a general principle inductively, the next step involved apply-
ing it “to all new but analogous facts.”^24
Meanwhile, even the most Bacon- happy phrenologists made room
within inductive method—and within the human skull—for more than
just simple observation. Overdevelopment of the cerebral organs respon-
sible for refl ection, as we might expect, led to “metaphysical theorizing,
which is valueless.” But if the observing organs dominated, then one
would be unable to ascend from facts to principles, which was “the only
possible means of arriving at truth.” Lydia Fowler, sister of Orson Fowler,
echoed these sentiments in a book aimed at children, counseling her
young readers to “think, inquire, and be not satisfi ed with simple facts,
but search for the principle, and endeavor to understand it.”^25 It was the
refl ective organ of comparison, and not those engaged by basic observa-
tion, on which inductive method was founded.
Such an amorphous and weakly bounded vision of science was also
perfectly consistent with the broad strokes of contemporary American cul-
ture. The desire of many Americans to assert their rights in various fi elds
of activity without regard to distinctions or divisions was in part related
to celebration of the spirit of democracy and the rejection of aristocracy in
all its forms. Information generally became less confi ned to the hierarchi-
cal systems of distribution that had prevailed during the 1700s. Newspa-
pers and popular lectures fl ourished to give citizens access to knowledge
of all kinds that was, according to some democratic enthusiasts, “every
man’s birth- right.”^26 At the same time, the conceptual tools available for
dissecting the world into well- bounded categories remained rare. The re-
sulting cultural landscape was, on the whole, far more fl exible, permeable,
and indeterminate than the one that emerged over the next two hundred
years. George Daniels observed of the second quarter of the nineteenth