The Phrenological Organs

A list of phrenological organs, by Samuel R. Wells, after O.S. Fowler.
WWW page by Jeffery Howe.

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1. AMATIVENESS.- Connubial love; attachment of the sexes to each other; adapted to the continuance of the race.
Excess: Licentiousness and obscenity.
Deficiency: The want of affection, and indifference toward, the opposite sex.

A. UNION FOR LIFE.- Desire to pair; to unite for life; and to remain constantly with the loved one.
Excess: The almost impossibility of transferring our affections from one to another.
Deficiency: Want of conjugal affection.

2. PHILOPROGENITIVENESS. - Parental love; fondness for pets, and the young and helpless generally; adapted to the infantile condition.
Excess: Idolizing and spoiling children by caresses and excessive indulgence; a slave to maternal duties.
Deficiency: Neglect of the young.

3. ADHESIVENESS. -- Love of friends; disposition to associate. Adapted to man's requisition for society and concert of action.
Excess: Excessive fondness for company.
Deficiency: Neglect of friends and society; the hermit disposition.

4. INHABITIVENESS. -- Love of home; desire to live permanently in one place; adapted to the necessity of a home.
Excess: Prejudice against other countries.
Deficiency: A roving disposition.

5. CONTINUITY. [or Concentrativeness] -- Ability to chain the thoughts and feelings to one particular subject until it is completed.
Excess: Prolixity; tediously long stories.
Deficiency: Excessive fondness for variety; has several irons in the fire at once; seldom finishes what has been commenced; very transitive and impatient.

E. VITATIVENESS.- Love of life; youthful vigor even in advanced age.
Excess: Extreme tenacity to life; fear of death.
Deficiency: Letting go, and yielding up life, when one might still live.

6. COMBATIVENESS. -- Self-defense; love for discussion - resistance; the energetic go-ahead disposition.
Excess: A quick, fiery, excitable, fault finding, contentious disposition.
Deficiency: Cowardice; want of courage and self-defense.

7. DESTRUCTIVENESS. - Executiveness; propelling power; the exterminating feeling.
Excess: The malicious, retaliating, revengeful, and murderous disposition.
Deficiency: Tameness; inefficiency, and want of resolution.

8. ALIMENITIVENESS, -- Appetite; enjoyment of food and drink. Excess: Gluttony; gormandizing, intemperance.
Deficiency: Daintiness; want of appetite and relish.

9. ACQUISITIVENESS.-- Economy; the disposition to save and accumulate property.
Excess: Miserly avarice: theft; extreme selfishness.
Deficiency: Prodigality; inability to appreciate the true value of property; lavish and wasteful.

10. SECRETIVENESS. -- Policy; management. Acquisitiveness gets, Secretiveness keeps.
Excess: Cunning; disguise; hypocrisy; intrigue.
Deficiency: Want of tact and restraint; openness; bluntness of expression.

11. CAUTIOUSNESS. -- Prudence; carefulness; watchfulness; solicitude. Excess: Fear; timidity; procrastination.
Deficiency: Careless; blundering; heedless: reckless.

12. APPROBATIVENESS. -- Love of praise; affability; ambition to be approved and promoted.
Excess: Vanity; self-praise; and extreme sensitiveness.
Deficiency: Indifference to public opinion, or to praise or blame; and disregard for personal appearance.

13. SELF-ESTEEM. -- Dignity, manliness; love of liberty; nobleness; an aspiring and commanding disposition.
Excess: Extreme pride; an arrogant, domineering spirit.
Deficiency: Clownishness; servitude, and lack of self-respect and personal appreciation.

14. FIRMNESS. -- Decision; stability; perseverance; fortitude; unwillingness to yield.
Excess: Obstinacy; wilfullness.
Deficiency: Fickle-Minded. No dependence can be placed on one without Firmness -- there is no stability or decision of character in such a one.

15. CONSCIENTIOUSNESS. -- Justice; integrity; sense of right and duty, and power to resist temptations.
Excess: Censoriousness; scrupulousness; remorse; self-condemnation; unjust censure.
Deficiency: No penitence for sin, or compunction for wrong-doing; self-justification in all things.

16. HOPE. -- Sense of immortality; expectation; looking into the future with confidence of success.
Excess: Extravagant promises; castle building and anticipation of impossibilities.
Deficiency: Despondency; gloom; melancholy; foreboding evil.

17. SPIRITUALITY. -- Intuition.; perception of the spiritual; the prophetic cast of mind.
Excess: Belief in ghosts, hobgoblins, witchcraft, etc.
Deficiency: Lack of faith; extreme incredulity, like the "doubting Thomas;" dark skepticism.

18. VENERATION. -- Devotion; reverence worship adoration; respect for the aged, authority, and for antiquity.
Excess: Idolatry; superstition; worship of images and idols.
Deficiency: Disregard for things sacred and venerable.

19. BENEVOLENCE. -- Kindness; sympathy; desire to do good; philanthropy; disinterestedness.
Excess: Giving alms to the undeserving; too easily overcome by scenes of suffering.
Deficiency: Extreme selfishness; indifference to suffering; no sympathetic regard for the distressed.

20. CONSTRUCTIVENESS. -- Mechanical ingenuity; ability to invent; use tools; construct.
Excess: Attempting perpetual motions, and other impossibilities.
Deficiency: Inability to use tools or understand machinery; lack of skill in planning, contriving, and dexterity in mechanism.

21. IDEALITY. -- Love of the perfect and beautiful in nature and art; refinement; ecstasy; poetry.
Excess: Fastidiousness, and a disgust even for the common duties of life.
Deficiency: Roughness; vulgarity; want of taste or refinement; disregard for the beautiful.

B. SUBLIMITY,--Fondness for the grand and sublime, the magnificent, the wild and romantic, as Niagara Falls, mountain Scenery.
Excess: Extravagant representations; magnified statements; fondness for tragedies.
Deficiency: Indifference to the grandeurs of nature; hears the thunder and views the terrific lightning without emotion.

22. IMITATION. -- Power of imitating; copying; working after a pattern; attitude for different pursuits.
Excess: Mimicry; servile imitation.
Deficiency: The ability to conform to the manners and customs of society.

D. AGREEABLENESS. -- Blandness and persuasiveness of manner, expression, and address; pleasantness; insinuation; the faculty of saying even disagreeable things pleasantly.
Excess: Affectation; blarney.
Deficiency: Want of ease of manner; inability to make one's self agreeable or acceptable when among strangers.

23. MIRTHFULNESS. -- Wit; fun; playfulness; humor; ability to joke, make fun, and enjoy a hearty laugh.
Excess: Ridicule and sport of the infirmities and misfortunes of others.
Deficiency: Extreme gravity and seriousness; indifference to all joyous play, amusements, and hilarity.

24. INDIVIDUALITY. -- The desire to see; ability to acquire knowledge by observation; the looking faculty.
Excess: An insatiable desire to see; a tendency to stare; prying curiosity; extreme inquisitiveness.
Deficiency: A want of practical knowledge derived from personal observation; inability to notice external objects.

25. FORM. -- Memory of shapes, forms, faces the configuration of things; aids in spelling, drawing , modeling, etc.; when large, one seldom forgets countenances. Deficiency: A poor memory of faces, shapes, etc.

26. SIZE. -- Ability to judge of size, length, breadth, height, depth, distance, and weight of bodies by their size; of measuring angles, perpendiculars, etc.; ability to judge accurately of the proportion which one body holds to another.
Deficiency: Unable to judge by the eye between small and large; seldom judges correctly the dimensions of an object.

27. WEIGHT. -- Gravity; ability to balance one's self, required by a marksman, sailor, or horseman; also the ability to "carry a steady hand."
Excess: Excessive desire to climb or go aloft unnecessarily.
Deficiency: Inability to keep one's balance; liability to stumble.

28. COLOR. -- Judgment of the different shades, hues, and tints, in paintings; the rainbow, flowers, and all things possessing color, will be objects of interest.
Excess: Extravagant fondness for colors; a desire to dress with many colors.
Deficiency: Color blindness; inability to distinguish or appreciate colors, or their harmony.

29. ORDER -- Method; system; arrangement; neatness and convenience. "A place for things, and everything in place."
Excess: More nice than wise; spends too much time in fixing; greatly annoyed by disorder; old maidish.
Deficiency: Slovenliness; carelessness about the arrangement of books, tools, papers, etc.; seldom knows where to find anything, although recently used.

30. CALCULATION. -- Ability to reckon figures by mental arithmetic; to add, subtract, divide, multiply; cast accounts, etc.
Excess: A disposition to count everything.
Deficiency: Inability to understand the most simple numerical relations.

31. LOCALITY. -- Recollection of places; the geographical faculty; desire to travel and see the world.
Excess: A roving, unsettled disposition.
Deficiency: Inability to remember places; liability to get lost; can not tell the points of the compass.

32. EVENTUALITY. -- Memory of events; the love of history, anecdotes, facts, items of all sorts; a kind of walking newspaper.
Excess: Constant storytelling to the neglect duties.
Deficiency: Forgetfulness; a poor memory of events.

33. TIME.-- Recollection of the lapse of time; day and date; ability to keep the time in music, march and dancing; to be able to carry the time of day in the memory.
Excess: Drumming with the feet and fingers, much to the annoyance of others.
Deficiency: Inability to remember dates.

34. TUNE. -- Love of music, and perception of harmony; power to compose music.
Excess: A continual singing, humming, or whistling, regardless of propriety.
Deficiency: Inability to comprehend the charms of music, or distinguish one tune from another.

35. LANGUAGE. --Ability to express ideas verbally or in writing, and to use such words as will best express our meaning; memory of words.
Excess: Volubility of expression; great talkativeness; more words than thoughts.
Deficiency: Extreme hesitation in conversation; inability to select appropriate language for the expression of ideas.

36. CAUSALITY. -- Ability to reason and comprehend first principles; the "why and wherefore" faculty; originality.
Excess: Too much theory, without bringing the mind to a practical bearing. Such a mind may be philosophic, but neither practical nor scientific.

37. COMPARISON. -- Inductive reasoning; ability to classify, and apply analogy to the discernment of principles; to compare, discriminate, and illustrate; to draw inferences, etc.
Excess: "Splitting hairs," or unnecessary criticism.
Deficiency: Inability to perceive the relation of things.

C. HUMAN NATURE. -- Intuition, discernment of character; perception of the motives at the first interview. Excess: prying into the character of another to the exclusion of duties, and at the sacrifice of courtesy and politeness. Deficiency: Misplaced confidence; supposing everybody honest.