Phrenologist and moral philosopher, was born, a brewer’s son, in Edinburgh, October 21, 1788. He became a Writer to the Signet in 1812, and practised till 1837, when he devoted himself to popularising his views on phrenology and education. Through Spurzheim he became a convert to phrenology, and wrote “Essays on Phrenology” (1819) and “Elements of Phrenology” (1824; 9th ed. 1862). But his most important production is “The Constitution of Man” (1828; 10th ed. 1893), which was violently opposed as inimical to revealed religion. He numbered amongst his friends Cobden, Robert Chambers, and “George Eliot.” He travelled and lectured in the United Kingdom, Germany, and America, and published “Notes on the United States” (1841). Combe married, in 1833, Cecilia (1794–1868), daughter of Mrs. Siddons; he died 14th August 1858. Other works were “Lectures on Popular Education” (1833), “Moral Philosophy” (1840), “Principles of Criminal Legislation” (1854), “The Currency Question” (1855), “The Relation between Science and Religion” (1857). Combe’s ideas on popular education were carried out for some years in a secular school which he founded in Edinburgh in 1848, where the sciences were taught, including physiology and phrenology. See “Life” by C. Gibbon (1878), and Combe’s views and articles on “Education,” collected by Jolly (1879).
Personal
His remarkable self-esteem; his self-consciousness, rendering him very faintly impressionable; his good-nature and real benevolence; his shrewdness and caution; the absence of all keen sensibility, and the presence of a constant sense of justice,—all fitted him to hold any given ground well against unscrupulous and passionate adversaries. No romance of duty dazzled him; no idolatry of the ideal intoxicated him; no sympathy with human passion or devout aspiration put him off his guard. Standing above the perils of gross selfishness and dishonesty, and below those which attend high intellectual and spiritual gifts, he was the man to hold a certain ground, and he held it steadily, cheerfully, and well.
George Combe, the English author, encountered a full share of the vicissitudes of genius. He was capable of much theoretical goodness, but was not practical in that respect. He wrote in his old age, “Few men have enjoyed more of the pleasures and brilliance of life than myself;” yet he died in the King’s Bench, where he had taken refuge from his creditors, not leaving enough to pay the expenses of his funeral.
Combe was remarkably even-tempered and mildly persistent; he was thoroughly amiable in all his family relations, and liberal in cases of need, though his formality and love of giving advice exposed him to some ridicule. He was essentially a man of one idea. His want of scientific training predisposed him to accept with implicit confidence the crude solution of enormously complex and delicate problems propounded by the phrenologists, and for the rest of his life he propagated the doctrine with the zeal of a religious missionary.
General
This [“A System of Phrenology”] is a long, sober, argumentative exposition of a very fantastical, and in our humble judgment, most absurd hypothesis. The author, however, is undoubtedly a man of talent as well as industry;—and while many of his remarks indicate no ordinary acuteness, it is impossible not to admire the dexterity with which he has occasionally evaded the weak, and improved the plausible parts of his argument—and the skill and perseverance he has employed in working up his scanty and intractable materials into a semblance of strength and consistency. Phrenology, in his hands, has assumed for the first time, an aspect not absolutely ludicrous;—and, by retrenching many of the ridiculous illustrations and inconsistent assumptions of its inventors, as well as by correcting its terminology, and tempering its extravagance, he has so far succeeded in disguising its inherent absurdity as to afford a decent apology for those who are determined, or at least very willing, to believe. After all, however, that radical absurdity is so glaring, that in spite of his zeal and earnestness, we really have great difficulty in believing the author to be in good faith with us; and suspect that few reflecting readers will be able to get through the work without many starts of impatient surprise, and a general uneasy surmise that it is a mere exercise of intellectual ingenuity or an elaborate experiment upon public credulity.
A man must be called a conspicuous member of society who writes a book approaching in circulation to the three ubiquitous books in our language—the Bible, “Pilgrim’s Progress,” and “Robinson Crusoe.” George Combe’s “Constitution of Man” is declared to rank next to these three in point of circulation…. The world owes him much, however disappointed it may be that it does now owe him more.
A man who was well known—almost famous—among the last generation, but of whom little is heard at the present day. Within a short time after his death the sale of “The Constitution of Man” had reached 100,000 copies; now the book is rarely read. Its author was in correspondence with men of learning and rank—even with the royal family—yet his memory cannot shield from ridicule the doctrine of which he was a leading apostle. Finally, he labored long and hard in behalf of reforms which the present generation enjoy with seldom a thought of the obloquy heaped upon their earlier champions. This may seem hard, but it is certainly not unnatural. The impression made upon the world during the lifetime of George Combe was due to his advocacy of opinions contrary to, or in advance of, those of his time, rather than to his possession of unusual bodily or mental powers. In fact, the essential mediocrity of his nature was cheerfully recognized when he said, at the age of forty-four, “No man whose brain does not exceed the average more than mine is of importance to the world.”
George Combe has been dead twenty years, and his name is almost forgotten. Many of his teachings, which were bitterly opposed when he uttered them, are quietly accepted. His theories of religion, of education, of the treatment of the insane and criminal classes, are more or less approved, and even the doctrine that mind is a function of the brain, which he was among the first to assert, and for which he was denounced as an infidel, has taken its place among the data of science. But the system of phrenology to which he gave himself with such intense devotion is discredited by science, and, like Mr. Combe himself, is now seldom heard of.
There was no combination or definite party, but many shared in a movement in which George Combe in every way deserves the pre-eminence. He was a man of spotless character and the most sincere enthusiasm, combining an earnest Christian theism with the most hesitating belief in views of man’s constitution and responsibility which seem constantly shading off into Materialism. Many of his special dogmas have vanished with the progress of knowledge, especially of that natural knowledge on which his system was based; but there are also important aspects of his teaching, in its bearing on education, which survive, and have entered with enlightening force into our modern educational theories. Not only so, but imperfect as we must judge, both from a philosophical and religious point of view, many of Combe’s generalizations, in which he reposed implicit confidence, we feel that there was a healthy element in his speculations. They were as salt in the intellectual and religious atmosphere, and at a time when there was so much to harden and sometimes darken religious feeling, they helped to nourish a broader and freer opinion not without its beneficent bearing on religion. It is, however, in other directions that we must look for the chief influences which at this time affected religious opinion in Scotland.
His writings were for many years extremely popular with the half-educated, and though his theories have fallen into complete discredit he did something, like his friend Chambers, to excite an interest in science and a belief in the importance of applying scientific method in moral questions.
In common with Horace Mann, he [Dr. Howe] held Mr. Combe to be one of the first intelligences of the age, and esteemed his work on “The Constitution of Man” as one of the greatest of human productions.
