ABSTRACT
The treatment which phrenology advised for the diseased minds of criminals still left the vast bulk of mankind unattended. To protect man from the unwholesome changes in his society, and to insure the strong moral character of the nation, phrenologists advised a course which took into account the compound nature of man. Phrenologists shared a common philosophy of education. They assumed that the brain was in a very real sense the centre of the learning process and that it was subject to various laws. In his Philosophy of Necessity, Charles Bray stated that the 'mind is equally the subject of law with matter'. In the Philosophy of Education, James Simpson conceded that 'schools of real knowledge' existed in Great Britain and he listed a number of them. During his eleven-day testimony before the Select Committee in the summer of 1835, James Simpson was asked whether the study of foreign languages formed part of his system of education.
