ABSTRACT
The connection between George Combe and Richard Cobden was long lasting and important. Its enduring basis was not phrenology but Cobden's reading of Combe's handbook for political reformers: the Constitution of man, considered in relation to external objects, first published in 1828. In the Constitution, Combe's aim was not to teach phrenology but to explore the broader implications of his phrenological analysis. Phrenology, in Combe's hands, was never a discrete science of the skull. Cobden never came to disapprove, or to see through the delusions, of phrenology – in the way that some of his more embarrassed biographers might have wished. Nor did he ever express any regret, unlike their mutual friend William Ellis, that Combe damaged his more general philosophy by mixing it up with phrenology. But despite his equanimity Cobden was never an especially committed phrenologist.
