ABSTRACT
In the future history of philosophy, no circumstance will create more amusement than the recital of the astonishment and contempt with which the philosophers and the public of the nineteenth century received the discovery [of phrenology]. The development of the phrenologists' secular Nature can be traced through the textual remnants of the phrenology controversies. The phrenology controversies have long been of historiographical interest. Recently, Alison Winter has argued that the mesmerism controversies revolved around the credibility of the mesmerist and the reality of the phenomena. Phrenology seemed to be implicated in the most highly contentious and sensitive issues of the day: materialism, atheism and fatalism. The phrenologists' continued appeals to the authority of Nature became more conspicuous as the 1820s wore on. Critics began to take notice of the kind of argument phrenologists made. Phrenology was not an unproblematic way of achieving the authority of an expert.
