ABSTRACT
The long confrontation with Old Religion proved to be the most rigorous test of phrenology's endurance as a scientific philosophy. The confrontation was certainly long and often seemed inconclusive. In some debates both phrenology and traditional Christianity were so ably represented that an intelligent spectator might be forgiven if he thought that neither side had clearly won the field. Phrenology's first problem in the business of remaking man was the traditional belief in a paradise lost, in a situation where man enjoyed a more perfect state than at present. One of the points at issue between the Combeists and the Scottish Kirk was the question of man's supposed fall from an originally faultless moral character and high intellectual powers. Phrenologists were long acquainted with the state of affairs in British and European prisons. Gall and Spurzheim visited such places to document their theories and to study cases in which inordinate mental faculties led to careers of crime.
