ABSTRACT
In grammar school, he had reacted to being 'drilled with Bibles' with intense hatred. Hewett Cottrell Watson was not a religious person. When George Combe sent him a new edition of his Constitution of Man in 1835, Watson thanked him but regretted that Combe had stopped short of being as effective as he might have been: The grand stumbling block is Religion. In the following year, when Watson wrote Statistics of Phrenology, he wanted to refer readers to a philosophy of phrenology but decided he could not endorse The Constitution of Man. Watson held up high scientific standards for Combe in the hope of still salvaging a respectable phrenological science, some day. Watson decided that the naturalistic approach would be fatal to religion: 'instead of knowledge and religion entering into partnership, the former will gradually smother and destroy the latter'. For most people swept up in the phrenology movement, expectation of social reform was part of the appeal.
