Preface to: Self-Culture and Perfection of Character Including the Management of Youth, by O.S. Fowler, 1847.

Orson Fowler, along with his brother Lorenzo, became the pre-eminent spokespersons for phrenology in the 1830s and 40s. They combined evangelical zeal, astute business practices, and great showmanship as they toured the country lecturing and giving demonstrations. In 1835, they set up their headquarters in New York City and established a publishing house, mail order business, and museum. They published several journals and numerous tracts on phrenology. This preface to their 1847 book Self-Culture and Perfection of Character presents their belief in the power of phrenology to promote self-improvement through self-knowledge.

SELF-CULTURE

and

PERFECTION OF CHARACTER

including the

MANAGEMENT OF YOUTH

BY 0. S. FOWLER

IMPROVEMENT is the practical watchword of the age since the Revolution, men have probably made more numerous and valuable inventions and discoveries in machinery, agriculture, and the means of human comfort and luxury, than ever before since the Creation. Yet, while they are straining every nerve to its utmost tension to devise some shorter and still shorter road to augment wealth, and the facilities for promoting merely animal gratifications, and those mostly artificial, how few care or attempt to improve their INTELLECTUAL or MORAL faculties. If they can but amass riches, live in splendid palaces and princely style, and procure the means of indulging the selfish propensities, they exult in having attained "the highest good," though intellect lie waste, and moral pleasures are unknown. And even the few who attempt to improve their higher faculties know neither where to begin nor how to proceed.

Is this right? Does it comport with the great end of our creation? Is it even our true INTEREST? Does it secure our highest happiness? Neither, as man's sad experience abundantly attests. His INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL faculties constitute the great fountain of human enjoyment, while physical gratifications are only incidental-mere tributaries. He must be happy in the MORAL deportment of his nature, or be for ever miserable. With this settled ordinance of his nature he must comply, or else suffer the penalty affixed to the breach of this cardinal law of his moral constitution.

To expound, in view of these principles, the laws of virtue, and develop nature's method of cultivating the higher and holier capabilities of our nature; to guide the young into the paths of goodness, and consequent happiness; to show parents and teachers how to conduct the moral training and government of children and to disclose to all aspirants after SELF-IMFROVEMENT the means of securing "the highest good" by expounding the laws of our moral being and inciting to their obedience objects the most exalted which can possibly engage human attention or effort is this work laid before the public. It discloses the true sources of human enjoyment, and will conduct inquirers, especially youthful to the fountain-head of all pleasure, where they may drink deep and perpetually of those delicious and soul renovating waters of moral enjoyment, which our Creator proffers without stint to all who will accept this God-conferred and Heaven-tending boon. It will show all how to guide and regulate their feelings and conduct; how to restrain and subdue their "easily BESETTING SINS"; IMPROVE THEIR MORAL characters; and exercise all their faculties in harmony with their primitive constitution, and thereby render their action always virtuous, so as thus to secure that one end of their being -- HAPPINESS.

To give a more specific aspect of its object and adaptation: Applicants for phrenological examinations are daily and earnestly inquiring-" How can I REMEDY my defects? By what MEANS can I increase my deficient organs and diminish or regulate those that are too large?" Man naturally longs for higher and still higher intellectual and moral attainments. The scale or range of self-improvement is illimitable. However high a point we may reach, we naturally desire to rise higher and still higher, till we become "perfect, as God is perfect." And the higher we rise, the stronger our desire to press forward and upward into a state still more exalted. At no previous point of time, probably, has this desire equalled its present point of intensity. Parents, in particular, are inquiring with deep solicitude -- " How can I make my children better? That new and most powerful mental stimulant furnished by our republican institutions, has waked up a mighty hungering and thirsting, especially in parents and the young, after moral excellence. These important inquiries ‹ How can I render myself, and how make my children BETTER? this work answers scientifically. It bases every direction in those LAWS of MIND developed by Phrenology -- that exponent of all the moral laws of our being, that epitome of all mental knowledge, that great director of the constituent elements of perfection, and how to attain it. This science of mind not only teaches us our characters, but also, what is infinitely more important, how to IMPROVE them. It shows us in what perfection consists, and how to form character and mould mind in accordance with its conditions. SELF-KNOWLEDGE must precede self-improvement, but never supersede it. Formerly, phrenologists were content with reading themselves and others through this mirror of human nature, but they now seek earnestly to APPLY it to their own intellectual and moral progression, and that of the rising generation -- an application which, practically made, will more effectually subserve human advancement and happiness, than all the discoveries and inventions, all the metaphysical and even theological speculations, together with all the educational efforts of the age and of all ages combined; because this discloses the true philosophy of mind, and shows how to perfect it; while they appertain to physics, or enter the department of mind only to becloud it. To the elucidation of these momentous truths these pages are devoted.