A NOTE ON 'SECULAR' EDUCATION IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.

The article presents a discussion on the element of secularism in education in the nineteenth century Great Britain. The evolution of a national education system was the result of many forces, whose complexity, diffuseness and ramifications in fields other than education make it possible to speak of a general, forward movement only in a very wide sense. One of the men who, in the first half of the century, provided one of these forces was George Combe, the leading advocate in his day of phrenology and the first proponent of secular education. Combe's place in the reform of education has been very largely obscured both by the greater men who followed him in the field and by his being associated with what became a disreputable theory, phrenology. Phrenology was introduced to the world as a theory of the brain as the seat of the mind. It was before 1820 that Combe took up the study of the theory and very shortly afterwards published his first writings on the subject, not as a physiological but as a moral science, to use his own description. According to phrenology the mind, the organ of which is the brain, is made up of a number of distinct faculties, each corresponding to a definite area of the brain's surface and manifested externally in the contours of the skull. When these organs are activated, from whatever cause, the appropriate faculties manifest their characteristics in the behaviour of the individual. Phrenology thus postulated a primitive behaviourist psychology.