Phronsie

“ Prince is a noble fellow,” (here the dog's ears twitched very perceptibly) “and he kept at that man; oh! how he bit him! till he had to run for fear the monkey would get killed.”
“Was Phronsie frightened?” asked Ben; “she's never seen strangers.”
“Not a bit,” said the boy, cheerily; “she just clung to me like everything—I only wish she was my sister,” he added impulsively.
“What were you going to do with her if I hadn't come along?” asked Ben.
“Well, I got out on the main road,” said the boy, “because I thought anybody who had lost her, would probably come through this way ”

“ Whitney, "that is full. I peeped in there yesterday, and the dolls are ranged according to the times when father gave them to her."
"And the baby-house is just crowded," laughed Jasper. "I know, because
I saw her moving out her chairs and tables to make room."
"O dear me!" exclaimed Alexia again, for want of something else to say.
"I just hate dolls," exploded Dick. "Faugh! how can girls play with them; they're so silly. And Phronsie always has something to do for hers, so she can't come when I want her to. ”

“ The sunlight through an oriel window fell on the childish face and figure, glinting the yellow hair, and lighting up the radiant face, that yet had a tender, loving glance for the two who waited for her below. One little foot was poised, just in the act of stepping down to the next lower stair, and the fat hand grasped the polished railing, expressive of just enough caution to make it truly childish. ”

“ I spoke of phrenology, he said, not with the object of criticising a system which has its good side, in so far as it tends to complete the series of physiological observations that aim at increasing our knowledge of man; I used the word phrenology because the only fatality that we believe in nowadays is that created by our own instincts. I do not believe that phrenology is more fatalistic than any other system of this kind ”

“ Will no entreaties cause thee to turn a favourable eye upon thy creature, who implores thy goodness and compassion. Believe me, Frankenstein: I was benevolent; my soul glowed with love and humanity: but am I not alone, miserably alone? You, my creator, abhor me; what hope can I gather from your fellow-creatures, who owe me nothing? they spurn and hate me. The desert mountains and dreary glaciers are my refuge. I have wandered here many days; the caves of ice, which I only do not fear, are a dwelling to me, and the only one which man does not grudge. ”

“ Frankenstein, your son, your kinsman, your early, much-loved friend; he who would spend each vital drop of blood for your sakes—who has no thought nor sense of joy, except as it is mirrored also in your dear countenances—who would fill the air with blessings, and spend his life in serving you—he bids you weep—to shed countless tears; happy beyond his hopes, if thus inexorable fate be satisfied, and if the destruction pause before the peace of the grave have succeeded to your sad torments! ”

“ There are few Men in the World I value more than you, Horatio! for amidst all your Foibles and painful Pursuits of Pleasure, I have oft observed in you an honest Heart, and a Mind strongly bent towards Virtue. I wish, from my Soul, I could assist you in acting steadily the Part of a reasonable Creature; for, if you would not think it a Paradox, I should tell you I love you better than you do yourself.
Hor. A Paradox indeed! Better than I do myself! When I love my dear self so well, that I love every Thing else for my own sake. ”

“ In conclusion, let me say a few words to those who dread what has been called the materialistic tendency of modern science, and who may have thought that, in forecasting the future triumphs of physiology, I have entered upon ground which ought to have been sacred.
There are not a few persons who still think that in seeking to know how the animal body is built up, and in imitating some of its actions, we are in danger like Frankenstein of constructing a monster, which will ultimately destroy our most precious faith in God and in spiritual things. ”

“ There were men who had conceived some of the ideas of Franklin,—not that Franklin was of himself the discoverer or the person who reduced it to a science, but his mind was the medium that brought the wisdom of the wise into focus, so that an experiment might be made to prove the principle. The wisdom of the world is not confined to any person, but when it begins to condense into a truth it must exhibit itself through some medium. ”

“ I saw—with shut eyes, but acute mental vision,—I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world. ”

“ Light, feeling, and sense, will pass away; and in this condition must I find my happiness. Some years ago, when the images which this world affords first opened upon me, when I felt the cheering warmth of summer, and heard the rustling of the leaves and the chirping of the birds, and these were all to me, I should have wept to die; now it is my only consolation. Polluted by crimes, and torn by the bitterest remorse, where can I find rest but in death?
"Farewell! I leave you, and in you the last of human kind whom these eyes will ever behold. Farewell, Frankenstein! ”

“ Plague take him for a very moral of perversity! for he'll find Mr. Franklin in the parlour; and how many odd notions may come into his head the cunning one himself would not guess. For, dear me! he has a marvellous gift for making much out of nothing, as his valet at the hall tells me.—He's perversity personified; for if one wants him to turn to the right hand, for that very reason he turns to the left. ”

“ I sat one evening in my laboratory; the sun had set, and the moon was just rising from the sea; I had not sufficient light for my employment, and I remained idle, in a pause of consideration of whether I should leave my labour for the night or hasten its conclusion by an unremitting attention to it. As I sat, a train of reflection occurred to me which led me to consider the effects of what I was now doing. Three years before, I was engaged in the same manner and had created a fiend whose unparalleled barbarity had desolated my heart and filled it for ever with the bitterest remorse. ”

“ Experimental physiology and pathology, by suggesting other functions for parts of the brain-surface, are thus directly subversive of many details of the phrenology of Gall and Spurzheim.
Psychological Aspect.—The fundamental hypothesis which underlies phrenology as a system of mental science is that mental phenomena are resolvable into the manifestations of a group of separate faculties. A faculty is defined as “a convenient expression for the particular states into which the mind enters when influenced by particular organs ”

“ Each phronetal cell is a small chemical laboratory, contributing its share to the unified central function of the mind, the conscious action of reason. Scientists are still very far from agreement as to the extent of the phronema in the cortex and its delimitation from the neighboring sense-centres (sensoria) . But they are all agreed that there is such a central organ of mind, and that its normal anatomic and chemical condition is the first requisite for the life of the human mind. This belief—one of the foundations of monistic psychology—is confirmed by the study of psychiatry. ”

“ In these attributes of mind, character and nature can readily be found, we think, the explanation of that capacity for winning and retaining friends which made the life of Franklin as mellow as a ripe peach. The most important of them in a social sense lead us, of course, simply to the statement that he was far more beloved than most men are because he was himself influenced far more than most men are by the spirit of love. ”

“ There are certain human feelings which rise in moments of uncommon stress or fervor from the profoundest depths of our being to our lips and take on the form and rhythm of sonorous religious utterance, if for no better reason, because no other language is lofty or musical enough to serve aptly the purposes of such supreme occasions; and this is true even of an individuality so meagrely spiritual as that of Franklin. ”

“ Oh, Frankenstein, be not equitable to every other, and trample upon me alone, to whom thy justice, and even thy clemency and affection, is most due. Remember, that I am thy creature: I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed. Every where I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.”
“Begone! I will not hear you. There can be no community between you and me; we are enemies. ”

“ The appearance of this greatest of political works which has blessed a world, with all the attending circumstances—the obscure life of Paine, the few wild events connected with it, the unprecedented action of Franklin, the introduction to the world of a profound thinker and almost perfect writer in the full ripeness of his intellect, and the beginning of an unceasing brilliant literary life at its meridian, are mysteries, save in this instance, unknown to history. Common Sense is a child of mystery. ”

“ Was I, then, a monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled and whom all men disowned?
“I cannot describe to you the agony that these reflections inflicted upon me; I tried to dispel them, but sorrow only increased with knowledge. Oh, that I had for ever remained in my native wood, nor known nor felt beyond the sensations of hunger, thirst, and heat!
“Of what a strange nature is knowledge! It clings to the mind when it has once seized on it like a lichen on the rock. ”

“ It is plain enough that in practice as well as in precept to Franklin life was ever a welcome gift to be enjoyed so long as corporeal infirmities permit it to be enjoyed, and to be surrendered, when the ends of its institution can no longer be fulfilled, as naturally as we surrender consciousness when we turn into our warmer beds and give ourselves over to our shorter slumbers. ”

“ It is no exaggeration to say that this intellect was an organ lacking in no element of power except that which can be supplied by a profound spiritual insight and a kindling imagination alone. The Many-Sided Franklin, the title of the essay by Paul Leicester Ford, is a felicitous touch of description. The life, the mind, the character of the man were all manifold, composite, marked by spacious breadth and freedom. ”

“ The Phœnician must have failed to recognize in the new finery of the time the latest representative of a brotherhood that had long existed.
This strange individual, it seemed, lived by folly, and, though I had often noticed that wit was not a fat profession, I could not help regarding him with wonder. He was, under his veneer of shallowness, a most gentle and observant jester. Long study in the arts of pleasing had given him a very delicate discrimination of moods and men. He could fit a merriment to the capacity of any man’s mind with extraordinary acumen. ”

“ A generation whose fathers remembered the time when men educated in universities regarded Franklin with his lightning-rod as ‘heaven-defying,’ can readily understand the legend of Vulcan—type of the untamed force of fire—being sent to bind Prometheus, master of fire.2 How much fear of the forces of nature, as personified by superstition, levelled against the first creative minds and hands the epithets which Franklin heard, and which still fall upon the heads of some scientific investigators! ”

“ The all important question is, not whether phrenologists have properly located and rightly earned all the faculties of mind, but have their expositions been useful in the development of truth. While endeavoring to connect each mental power with a local habitation in the brain, the system of phrenology may be chargeable with some incongruous classification of the faculties, and yet it has furnished an analysis of the mind which has been of incalculable service to writers upon mental philosophy. ”

“ Something like the feelings of Sir Isaac Newton, when the falling apple brought to his ear the real music of the spheres, must have been those of Franklin, when the loose filaments of twine bristled up stiffly, as if stirred by some violated instinct of wild freedom, and the stream of sparks from the key told him that he was right in supposing that the mysterious and appalling agency, which had for centuries been associated in the human mind with the resistless wrath of Omnipotence, was but the same subtle fluid that had so often lit up his electrical apparatus with its playful corruscations. ”

“ One auditor, a learned natural philosopher, assured him that he must certainly be mistaken as to the light coming into his room, for, it being well known that there could be no light abroad at that hour, it followed that none could enter from without, and that, of consequence, his open windows, instead of letting in the light, must have only served to let out the darkness. This philosopher, Franklin confessed, puzzled him a little, but subsequent observation confirmed him in his first opinion. ”

“ Having carefully weighed the world, Franklin could act any part in it. By nature turned to knowledge, his mind was often grave, but never serious. At times he had seriousness—­extreme seriousness—­for others, but never for himself. ”