The Imp of the Perverse

“In the pure arrogance of the reason, we have all overlooked it. We have suffered its existence to escape our senses, solely through want of belief—of faith;—whether it be faith in Revelation, or faith in the Kabbala.”

The narrator adopts the discursive mode and authorial “we” of academic writing to lend credibility to his argument on the limits of “reason,” or intellect, to reveal human perverseness. The religious allusions to the Christian Book of Revelation (which deals with good and evil and the judgment of man) and the Jewish Kabbala (a mystical text explaining the relationship between God’s eternity and man’s mortality) add to the narrator’s credibility. They signal to the educated reader that the narrator will reveal a truth about human nature that has previously been considered a divine mystery and “escaped” the senses.

“Induction, à posteriori, would have brought phrenology to admit, as an innate and primitive principle of human action, a paradoxical something, which we may call perverseness, for want of a more characteristic term.”

The narrator establishes credibility through his command of academic language—e.g., the term “a posteriori,” or through empirical experience, which the philosopher Immanuel Kant popularized. The narrator uses this credibility to buttress his main point, which is that the methodology of phrenology is flawed; it is so certain that human impulses must serve a rational purpose that it ignores the Irrationality and Perverseness of real human behavior.

“The phrenological combativeness has for its essence, the necessity of self-defense. It is our safeguard against injury. Its principle regards our well-being; and thus the desire to be well is excited simultaneously with its development. It follows, that the desire to be well must be excited simultaneously with any principle which shall be merely a modification of combativeness, but in the case of that something which I term perverseness, the desire to be well is not only not aroused, but a strongly antagonistical sentiment exists.”

The narrator refers to phrenology as a way of legitimizing his theories and uses the jargon of the popular pseudoscience, such as the trait “combativeness,” to support his theory of perverseness.