TENTH EPOCH.

PSYCHOLOGY SEEKING ITS BASIS IN PHYSIOLOGY.

CHAPTER I.

CABANIS.

WHILE Ontology was reasserting its claim in Germany, with such results as we have seen, Philosophy in England and France relinquished its lofty claims, and contented itself with the endeavor to construct a Psychology. The writings of Reid, Stewart, Brown, James Mill, and their disciples, valuable in many respects, are all deficient in Method, all without a firm basis. The attempt of Hartley and Darwin to connect Psychology with Physiology, we have seen was premature. It nevertheless pointed out the true direction. If Psychology is to be studied as a Science, it must be studied according to rigorously scientific principles; if, on the contrary, it is to be studied as a branch of Metaphysics, then indeed the Scotch school, and every other unscientific school, may justly complain of the encroachment of Physiology on their domain.

The history of the rise of psychological Method remains to be written. It began with Hobbes and Locke. They opposed the reigning doctrine of innate ideas. They analyzed Thought as the product of Experience. Hobbes, as was natural in the first vehemence of the swing of reaction against spiritualism, recog nizes nothing in the mind but sensations in all their varieties;

the mind, he said, is moved by external motion, that is all. Locke, on deeper meditation, saw that there was something more than this; he saw, dimly it is true, yet never overlooking it altogether, that the mind co-operated. Not only Sense, but Reflection on the materials given through Sense, furnished, he said, the complex thoughts of man. Thus he proclaimed Experience the source of knowledge. The mind of the child was like a sheet of blank paper, on which Experience wrote its various records. In Locke, we see the initial steps of the Physiological Method; and as he was himself an anatomist, there is nothing surprising in his having been led by his study of man's structure to some conclusions respecting man's mind. He directed that attention to Sense which metaphysicians had been in the habit of directing to ideas and verbal subtleties; and by so doing, took an important step towards the confrontation of speculation with fact; and initiated the still more important idea of a constant relation between organ and function. He also was led to study the growth of mind; and hence his frequent reference to savages and children, which distresses Victor Cousin, who is often as terrified at a fact as at a ghost.

Great as Locke's services were, there was a radical vice in his system which prevented its acceptance. He began the Physiological Method, but he only began it. The Experience-hypothesis would not suffice to explain all phenomena (at least not as that hypothesis was then understood); there were forms of thought neither reducible to Sense and Reflection, nor to individual Experience. He drew illustrations from children and savages; but he neither did this systematically, nor did he extend the Comparative Method to animals. The prejudices of that age forbade it. The ignorance of that age made it impossible. Comparative Physiology is no older than Goethe, and Comparative Psychology is only now glimmering in the minds of men as a possibility. If men formerly thought they could understand man's body by dissecting it, and did not need the light thrown thereon by the dissection of animals; they were still less likely

to seek psychical illustrations in animals, denying, as they did, that animals had minds.

The school of Locke, therefore, although regarding Mind as a property of Matter, consequently directing attention to the hu man organism, trying to understand the mechanism of sensation, and thus dealing with tangible realities instead of with impalpable and ever-shifting entities, was really incompetent to solve the problems it had set itself, because its Method was imperfect, and its knowledge incomplete. The good effect of its labors was positive; the evil, negative. Following out this positive tendency, we see Hartley and Darwin advancing still nearer to a true Method;-by a bold hypothesis, making the phenomena dependent on vibrations in the nerves; thus leading to a still more precise and definite consideration of the organism.

These were, however, tentatives guided by no distinct conception of the necessary relation between organ and function; and the Physiological Method, truly so called, must be first sought in Cabanis.

Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis was born 5th of June, 1757, at Conac, near Brives. He became a physician, and established himself at Auteuil, where, in the house of Madame Helvetius, he cultivated the acquaintance of Turgot, D'Holbach, Franklin, Condillac, Diderot, and D'Alembert. To these let us add Condorcet and Mirabeau, both of whom he attended in their last hours. He died on the 6th of May, 1808. He wrote several works, but one only has survived in the memories of philosophic readers: Rapports du Physique et du Moral de l'Homme.*

A disciple of Condillac, he nevertheless saw, more distinctly than any man before him, one radical vice of Condillac's system, namely, the limitation of mental phenomena to sensations, and

*This work originally appeared as a series of Memoires read before the Institute (1798-99). It was published as a separate book in 1802, under the title Traité du Physique et du Moral de l'Homme; which title is also borne by the second edition of 1805. Not until 1815, and after the death of Cabanis, was the word Rapports substituted for Traité.

the non-recognition of connate instincts. If sensation were the admitted source of all mental phenomena (and Cabanis rightly extended these phenomena beyond "ideas"), it became the duty of philosophers to examine the nature of sensation itself. "No one," he says, "had clearly explained in what the act of sensibility consists. Does it always presuppose consciousness and distinct perception? and must we refer to some other property of the living body all those unperceived impressions and movements in which volition has no part?" To put this question was to inaugurate a new study. It became necessary to examine whether all mental phenomena were not reducible to the fundamental laws of sensibility. "All the while that the Intellect is judging and the Will is desiring or rejecting, many other functions are going on, all more or less necessary to the preservation of life. Have these diverse operations any influence, the one on the other? And is it possible from the consideration of different physical and moral states, which are observed simultaneously, to seize the relations which connect the most striking phenomena, with such precision as to be certain that in the other less obvious cases, if the connection is less easily detected, it is so simply because the indications are too fugitive ?"

This conception of a possible Psychology is in itself enough to mark forever the place of Cabanis in the History of Philosophy. It establishes Psychology as one branch of the great science of Life. It connects the operations of intelligence and volition with the origin of all vital movements. It makes Life and Mind correlatives. This was a revival of the great truth clearly recog nized by Aristotle, from whom it descended to the Schoolmen. "Impossibile est," says Aquinas, very emphatically, "in uno homine esse plures animas per essentiam differentes, sed una tantum est anima intellectiva, quæ vegetativæ et sensitivæ et intellectivæ officiis fungitur." The division of Life and Mind as two distinct entities was introduced by the Italians of the Renaissance, adopted by Bacon, and once more rejected by Stahl, who returned to the Aristotelian conception. With the fall of Stahl's

doctrine, the separation of Mind from Life again became the dictum of the schools, until Cabanis; no one since Cabanis seems to have been thoroughly impressed with the unity of the two till Mr. Herbert Spencer presented it as the basis of psychological induction.* The consequences were immediate: if Mind was to be studied as one aspect of Life, it could only be efficiently studied on that inductive and experimental Method which had reached the certain truths of positive science: "Les principes fondamentaux seraient également solides; elles se formeraient également par l'étude sévère et par la composition des faits; elles s'étendraient par les mêmes méthodes de raisonnement." Cabanis warns his readers that they will find nothing of what is called Metaphysics in his book; they will only find physiological researches, mais dirigées vers l'étude particulière d'un ordre de fonctions.

In the purely physiological direction, indeed, Cabanis had many predecessors, from Willis in the middle of the seventeenth century, to Prochaska, who preceded Cabanis by one year only.† The nervous system had of course been studied by physiologists, and this study led them to psychological theories; but although we may find elsewhere, especially in Unzer and Prochaska, sounder views of the physiology of the nervous system, we find nowhere so clear and large a conception of the physiological psychology.

"Subject to the action of external bodies," says Cabanis, “man finds in the impressions these bodies make on his organs at once his knowledge and the causes of his continued existence; for to live is to feel; and in that admirable chain of phenomena which constitute his existence, every want depends on the development

Spencer, Principles of Psychology, 1955.

↑ Lehrsätze aus der Physiologie des Menschen, 1797. Curiously enough the second and third editions of this work were exactly contemporaneous with the second and third editions of Cabanis, 1802 and 1805 (counting the publication in the Mémoires de l'Institut as one edition). It is not to be supposed that Cabanis knew of Prochaska's existence; nor is there more than a general resemblance in their physiological conclusions.