of some faculty; every faculty by its very development satisfies some want, and the faculties grow by exercise as the wants extend with the facility of satisfying them. By the continual action of external bodies on the senses of man, results the most remarkable part of his existence. But is it true that the nervous centres only receive and combine the impressions which reach them from these bodies? Is it true that no image or idea is formed in the brain, and that no determination of the sensitive organ takes place, other than by virtue of these same impressions on the senses strictly so called ?"*

This question cuts away the very root of Condillac's system. Cabanis had no difficulty in showing that Condillac's limitation of our mental phenomena to the action of the special senses, was a contradiction of familiar experience, e. g. the manifold influence exercised by the age, sex, temperament, and the visceral sensations generally. A survey of the human organism, compared with that of animals, conducted him to the following conclusions:

"The faculty of feeling and of spontaneous movement, forms the character of animal nature.

"The faculty of feeling consists in the property possessed by the nervous system of being warned by the impressions produced on its different parts, and notably on its extremities. These impressions are internal or external.

"External impressions, when perception is distinct, are called sensations.

"Internal impressions are very often vague and confused, and the animal is then only warned by their effects, and does not clearly distinguish their connection with the causes.

"The former result from the application of external objects to the organs of sense; and on them ideas depend.

"The latter result from the development of the regular functions, or from the maladies to which each organ is subject; and from these issue those determinations which bear the name of instincts.

* Deuxième Mémoire, § ii.

"Feeling and movement are linked together. Every movement is determined by an impression, and the nerves, as the organs of feeling, animate and direct the motor organs.

"In feeling, the nervous organ reacts on itself. In movement it reacts on other parts, to which it communicates the contractile faculty, the simple and fecund principle of all animal movement.

"Finally, the vital functions can exercise themselves by the influence of some nervous ramifications, isolated from the system: the instinctive faculties can develop themselves, even when the brain is almost wholly destroyed, and when it seems wholly inactive.

"But for the formation of thoughts it is necessary that the brain should exist, and be in a healthy condition: it is the special organ of thought."*

He justly repudiates any attempt to explain sensibility, which must be accepted as a general property of organized beings, in the same way that attraction is accepted as a general property of masses. No general fact admits of explanation. It can only be subordinated to some other fact, and be explained by it, on the supposition that it is not general. Accepting sensibility, therefore, as an ultimate fact in the organic world, he detects its phenomena running through all those called vital and all those called mental.

"It is something," he says, "to have established that all ideas and all moral phenomena are the results of impressions received by the different organs; and I think a still wider step is taken when we have shown that these impressions have appreciable differences, and that we can distinguish them by their seat and the character of their products, although they all act and react on each other, on account of the rapid and continual communications with the sensitive organ." The object of his treatise is to examine the relations existing between the moral and physical conditions, how the sensations are modified by modifications in

* Deuxième Mémoire, § viii.

+ Ibid., § v.

the organs, how ideas, instincts, passions are developed and modified by the influences of age, sex, temperament, maladies, etc. It is not, therefore, a treatise on Psychology, but contributions towards a science of Psychology, and as such may still be read with advantage, although the science of the present day rejects many of its physiological details. He foresaw that this would be So. "Le lecteur s'apercevra bientôt que nous entrons ici dans une carrière toute nouvelle. Je n'ai pas la prétention de l'avoir parcouru jusqu'au bout; mais des hommes plus habiles et plus heureux achèveront ce que trop souvent je n'ai pu que tenter."

As a specimen of inductive Psychology, we must not pass over in silence his experimental proof of instinct being developed by certain organic conditions. He takes one of the most marvellous of instincts, that of maternal love, and having analyzed its physiological conditions, he says "In my province, and some of the neighboring provinces, when there is a deficiency of sitting Hens, a singular practice is customary. We take a capon, pluck off the feathers from the abdomen, rub it with nettles and vinegar, and in this state of local irritation place the capon on the eggs. At first he remains there to soothe the pain; soon there is established within him a series of unaccustomed but agreeable impressions, which attach him to these eggs during the whole period of incubation; and the effect is to produce in him a sort of factitious maternal love, which endures, like that of the hen, as long as the chickens have need of aid and protection. The cock is not thus to be modified; he has an instinct which carries him elsewhere."

The novelty of the conception which Cabanis put forth, and the interest attached to many of his illustrations, made his work very popular; but its influence was only indirect. The ignorance which almost all psychologists continued to display, not only of Physiology, but of the necessity of a physiological Method, together with the alarm excited by the accusation of "materialism," aided as it was by the reaction, mainly political, but soon extending itself to philosophical questions, which con

demned the labors of the eighteenth century, left Cabanis with few adherents and no continuers. In elaborate works the brain was still designated as the "organ of the mind," but the mind was passionately declared not to be the function of the brain; the profounder views of Cabanis, which regarded Mind as one aspect of Life, were replaced by the old metaphysical conceptions of le Moi-the Ego-the immaterial Entity playing upon the brain as a musician plays upon an instrument.* Instinct was no longer regarded as determined by the organism, changing with its changes, rendered abortive by mutilations, and rendered active by stimulation; but as a "mysterious principle implanted" in the organism: a "something" which, although essentially mysterious and unknowable, appeared to be perfectly well known to the metaphysicians.

While the reaction was strong against Cabanis and against the whole eighteenth-century Philosophy, there arose another doctrine, which, taking Physiology as its avowed basis, succeeded, in spite of vehement opposition, in establishing itself permanently among the intellectual tendencies of the age; and that doctrine may now be said to be the only psychological one which counts any considerable mass of adherents. I allude to Phrenology.

* One living writer, of authority, has gravely declared that mental fatigue is the consciousness which the mind has of the brain's weariness! In our confessed inability to understand what matter is, why will men persist in dogmatizing on what it is not? We know neither matter nor spirit, we only know phenomena.

CHAPTER II.

PHRENOLOGY.

I. LIFE OF GALL.

FRANCIS JOSEPH GALL was born at Tiefenbrunn, in Suabia, on the 9th of March, 1757. In the preface to his great work, Anatomie et Physiologie du Système Nerveux, 1810, he narrates how as a boy he was struck with the differences of character and talents displayed by members of the same family, and how he observed certain external peculiarities of the head to correspond with these differences. Finding no clue given in the works of metaphysicians, he resumed his observations of nature. The physician of a lunatic asylum at Vienna allowed him frequent occasions of noticing the coincidence of peculiar monomaniacs with peculiar configurations of the skull. The prisons and courts of justice furnished him with abundant material. Whenever he heard of a man remarkable either for good or evil, he made his head a study. He extended his observation to animals; and finally sought confirmation in anatomy. The exterior of the skull he found, as a general rule, to correspond with the form of the brain.

After twenty years of observation, dissection, theorizing, and arguing, he delivered his first course of lectures in Vienna. This was in 1796. The novelty of his views excited a great sensation; one party fanatically opposing them, another almost as fanatically espousing them. Ridicule was not sparing. The new system lent itself to ridicule, and angry opponents were anxious, as opponents usually are, to show that what made them angry was utterly farcical. In 1800 Gall gained his best disciple, Spurzheim.