Part 13

I will quote, also, the following passage from my work sur l’instinct et l’intelligence des animaux, p. 178, et seq.

“ ... There are three facts: instinct, understanding of brutes, and human understanding; and each of these facts has its definite limits.

“Instinct acts without knowing; understanding knows in order to act; the human understanding alone knows, and knows itself.

“Reflection, closely defined, is the knowledge of thought by thought. And this power of thought over thought gives us a whole order of new relations. As soon as the mind perceives itself it judges itself; as soon as it can act upon itself it is free; as soon as it becomes free it becomes moral.

“Man is only moral because he is free.

“The brute animal follows its body; in the midst of this body, which shrouds it completely in matter, the human mind is free, and so free that it can, whenever it prefers to do so, immolate its very body.

“‘The great power of the will over the body,’ says Bossuet, ‘consists in this prodigious effect, that man is so completely master of his frame, that he can even sacrifice it for the sake of some greater good in view. To rush into the midst of blows, and plunge into a flight of arrows from a blind impetuosity, as happens among brute creatures, shows nothing superior to the body itself; but to resolve to die with understanding, and for reasons, notwithstanding the whole disposition of the body to the contrary, evinces a principle superior to the body; and among all the tribes of animals, man is the only one in whom this principle exists.’”

NOTE III.

GALL, AS AN OBSERVER.

Page 93. He studied them (mankind) in his own way, but he studied them very closely.

Gall was a practical observer. He observed and studied always, and with so much the greater success because “people never suspected that they had to do (these are his own words) with a man who knew perfectly well that the basis of human character continues to be always the same, and that merely the objects that interest us change with the progress of years.”

He examined “families, schools, hospitals, &c.” And he never was satisfied with appearances only. “The occupations that we pursue as our business, generally prove nothing either as to our faculties or our propensities: but those which we engage in as recreation are almost always in conformity with our tastes and our talents.”

His observations on men were more serviceable to him in judging of and describing their characters, than the bumps on the skull.

“I often said to my friends, show me the fundamental forces of the soul, and I will find the organ and the seat for each one of them. ... When I had become convinced that a distinguished talent, and one fully so recognised, was especially the work of nature, I examined the head of the individual, ... &c.”

Gall’s progression, then, was from observation to the cranium; he first proceeded from observation to the cranium, and next from the cranium to the brain.

Furthermore, Gall began by studying the physiognomy—the features of the countenance—like Lavater.

He at first thought that a good memory was connected with a certain conformation of the eyes: “I remarked,” says he, “that they all had large projecting eyes.... I suspected, therefore, that there ought to exist some connexion between memory and this conformation of the eyes.” Again he says, “It may be perceived, from the progress of these researches, that the first step consisted in the discovery of certain organs; that it was by degrees only that we allowed facts to speak in order to deduce from them general principles; and that it was subsequently, and towards the close, that we had learned to know the brain.”

Thus it appears that the study of the brain came later than the doctrine; and that is the reason why the anatomy of the brain is a mere series of mistakes and conjectures—I mean here the special anatomy, the secret anatomy, the phrenological anatomy; I mean the anatomy made out to suit the doctrine. I have already sufficiently discriminated between it and the real anatomy.

NOTE IV.

OF THE ANIMAL SPIRITS.

Page 116. He who is so intolerant of the personifications proposed by others makes one personification more.

Broussais explains every thing by the word irritation, just as Gall explains every thing by the word faculties, and as Malebranche explained them by animal spirits.

After serving Descartes, the animal spirits were in the service of Malebranche; they served all the authors of the seventeenth century.

Malebranche commences one of his chapters with these words: “Every body agrees that the animal spirits....” He had no idea that every body would agree some day, that the animal spirits is mere nonsense.

There were animal spirits of all sorts; as Gall had faculties of all sorts: there were agitated animal spirits, languid animal spirits. There were even libertine animal spirits.

“Wine is so spirituous,” says Malebranche, “that it is animal spirits almost completely formed, but libertine spirits.”

The animal spirits seemed to have become the ultima ratio of the philosophers.

The author of a book, in other respects to be esteemed, thus defined imagination: “Imagination is a perception of the soul’s caused by the internal motion of the animal spirits.”