CHAPTER VI. INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL, OR CEREBRAL FUNCTIONS. THE `HE remaining portion of biological philosophy is that which relates to the study of the affective and intellectual faculties, which leads us over from individual physiology to Social Physics, as vegetative physiology does from the inorganic to the organic philosophy. Shortcoming of Descartes. While Descartes was rendering to the world the glorious service of instituting a complete system of positive philosophy, the reformer, with all his bold energy, was unable to raise himself so far above his age as to give its complete logical extension to his own theory by comprehending in it the part of physiology that relates to intellectual and moral phenomena. After having instituted a vast mechanical hypothesis upon the fundamental theory of the most simple and universal phenomena, he extended in succession the same philosophical spirit to the different elementary notions relating to the inorganic world; and finally subordinated to it the study of the chief physical functions of the animal organism. But, when he arrived at the functions of the affections and the intellect, he stopped abruptly, and expressly constituted from them a special study, as an appurtenance of the metaphysico-theological philosophy, to which he thus endeavoured to give a kind of new life, after having wrought far more successfully in sapping its scientific foundations. We have an unquestionable evidence of the state of his mind in his celebrated paradox about the intelligence and instincts of animals. He called brutes automata, rather than allow the application of the old philosophy to them. Being unable to pursue this method with Man, he delivered him over expressly to the domain of metaphysics and theology. It is difficult to see how he could have done otherwise, in the then existing History till state of knowledge: and we owe to his strange hypothesis, which the physiologists went to work to confute, the clearing away of the partition which he set up between the study of animals and that of Man, and consequently, the entire elimination among the higher order of investigators, of theological and metaphysical philosophy. What the first contradictory constitution of the modern philosophy was, we may see in the great work of Malebranche, who was the chief interpreter of Descartes, and who shows how his philosophy continued to apply to the most complex parts of the intellectual system the same methods which had been shown to be necessarily futile with regard to the simplest subjects. It is necessary to indicate this state of things because it has remained essentially unaltered during the last two centuries, notwithstanding the vast progress of positive science, which has all the while been gradually preparing for its inevitable transformation. The school of Boerhaave left Descartes's division of subjects as they found it and if they, the successors of Descartes in physiology, abandoned this department of it to the metaphysical method, it can be no wonder that intellectual and moral phenomena remained, till this century, entirely excluded from the great scientific movement originated and guided by the impulse of Descartes. The growing action of the positive spirit has been, during the whole succeeding interval, merely critical,-attacking the inefficacy of metaphysical studies,-exhibiting the perpetual reconciliation of the naturalists on points of genuine doctrine, in contrast to the incessant disputes of various metaphysicians, arguing still, as from Plato downwards, about the very elements of their pretended science: this criticism itself relating only to results, and still offering no objection to the supremacy of metaphysical philosophy, in the study of Man, in his intellectual and moral aspects. It was not till our own time that modern science, with the illustrious Gall for its organ, drove the old philosophy from this last portion of its domain, and passed on in the inevitable course from the critical to the organic state, striving in its turn to treat in its own way the general theory of the highest vital functions. However imperfect the first attempts, the thing is NEW SYSTEM OF BIOLOGICAL INVESTIGATION. 115 Positive theory of Cerebral functions. done. Subjected for half a century to the most decisive tests, this new doctrine has clearly manifested all the indications which can guarantee the indestructible vitality of scientific conceptions. Neither enmity nor irrational advocacy has hindered the continuous spread, in all parts of the scientific world, of the new system of investigation of intellectual and moral man. All the signs of the progressive success of a happy philosophical revolution are present in this case. The positive theory of the affective and intellectual functions is therefore settled, irreversibly, to be this:-it consists in the experimental and rational study of the phenomena of interior sensibility proper to the cerebral ganglions, apart from all immediate external apparatus. These phenomena are the most complex and the most special of all belonging to physiology; and therefore they have naturally been the last to attain to a positive analysis; to say nothing of their relation to social considerations, which must be an impediment in the way of their study. This study could not precede the principal scientific conceptions of the organic life, or the first notions of the animal life; so that Gall must follow Bichat: and our surprise would be that he followed him so soon, if the maturity of his task did not explain it sufficiently. The grounds of my provisional separation of this part of physiology from the province of animal life generally are the eminent differences between this order of phenomena and those that have gone before,-their more direct and striking importance, and, above all, the greater imperfection of our present study of them. This new body of doctrine, thus erected into a third section of physiology, will assume its true place within the boundaries of the second when we obtain a distincter knowledge of organic, and a more philosophical conception of animal physiology. We must bear in mind what the proper arrangement should be, this third department differing much less from the second than the second differs from the first. We need not stop to draw out any parallel or contrast between phrenology and psychology. Gall has fully and clearly exposed the Its proper place. Vices of Psychological systems. powerlessness of metaphysical methods for the study of intellectual and moral phenomena: and in the present state of the human mind, all discussion on this subject is superfluous. The great philosophical cause is tried and judged; and the metaphysicians have passed from a state of domination to one of protestation, in the learned world at least, where their opposition would obtain no attention but for the inconvenience of their still impeding the progress of popular reason. The triumph of the positive method is so decided that it is needless to devote time and effort to any demonstration, except in the way of instruction: but, in order to characterize, by a striking contrast, the true general spirit of phrenological physiology, it may be useful here to analyse very briefly the radical vices of the pretended physiological method, considered merely in regard to what it has in common in the principal existing schools; in those called the French, the German, and (the least consistent and also the least absurd of the three) the Scotch school:—that is, as far as we can talk of schools in a philosophy which, by its nature, must engender as many incompatible opinions as it has adepts gifted with any degree of imagination. We may, moreover, refer confidently to these sects for the mutual refutation of their most essential points of difference. Method. Interior Observation. As for their fundamental principle of interior observation, it would certainly be superfluous to add anything to what I have already said about the absurdity of the supposition of a man seeing himself think. It was well remarked by M. Broussais, on this point, that such a method, if possible, would extremely restrict the study of the understanding, by necessarily limiting it to the case of adult and healthy Man, without any hope of illustrating this difficult doctrine by any comparison of different ages, or consideration of pathological states, which yet are unanimously recognized as indispensable auxiliaries in the simplest researches about Man. But, further, we must be also struck by the resolute interdict which is laid upon all intellectual and moral study of animals, from whom the psychologists can hardly be expecting any interior observation. It seems rather strange that the philosophers who have so attenuated this immense METHOD OF INTERIOR OBSERVATION. 117 subject should be those who are for ever reproaching their adversaries with a want of comprehensiveness and elevation. The case of animals is the rock on which all psychological theories have split, since the naturalists have compelled the metaphysicians to part with the singular expedient imagined by Descartes, and to admit that animals, in the higher parts of the scale at least, manifest most of our affective, and even intellectual faculties, with mere differences of degree; a fact which no one at this day ventures to deny, and which is enough of itself to demonstrate the absurdity of these idle conceptions. Recurring to the first ideas of philosophical common sense, it is at once evident that no function can be studied but with relation to the organ that fulfils it, or to the phenomena of its fulfilment: and, in the second place, that the affective functions, and yet more the intellectual, exhibit in the latter respect this particular characteristic,that they cannot be observed during their operation, but only in their results, -more or less immediate, and more or less durable. There are then only two ways of studying such an order of functions; either determining, with all attainable precision, the various organic conditions on which they depend,-which is the chief object of phrenological physiology; or in directly observing the series of intellectual and moral acts,-which belongs rather to natural history, properly so called: these two inseparable aspects of one subject being always so conceived as to throw light on each other. Thus regarded, this great study is seen to be indissolubly connected on the one hand with the whole of the foregoing parts of natural philosophy, and especially with the fundamental doctrines of biology; and, on the other hand, with the whole of history,—of animals as well as of man and of humanity. But when, by the pretended psychological method, the consideration of both the agent and the act is discarded altogether, what material can remain but an unintelligible conflict of words, in which merely nominal entities are substituted for real phenomena? The most difficult study of all is thus set up in a state of isolation, without any one point of support in the most simple and perfect sciences, over which it is yet proposed to give it a majestic sovereignty: and in this all |