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CHAPTER V.

CABANIS.

PIERRE JEAN GEORGES CABANIS was born on the

5th of June, 1757, at Conac near Brives. The dear friend of De Tracy, he was both prized as a thinker by Turgot, D'Holbach, Franklin, Condorcet, Mirabeau, Diderot, and D'Alembert, and prized as a physician by numerous patients. He died on the 6th of May, 1808.

We have traced the course of psychological investigation in its attempts to detect the mechanism of mind up to the point it had attained in the system of De Tracy. The announcement that ideology was a part of zoology, is but the systematic expression of a tendency dimly discernible even in Locke, who, as Victor Cousin complains, is fond of drawing facts from savages, children, and animals. Condillac in his Traité des Animaux had boldly claimed the validity of inferences deducible from animals; but a thorough application of the Comparative Method was not practicable at that period.

The prejudices of that age forbade it. The ignorance of that age made it impossible. Comparative Physiology is little 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 human 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 labours was positive; the evil, negative. Following out this positive tendency, we saw 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 biological Method, truly so called, must be first sought in the work of Cabanis: 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 the non-recognition of connate instincts. If sensation were the admitted source of all mental phenomena (and Cabanis rightly made these phenomena include more than '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,

This work originally appeared as a series of Mémoires 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.

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 for ever 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 recognised 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 Descartes and 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

* SPENCER: Principles of Psychology, 1855.

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 form 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 physiological Psychology as in Cabanis.

Subject to the action of external bodies,' he says, '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 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 Con

* 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.

+ Deuxième Mémoire, § ii.

dillac'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.

'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 develope 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