5
Maine de Biran
Programme
(Extract from Moniteur français, 14 May 1810)
Some still deny the utility of physical doctrines and experiments in explaining the phenomena of the mind and of internal sense. Others on the contrary disdainfully reject psychological observations and reasons in investigations whose object is the body, or restrict their application to certain illnesses. It would be useful to discuss these two sentiments, to show and to determine more carefully to what extent psychology and physics may be linked to one another, and to demonstrate by historical proofs what each of these two sciences has done for the advancement of the other.
Introduction
‘Corporeae machinae mentibus serviunt, et quod in mente est providentia, in corpore est fatum.’1
To observe or to collect phenomena, to classify them, to posit laws, to seek out causes – such are the regular procedures that alone can lead to truth in the sciences of fact.
It is by following this path traced by Bacon, and never allowing themselves to invert its order, that the promoters of the natural sciences managed to erect, in the interval of one century, an edifice as imposing by the solidity of its mass as by the beauty and regularity of its proportions.
The first step, which consists in observing and collecting the facts of nature, is founded upon the regular exercise of the first and simplest faculties of the human mind – the senses; it thus supposes the reality of an ancient and famous maxim, nihil ist in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu,2 a controversial maxim, so often contested in the theory or the science of principles, and so obviously justified in practice, or in the science of results. The action of walking thus serves to refute those who deny the existence of movement.
But this word ‘sense’, as simple as it at first seems, has itself a rather wide latitude of meaning: beyond the external senses, whose number, functions and range are rather well determined, there is one or several internal senses, whose nature and derivative faculties are not equally nor as unanimously recognized.
Sight and touch, which put man in direct communication with external nature, are the truly predominate senses in the human organism (l’organisation humaine), and since we attach a far greater importance to studying and knowing things than to knowing ourselves and to studying ourselves, so it is upon the relationship between these first senses that our attention first fixes – it is under their tutelage that the observer is trained. The most extensive, the most influential branch of his education, consists in clarifying, comparing and rectifying their testimony; and all the ideas to which he attains while raising himself up to the highest degrees of the intellectual scale, all the abstractions that his practised mind can grasp or create, always conserve some imprint of this origin.
As for the internal sense that is hidden within us, whose development is most belated, whose cultivation most rare and difficult, it emerges only in the silence of all the others. It is appropriate only for a unique and simple subject, whose study at first offers nothing attractive, and which most men seem more disposed to flee that to investigate. It is, however, through the cultivation of this internal sense that man enables himself to satisfy the oracle’s precept, nosce te ipsum [know thyself].
Internal observation is nothing other than the present application of this sense to that which is in us, or which properly belongs to us, and whatever idealism may say, it is by focusing upon its testimony, and not by raising ourselves up to the heavens or by descending into the abyss, on the wings of the senses or of imagination, that we may contemplate our thought and know our nature.
Here, right from our first step, as from the first advancement of the sciences of fact, we encounter two orders of phenomena that are distinct and even opposed, and hence two kinds of observation, which have nothing in common as to their means, or their object, or their aim – and even seem most often mutually to contradict themselves, one tending to take flight far away from us, the other staying as closely as possible to the self, seeking only to penetrate into its depths.
It is perhaps by paying heed to this conflict between the two sciences’ tendencies and means that Newton, hitting upon the core of the question with which we are occupied, cried out, ‘O physics! Preserve thee from metaphysics!’ It is also by heeding the necessarily double observation of two classes of phenomena, which when mixed up and conflated produce so many errors and illusions and misunderstandings, that we may cry out in turn: ‘O psychology! Preserve thee from physics!’
Let us recognize at present, pending further developments that constitute the object of this treatise, that it is not possible for the two sciences in question to have more necessary ties with one another than the external senses of touch and sight have with a sense that is wholly internal, or that the object of an external representation, variable and multiple, has with the subject one, simple and identical, that represents itself. Let us add that the way one observes or collects external and internal phenomena differs for the two cases as much as the imagination or intuition of outside things differs from concentrated reflection – a first result that would seem to remove any idea of utility or propriety from applying the facts of physics to those of psychology.
The object of the first part of the proposed question, it seems to me, turns mainly upon the last two methods of science, the positing of laws (which does not essentially differ, as we shall see, from the regular classification of phenomena) and the search for causes, and upon the application that is permitted or possible to make, in these two respects, of the physical sciences to psychology … Below we present the layout and division of our work:
False application of the relation of causality; subject of discussion and misunderstanding in the application of physics to psychology.
‘How,’ says Mr Dégerando quite rightfully, ‘could physiology, which cannot explain physical life itself, explain feeling and thought?’
An impatience and a precipitation all too natural to the human mind cause it almost inevitably to seek out causes or to establish general laws for phenomena that it did not take the time to observe or to verify; and imagination, the first faculty to be exercised, takes hold of these phenomena even before the senses are accurately applied to them. If this is true for a science whose object is palpable or immediately accessible to the senses, how much more so shall it be for one in which the external senses have no use, or for which one has long believed that any direct observation is impossible!
It must therefore have happened that after imagining causes ex abrupto, or feigning explicative hypotheses within a wholly corpuscular philosophy – one extended these same explanations, these hypotheses, to the most obscure phenomena of the mind and the soul, whose nature one did not yet know how to evaluate, nor whose succession how to observe.
Here we encounter all the hypotheses that align with the atomists’ most ancient systems, from Democritus, Leucippus and Epicurus, to Descartes and Gassendi, hypotheses with which they claimed to explain the workings of the senses and imagination through impressional species (espèces impressionnelles) that emanate from objects themselves – tenuia rerum simulacra [thin images of things]; animal spirits; vibrations or vibrationcules produced in infinitesimal nerve fibrils, etc.: all explicative hypotheses created before the nature of each type of sensation or idea was investigated, and before their similarities and their differences were established.
The philosophers of antiquity, following a path contrary to that of induction, which modern physicists since Newton have so successfully practised, put themselves at the source of everything, and imagined general causes to explain everything; their method, which had created nothing but vain systems, did not have more success in Descartes’ hands. In Newton’s time, Leibniz, Malebranche and other philosophers used it to as little advantage – ultimately, the useless hypotheses that were thought up on account of this method, and the progress that the sciences owe to the contrary method of induction, have brought back around all right-thinking minds.
The physics of Descartes, not very rich and especially not very solid as regards details, is scarcely anything other than a collection of hypotheses used to explain poorly observed or unverified facts.
The constant aim of this philosophy is not only to establish the existence of a cause, of a general law experienced in its applications to particular facts falling within its domain, but to state or imagine how such and such a simple nature, such and such a supposed impulsive force acts upon matter to produce such and such effects.
‘Give me matter and movement, and I shall create the world.’ Such is the spirit of Descartes’ philosophy: with certain principles or simple natures that he draws from the depths of his thought, he will indeed create a living nature, as well as an inert nature, while believing he is explaining its laws; he will state how the various whirls of subtle matter are formed, how each of them circulates by flushing towards its centre all the bodies that are placed in its sphere of activity and that rotate with it; he will explain magnetic attraction and all the phenomena of elective affinities as another interplay of subtle matter that penetrates into the pores of certain bodies, always travels through them in a certain direction, enters and exits in a certain direction, etc.
Likewise he will explain how the animal spirits, set in motion in different parts of the body, come and agitate the pineal gland, and awaken certain sensations or material images, or determine certain muscular movements by the reaction of this gland, etc. Thus, nature will have no more impenetrable mysteries; there shall exist no phenomena for which the human mind cannot only designate the general cause or the individual productive force, but also know how they are produced.
These illusions, too flattering, too seductive for the imagination that conceived them, dissipate like vain shadows before the torch of reason, or rather the true spirit of the physical sciences, which was reignited by Bacon, and in whose glow a multitude of bright minds are paving the way, and marching with assurance on a course to which the spirit of observation not only opened the way, but also for which it traced the line of circumvallation and set the limits. They return to the study and simple analysis of the phenomena of nature, which alone should serve as a foundation to science. They advance prudently, using induction and analogy, in the classification of these phenomena, which are carefully verified in their details by observation and by the experience of the senses or of the instruments that extend their scope. They strive to posit general laws, whose reality, on the one hand, is established by experiments repeated a thousand times over, and whose value and limits, on the other, are established by the perfected methods of calculation that are brought into harmonious accord with the phenomena observed. Lastly, they abandon the how of things, whose secret the great architect of the universe has reserved for himself, to dedicate their efforts to the how much, which falls within the province of man, and is the end point of his efforts, in the science of fact, of external nature.
Such was the spirit of this wise and luminous method, worthy to serve as the interpreter and support of Newton’s genius. Thus did this audacious search for causes find itself confined within the most narrow limits; Cartesianism’s vain hypotheses had already themselves contributed to discrediting this search to so great an extent as to exclude it from the realm of philosophy, and if it was able thereafter to find a place within this realm, it did so under another name or by following a wholly opposite tendency or direction.
Let us dwell a moment upon the foundation of this reflection on the search for causes or the explanation of effects, such as our modern physics may have conceived or practised them.
We have already noted that the explanation of a physical phenomenon in the Cartesian doctrine consisted not only in determining the natural cause on which this phenomenon depends, but furthermore in demonstrating or imagining in detail how this cause acted to produce the effect in question; suppose, for instance, we wish to explain the interplay of affinities or the phenomena of electricity, of magnetism, etc., a Cartesian would feel compelled to indicate the figure or form of the fluid molecules that are considered to be the immediate or occasional cause, or of the pores of the body in which it penetrates or circulates, the movement or the direction that it takes on there, etc., all things that the imagination can conceive but that neither the senses nor experience can verify.
A physicist of Bacon or Newton’s school, on the contrary, will first attempt to analyse all the phenomenon’s sensory circumstances; he will try various experiments to ascertain whether it has some analogy with other facts whose laws are known: and if he succeeds in placing them under these laws, and in showing by observation or by calculation that it depends on them or that it is a particular function of the same cause (x), whatever may be the nature of this cause, he will feel he has given all the explanation desirable of the particular phenomenon at issue. It is thus that instead of imagining hypotheses to explain the phenomena of magnetism, of electricity, of galvanism, today we put our efforts into verifying the analogies that these three orders of phenomena may present between one other, into demonstrating experimentally the laws governing their action by moving further from the centre point (as the physicist Coulomb did). It is thus that Franklin explains the phenomenon of thunder, by establishing all the sensorial analogies that exist between this phenomenon such as it appears in a storm cloud, and such as it appears in the apparatus of our electric batteries. It is thus, lastly, that we would feel we had sufficiently explained the chemical affinities if we succeeded in verifying Buffon’s conjecture that the laws governing these particular phenomena and the more general laws of the attraction of masses are identical, by placing in the expression of these first laws, as an infinitesimal function, the figure of the chemical molecules brought together until they are in immediate contact.
We can thereby see how our modern physics, which has become more modest, more reserved and more circumspect, perhaps excessively so in certain respects, aspires to understand the system of nature without attempting to explain it, and even dispensing with imagining explicative hypotheses to account for the facts … hypotheses non fingo, said the great Newton; and, indeed, attraction was never anything other for him than a general fact with which a series of analogies successively came to align; never did he pretend to turn it into a real explicative principle of phenomena.
We can also see how this latest intellectual development in the sciences of fact, which we characterize under the heading search for causes, does not prevail, strictly speaking, in the current method of our physicists. Indeed, this search reduces to a simple generalization or classification of natural phenomena, that is, to moving from effect to effect until it reaches the most general effect from which the particular ones derive and in which they are assumed to be contained. But, in this ascending scale of effects, the mind’s whole task consists in perceiving the ever more extensive relations between the phenomena that it is comparing and whose ideas or signs it links together in accordance with the real order of the successions or of the analogies it succeeds in discovering; as the number of these perceived analogies increases, that of the formerly separate categories diminishes; the various series diverge and tend to meet up at their summit. It is thus that the real causes, the true productive forces, withdraw to the rear of our minds and are said to be simplified possibly even to the point of systematic unity. But the secret return of the mind towards some absolutely unknown, efficient cause (x,y), which we no longer even attempt to determine in itself, is not less compelled by the nature of our minds; and whatever care is taken to remove the unknown, or to conceal its name or distinctive functions, still it subsists in the secret confines (dans l’intimité) of thought, which pursues it and vainly seeks to grasp it externally.
Such a method seems quite conducive to cutting out from the root all the systematic illusions of which the imprudent investigations on the nature of forces, and the modes of their action, or on what we can truly call explicative hypotheses of phenomena, are so often at risk; this method, however, has its own illusions and chimeras, if not in its way of observing the various orders of phenomena, at least in its way of classifying and generalizing them according to feigned or assumed analogies, which it often seeks to establish between facts that by their nature are entirely heterogeneous.
This last reflection brings us back to the more precise object of the proposed question, which consists in examining first to what extent the opinion of those who currently deny the utility of physical doctrines or experiments to explain the phenomena of the mind or of internal sense, can be justified.
Whereupon I shall observe, without further delay, and in accordance with all that precedes, that the type of explanation discussed here can be taken in three main different senses, namely:
(1)the sense in which the physics of the ancients and of Descartes explained phenomena through their causes by seeking to determine how a given cause, whether material or immaterial, acted to produce these phenomena – the question here is to what extent any given physical explanation of the facts of internal sense or of the workings of the mind can be useful or justified;
(2)the type of explanation that consists in reducing to one and the same class both the phenomena that reveal themselves (se découvrent) only to internal sense, and the strictly physical facts, such as they might appear (se représentent) to the external senses or to the imagination; this reduction or assimilation being founded upon analogies or identities believed to be observed between the two types of facts in question, considered in their order of succession, subordination or reciprocal dependence – this mode of explanation would seem to be the only one in keeping with our current mode of philosophizing in the positing of laws and the search for causes;
(3)in the sense in which the word explain means simply to make clearer things or ideas that are obscure by their nature, by comparing them to other tangible (sensible) things or ideas that are as it were their illustration (figures). One could thus seek to represent the internal phenomena in question by certain external or physical movements that are produced in the body (l’organisation), and that, presumed to correspond to the sensations or ideas produced in the mind, may serve as their symbols or natural signs, without at all being connected to them by any relation of identity or even of resemblance, it not being necessary for signs to have any resemblance with the things or the phenomena signified, in order to express or represent them to the mind as regards their real properties, their succession, etc. The explanation in question would thus be purely symbolic.
An analytic examination of these three systems or modes of explanation will be the object of the first part of this treatise.
Part one
Of the misuse and futility of physical doctrines and experiments in explaining the phenomena of the mind and of internal sense. Analysis of the various systems of explanation.
First article
Of physical and physiological methods of explanation.
In returning all the way back to ancient philosophy, one finds these purported physical explanations of the senses and of the mind’s ideas first introduced by the Eleatic physicists, and then more or less accredited by the various Greek and Latin schools … Or better put, these first philosophers, having not yet risen to a clear distinction between the two orders of phenomena or operations, one of which relates to the properties of matter and the other to the functions of the mind and of the soul, were not yet really concerned with determining what their mutual relations, their means of correspondence, and the ties that unite them, may consist in. They could even less consider explaining the phenomena of the mind or of internal sense with physical doctrines in that these phenomena themselves were mixed up in the physical systems of those times and were presumed to be part of them. Who indeed could recognize today the makings of an explanation, however probable or specious, in these thoughtless doctrines that took the ideas of the mind for the shadows or faint images of objects – tenuia rerum simulacra? – or that believed that these simulacra detached from objects at various points, readily penetrating the pores of coarse bodies by their tenuousness and coming and striking the mind, which itself was but a more thinned out body, over whose composition and form solemn discussions would arise, to determine whether it was made of fire, of air, of water, or whether it did not participate in the nature of all the elements and contained in its composition something similar to what we perceive in each of them; if its form wasn’t spherical, the most perfect of forms, or a composite of all the forms, which makes us able to perceive and imagine all those that are outside of us, etc., etc.?
We do not think it necessary to insist further on these first illusions of the childhood of philosophy, where metaphysics, yet to be born, found itself confused and identified with the most crass physics, a physics abundant in explanations as haphazard or ridiculous in their means, as they were audacious in their objects, or their goal.
To find some regular theory on the respective functions of the soul and the body, and on the relations of causality or dependence, of analogy or dissimilarity, which may exist between the phenomena of the mind and those of matter, it is necessary to traverse the various eras of philosophy successively occupied by the doctrines of Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus and the Peripaticians, before arriving at Descartes, who was the first to deal a fatal blow to ancient philosophy, in a manner that we must now consider.
Descartes must be considered the true father of metaphysics. He is the first philosopher who established an exact dividing line between the functions that belong only to the soul, and the properties or qualities that can be ascribed only to bodies. He was the first, as observes a profound and eminently judicious writer,3 to employ the only appropriate method for precisely studying the operations of the mind, that is, proceeding by way of reflection, and not by way of external or tangible (sensible) analogy; an example that no philosopher had given before, and that very few followed after him. In this way, he realized and established that thought, will, remembrance and all the other attributes of the mind having no resemblance with extension and figure and all the other qualities of bodies, knowledge of them can only emerge from reflection or from intimate sense properly consulted, and that the exact notions that can be formed about them can never be gleaned from external objects, the existence of these objects and that of our body being liable to doubt, whereas we have the immediate certainty or positive evidence of the existence of the soul, or of the thinking self, even in our very doubt of all the rest.
By starting from this principle, and proceeding by way of reflection to investigate the phenomena of internal sense, one could not imagine – I shan’t say the utility, but even the possibility of adapting any physical doctrine or experiment whatsoever to the explanation of phenomena so conceived. Nor is this all: from the point of view centred on the intimate reflection of the self, it appears just as difficult to grasp the object of a physical science, to lay its base, as it was from the external or material point of view of the imagination to arrive at the subject of a purely psychological science and to lay its foundations.
But doubt about the existence of the body is just as impossible for the very fact of consciousness as doubt about the existence of the soul or of the thinking self. By returning to this first truth by another indirect route, by seeking to found it upon vain artificial or logical methods, or upon the intervention of God himself (tamquam deus ex machina), Descartes’ system seemed to open up two opposite routes, one of which led directly to a true idealism where the mind draws everything from within itself, and applies its laws and forms to external nature, and the other of which tended to lead, by another order of considerations, to a kind of speculative materialism, where purely mechanical laws, used first to explain all the phenomena of organized, living and perceptive nature, as well as of dead matter, are later illegitimately extended, to the point of invading the very domain of the soul, which was initially circumscribed within very narrow limits, so it could preserve its independence, and remain in an isolation equally forced, equally contrary to the testimony of intimate sense.
Nothing, indeed, is closer to the soul than the particular intimate modifications that stem directly from the dynamics of life (jeu de la vie), those appetites, those affections4 or determinations of an instinct wholly blind in its principle, which Descartes’ system claimed to explain in detail, by the laws of a true mechanism. If a multitude of organized, living beings, to whom we are naturally inclined to attribute the faculty of feeling, of spontaneously moving and of imagining, can exercise these faculties according to purely automatic laws, why, putting feeling and thought aside, or even placing them under mechanical or organic laws, does one not seek to explain, by the action of matter or the interplay of certain spirits, all those particular operations Descartes attributes exclusively to the soul, of which a number of philosophers deny, moreover, that any idea can be formed, only recognizing as idea the image depicted in the imagination (fantaisie)? I indeed know not whether these supposed mechanical explanations such as are found in the volumes of Descartes or of Malebranche on the passions and imagination have not contributed more to confirm certain rather unreflective minds in the standpoint of materialism, than to extend, accredit or justify the contrary opinion.
What is certain is that by claiming to reduce the explanation of the phenomena of organization and of life to the ordinary mechanics of brute bodies, and by confusing two types of laws kept quite separate by nature, Descartes’ doctrine, in addition to holding up the progress of physiological science and falsifying its theory, also did harm in certain respects to the philosophy of the human mind, which its method of reflection otherwise tended to direct in such a fine and useful direction.
If indeed everything operates in living bodies by the mere laws of mechanics, there is no admissible intermediary between pure automatism and pure intelligence; nor as a result is there any tie, any natural means of correspondence between thought and extension, between the soul and the body. A relation, a reciprocal action of one upon the other could only take place by a perpetual miracle, or the intervention of the supreme force, which alone is truly productive, the unique and exclusively efficient cause. The material impressions of bodies being nothing but occasional causes, will nonetheless be necessary occasions or conditions for the affections or representations of the soul, since these will occasionally and necessarily determine the consecutive and automatic movements of the body; whence it follows:
(1)that intimate sentiment or fact of consciousness, which constitutes the self (as) real cause, or immediate productive force of the movements brought about by the will, is but a mere illusion, and that the criterion for truth no longer being in this internal testimony upon which all science is founded, can no longer be anywhere…
(2)that there being no intermediary between thought proper and the blindest mechanism, we must choose one or the other, or fit into thought’s domain a multitude of affective impressions, of penchants, of appetites, of obscure sensations, which, though never appearing to the consciousness of the self, nonetheless affect a being in its purely sensorial capacity, by becoming the basis of the immediate and unreflecting sentiment of existence; or again mix up all those functions of life and of physical sensitivity among the properties and movements of brute matter; in both cases, alter the nature of the most well established phenomena, assimilate the most obviously opposed classes, close our eyes on an entire class of facts that are an essential part of the complete knowledge of man, to which one perhaps cannot attain except by raising oneself up through the numerous degrees of the animal scale, from the most obscure nuance of a sensitivity that is not yet thought, to that elevation that is the station of the reflective and enlightened contemplator of the works of creation.
The doctrine of Descartes immediately produced the sect of mechanical physiologists, who by working with mechanical explanations and with the laws of organization and of life, end up failing to recognize the fundamental principle of the mother doctrine and the great distinction established between extension, figure and movement, which can be represented, and the indivisible subject (le sujet un) of sensation, which can only reflect on itself. Once this dividing line was removed, the explicative physical hypotheses of the senses and of ideas could henceforth go unchecked.
One thus ends up asserting that the efficient cause (and no longer just the occasion, or the necessary condition of sensation) is none other than the object that presses upon the organ. This pressure penetrates all the way to the centre of the brain by way of the nerves. The brain then reacts outside itself upon these nerves and thereby upon the representations or images of external things, or upon the heart and muscular organs, and thereby upon affective sensations, movements, animal attractions or repulsions, etc.
Such is the substance of all those physical explanations that various authors since Hobbes have modified and developed in an infinity of ways, but that on the whole are summed up in these few words.
These physical explanations share with Descartes’ physical hypotheses the common vice of being purely gratuitous products of the imagination, impossible to justify by any kind of external or internal observation, and even of being in opposition to the facts of intimate sense, which they pretend to explain. But they have in addition a character of absurdity that is quite particular to them. It is by excluding any participation, even passive, of a feeling subject, or of a hyper-physical substance, superior to material organization (such as Descartes conceived the soul, and which the authors of these hypotheses persist in disregarding or expressly denying) that they posit a relationship of hypothetical resemblance first between external mechanical movements and purely organic impressions, and a still more illusory and obviously absurd identity between the same movements or impressions and the feelings, perceptions, ideas or operations that the self, the indivisible and simple subject of thought, perceives in itself and attributes to itself in the ineffable fact of consciousness.
Whence a revolting opinion that was suggested by Hobbes and that certain physicists have since not feared to profess expressly: that all matter essentially and in its nature has the faculty to feel, as well as that to attract or to move – that all it needs are organs and a memory like animals in order to manifest its obscure affections, etc.
It is useless to insist upon such opinions, as well as upon the physical explanations of the senses and of ideas that pure materialism has claimed to deduce from them; we only needed to mention them in order to foreshadow the illusions and dangers attached to such explanations, even when (like Descartes and Malebranche) one wishes to reconcile them with the metaphysical theories most solidly established upon the facts of intimate sense.
Second article
Of the systems of physiology, and of their use in the explanation of the phenomena of internal sense.
The real test of a hypothesis lies in the details of the phenomena they are used to explain. It was by pushing to the limit the supposed explanations of the physiological mechanists, who saw in the body a mere hydraulic machine, or a composite of levers, cords and instruments intended to transmit and carry on the movements of fluids or solids, etc., that philosophers finally realized, owing to the incompatibility of the results, both with each other and with nature, that it was necessary to give up hypotheses that the imagination alone could still foster, but that experience and reason repelled at each turn.
If the goal of such haphazard hypotheses had not first been to explain the senses and the imagination, which by their nature are inaccessible to all observation or experiment, perhaps their reign might have been longer. But as soon as one tried to adapt these hypotheses to the laws of organization and of life, there was a kind of experimental criterion to which to compare them. To demonstrate that they could not be reconciled with the facts of physiology was to lessen and annihilate their value with respect to another order of much more obscure and much more uncertain explanations. It cannot be disputed that, in this respect at least, the better-conducted research that ruined the mechanists’ system usefully served the interests of the philosophy of the human mind.
Stahl was the first to take a stance diametrically opposed to those who claim to apply purely mechanistic laws to the functions of the organism and of life. He was also the first to eliminate the barrier erected by Descartes between the reflective consciousness of that which belongs to the soul and the representative science of that which pertains to the body; and since, before him, physics had been transported into metaphysics, by restricting ever more the domain of the soul, he sought on the contrary to transport metaphysics into physiology, by giving to this hyper-organic force, to this principle of feeling and thought, the most unlimited dominion.
An attentive and scrupulous observer of the phenomena of organization and of life, Stahl quickly recognized the signs of a distinctive activity, an activity that to a certain extent is independent from externally prodding objects (objets d’incitation extérieure), over which it prevails, rather than being absolutely and constantly subordinate to them, as the movement of a body is to that of another body that strikes it.
He recognizes an inexhaustible variety of means appropriate to a multitude of particular accidental goals, guided with an evident intention tending towards one single regular and constant end – the preservation of the organized being amidst all the possible causes of alteration, the endurance (durée) of life amidst so many causes of death!
He compared the phenomena of animate and inanimate bodies: on the one hand, he found movements that are always exactly proportionate to the quantity of matter and to the force of the shock and impetus involved, and that consistently reproduce themselves under the same physical circumstances: which gives rise to the possibility of finding the expression of those mathematical laws that apply without exception to all the physical facts of the same order, which would be expressed therein and precisely calculated in advance. On the other hand, he found variable movements that are now persisting, now stopping, now resuming and now breaking off again with no external cause, by the mere spontaneity of their internal productive force, or at times by an existing cause that, slight though it may be, on one occasion produces the most vigorous effects, and on another occurs over and over again, each time with renewed intensity, yet does not produce any perceptible effect.
The great laws governing the habits of organized machines, those habits that are exclusively particular to them, such as the periodicity of the vital or animal functions of wakefulness and sleep, of growth and deterioration: the seemingly intentional efforts of living nature to remove causes of illness, to fight against them, or to return to a healthy state – a host of other phenomena, which this is not the place to evoke, revealed to Stahl’s genius a marked opposition between the laws governing the motion of brute matter, and those governing the dynamics of living bodies. These latter appeared to him attributable only to an intelligent driving force superior to matter; and finding within himself, in the testimony of intimate sense, in the production of voluntary movement and of effort, the unique original prototype of such a force, considering that it is not an essential feature of this active and intelligent principle to know itself or to have consciousness of its own acts, in order to be and to act, he felt no qualms in attributing to it everything truly hyper-mechanical, or hyper-physical, that takes places in the living and feeling being. Thus, the soul is posited as the unique subject and the exclusive efficient cause of the most obscure vital movements, of the impressions or affections most foreign to consciousness, as well as of the acts that are brought about by a free will, and that an internal light envelops with its lustre.
This identity or this systematic unity of principle could perhaps still rely on the Cartesian doctrine that had partitioned all the beings of the universe into two broad classes that are mutually opposed, as are the incompatible attributes of thought and extension: whence it followed that if an order of phenomena could not be attributed to one of these classes, it necessarily had to fit into the other, or in other words, if it escaped the physical laws of bodies, it had to belong to the metaphysical laws of the mind.
By attributing the phenomena of the mind to these latter laws, Stahl thrust himself into the opposite extreme as the mechanical physiologists. He forced all his hypotheses; he did a kind of violence to the facts, established various assimilations, or illusory analogies, between things that are heterogeneous by nature. However, it was nonetheless a great step forward for the science of bodies and one cannot fail to see today that this great line of circumvallation traced around physiology, in preventing that science from henceforth being confused with ordinary physics, prepared the way for all its subsequent advances.
Let us observe that the system of explanation that was discussed previously presents itself here from a rather different point of view. Before, it was a matter of starting from physical theories or experiments, or properties of bodies, to explain the phenomena of the mind or of internal sense. Here, the goal would seem to start from the facts of consciousness as given and thus to explain the functions and movements of the organic body, an explanation perhaps equally illusory, equally impetuous in its goal. Nonetheless, the question is not, as in the preceding system, to determine how the effect is produced by its cause, but only to ascertain this nominal cause by the analogy, real or assumed, between the effects to be explained and another class of effects recognized as depending on the cause in question. As a result, this mode of explanation falls under the second division that we established, and whose advantages and disadvantages we are currently discussing.
The doctrine known by the name of animism, pretending to assimilate, by their cause, two orders of phenomena as distinct and separate as the organism and simple vitality on the one hand, and thought and will on the other, was founded upon a physiological observation as certain in the fact of intimate sense as hypothetical in its consequences. These consequences turned out to be foreign to the very thing claimed to be deduced, namely: that the operations of sensation (sensibility), of the will and of thought can gradually become more and more nebulous as a result of habit or the frequent repetition of the same acts or movements, to the point that they no longer even scratch the surface of internal sense, and disappear altogether from consciousness’s view: the same clouding over (obscuration) can be produced by the inattention of the mind when it is preoccupied with other impressions or congenerate movements, but in either case this does not prevent these unperceived impressions or movements from belonging to the same soul, which is still their cause and identical subject, even when it moves, or when it receives an impression unaccompanied by consciousness or the sentiment of the self. One thus concluded that the vital movements, or the internal impressions that correspond to them, were in fact originally true sensations, acts accompanied by consciousness, but somehow ceased to be so, either as a result of habit or due to those continual distractions that are occasioned by forceful external perceptions; to this we reply (and this is the strongest objection that can be made against this system):
(1)that consciousness being the chief and sole characteristic of the operations attributed to the thinking soul, all that takes place in the body [outside of its participation can only be attributed to it by a feigned analogy; and
(2)that a doctrine that reduces] the phenomena of the organism or of pure vitality, and of sentiment and thought, to the systematic unity of a subject or of a common cause, offends all the laws of wise observation, and all the exact procedures of the sciences of fact, where identity of cause can only legitimately be concluded from the resemblance or homogeneity of the observed facts that one seeks thereby to unite into a single class and to attribute to the same nominal cause.
But what resemblance, what homogeneity can be established between a mode or movement perceived internally as being brought about by the will and accompanied by effort, and an organic phenomenon devoid of all consciousness and foreign to the self…?
Considered as the cause or unknown productive force behind all the movements and functions that take place in the various parts of the organism (l’organisation), Stahl’s soul is thus distinguishable from the self, which resides entirely in the consciousness of its own acts or modifications; in this respect, this force could be classified as one of those forces of the external universe for which, strictly speaking, there is no science, outside of the effects in which and by which they appear (se représentent) to the senses or imagination.
We are thus brought back to a physicalist standpoint by the very doctrine that seemed the most likely to stray from it, as if it even the most spiritualist doctrines could not end up elsewhere; indeed just as Descartes’ system begot that of the mechanists and resulted in spinozism, so Stahl’s system produced another kind of materialism, which one might call organic, in which all the phenomena of the mind and of internal sense are attributed to the laws of vitality and of a wholly physical sensitivity. What does it matter whether it is the soul or the organs?
The soul, according to Stahl, feels or perceives all the various impressions; it alone executes the various kinds of movements that take place in the body; it unceasingly acts or is on the lookout (activas excubias agit), putting the organs in contact with one another and with the objects or occasional causes of impressions. These causes or objects do nothing except, as it were, give the initial warnings; the soul does all the rest. It forms its sensations on its own, exalts or tempers them as need be. It acts now to concentrate, now to spread out (épanouir) the organs. It is true once again that the self, often a stranger to these kinds of warnings and to these supposed sensations, is just as completely unaware of what its soul is said to feel or perform as it would be if this principle operated or felt in another being. But at least it is established in this system that there exists in living organized bodies an acting force that governs them according to its own laws, and thus shields them to a certain extent from mechanical agents. Given that foreign objects cannot be considered the efficient causes of sensations and of acts of consciousness, but rather that the soul creates them or contributes essentially to their creation through an activity that is particular to it, and also takes the initiative in the particular phenomena of sentiment and movement – an infinitely valuable point of view, which suitably restricts, or as we shall put it later on, better serves to trace the dividing line between the domain of the soul or of the self and that of the organism, overturns all the vain material explanations of the phenomena of the mind, and assigns to those explanations that it is permitted to use, the proper limits within which they must be contained, in order to illuminate certain essential parts of the science of man, without usurping it altogether.
I have said that in the absolute, and too exclusive, meaning of the animists, the hypothetical unity of the principle or of the productive force of sensory and intellectual vital phenomena tended to lead back, by another route, to a sort of organic materialism; indeed the mysterious unspecified agent that by the name of soul sets in motion all the organs required for ordinary life, feeling and thought, as soon as it operates unbeknownst to the self, or as soon as it is separated from it, is no longer but an immaterial force as it were, in a certain sense foreign or objective with respect to the self, to the individual subject of thought. Since any method wisely adapted to the physical sciences utterly excludes all useless notions or investigations such as might be concerned with the essence of the productive causes of phenomena (let us express these causes arbitrarily as (x,y,z), which is nothing other than a mere formula, an abbreviated sign with which all analogous phenomena of similar kind are aligned), it will appear quite indifferent whether we call the unique force in question soul, arché, enormon or vital principle, especially insofar as it is distinct and separate from the self. The only thing that must be considered, and that is truly characteristic of the system in question, is the unity of class under which one claims to place the phenomena of life and of thought, by starting with these latter as givens of intimate sense, so far as their principle or subject of inherence, the self, is concerned, and then by assimilating them, as required by hypothesis, with phenomena that would otherwise seem to belong to a foreign principle or have a foreign subject, the non-self. But as soon as one has accepted this assimilation or analogy between phenomena, the nature, the essence of the cause, whether real or nominal, is now but a matter of logic: it is thus permissible to rename or even completely disregard this cause in order to embrace the effects themselves.
Thus, just as Stahl had said that an animal’s nutrition, growth and vegetation are acts or particular modifications of the same principle that makes man think or that thinks in him, one will feel justified in saying that the principle by which man thinks or feels is but a particular modification of the same principle that makes him vegetate.
Just as Stahl would say that the soul, simultaneously present in each part of its realm, whose needs it anticipates, whose forces it directs, activates and primes; secretes in the liver, the spleen, inhales and exhales in the lungs, contracts and dilates in the heart, digests in the stomach, thinks in the brain, feels in the nerves, and in all the areas that it animates, so one might feel justified in saying that it is the organs themselves that, each imbued with its ineffable portion of life, and endowed by nature with different vital properties that we distinguish by their effects without tracing their cause (one or multiple), secrete, digest, move, feel and think. Who would have thought that we would go so far as to state this principle that appears so extraordinary and so bizarre when it is taken literally rather than figuratively, namely that the brain produces the organic secretion of thought, and digests it, like the stomach secretes gastric juices and digests food (Cabanis)? Stahl’s simple and individual unity is thus replaced with a kind of collective and artificial unity, to which the same functions are assigned. It will be the totality of the living parts collected into one system, and pertaining to a common centre, which will be
[A page is missing from the manuscript here. In the missing page, Biran might have shown how Stahl’s system leads, by logical extension, to materialism, and how, in both cases, it is one and the same mode of explanation, which consists in assimilating two classes of heterogeneous phenomena. The titles of the third article and of §1 are ours. (Note from the editor.)]
Third article
Of symbolic explanation. How one has claimed to explain the facts of internal sense by attributing them either to hypothetical nerve firings (ébranlement nerveux) (Hartley, Bonnet), or to the organic centres (Willis, Gall). Deviations from this method of explanation.
§1 Of the systems that explain psychological phenomena by the interplay of nerve fibres. Of Bonnet in particular
As we have already stated in the introduction to this treatise, the senses of sight and touch predominate in the human organism (l’organisation humaine), along with a system of representations that is founded almost exclusively on their primitive use. These senses, however, are as it were entirely in their objects; they reach only what is external or foreign to the self, and therefore physical and material. Thus, if one reduced our whole system of knowledge to our objective representations, any given idea, of whatever nature it may be, could necessarily be reduced to some perceptible image of shape, extension or movements represented in space. Otherwise, it would not be, strictly speaking, an idea, a conception of the mind, but merely a word, an empty sign. This, it seems to me, is how several philosophers understood it, and particularly those who, habitually engaging in physical investigations, thought they could attribute everything to the object of their favourite science. Thus, ever since the great restoration of Bacon, physics seems ultimately to have usurped the entire realm of human understanding.5
Faithful to his principles, Ch. Bonnet does not conceal, at the outset of his analytic investigations of the soul, that it is not in the soul itself, or the self, that he will study the phenomena of the mind and of internal sense. ‘I have undertaken to study man,’ he says naively at the beginning of the preface to his Analytical Essay, ‘as I have studied insects and plants … Physics is the mother of metaphysics.’
Who could believe this? Let us nonetheless see what we can say about it, and examine just what the daughter of such a mother may become.
‘There is no reasoning in perception,’ says a psychologist whom we have already cited.6 ‘Nature ordains that certain means and instruments shall intervene between the object and our perception of it, and these means and instruments limit and regulate our perceptions.’
Any means or instrument that intervenes or is supposed to intervene between the object and the perception that represents it does not enter into this perception itself. It can thus be considered as falling solely within the domain of physics, which can indeed only extend as far as the external means that preceded the sensation or perception without at all being part of it. Thus, the way in which beams of light move, by emission or vibration, from the luminous body that is their source, to the surface of the opaque body that reflects them towards the eye, the mode of this reflection, that of crossing in the pupil, refraction in the different humours of the eye – essentially all the phenomena that precede the immediate impression of these beams on the retina – belong to pure physics and, being outside the act of perception, can in no way serve to explain it. But these beams then produce an impression upon the nerves or the fibrils of the retina, and a change occurs in the nerve endings of this organ. What is this change, or of what does it consist? We have not the faintest idea, and it does not appear to fall within the domain of physics or of ordinary mechanics.
Could the beams indeed be considered as acting by impulse? But what relationship can we establish between this supposed shock, or any transmitted movement, and the phenomena that follow? Is it a kind of electric attraction or a chemical affinity that occurs even prior to the contact between the beams and the fibrils of the retina, endowed by nature with a mode of sensitivity or affectability that is particular or specific to it? That may be, but it is not yet quite clear. The most obvious result that can be drawn here, from physical or physiological experience, is that in order for visual sensation to take place, there must always be continuity and integrity of the nerves themselves that extend from the retina to the cerebral pulp in which they penetrate and disappear, although the scalpel has till now not been able to follow their tracks back to a unique central point where it was long thought they would converge.
The least obstacle that obstructs this continuity of the nerves seems to destroy the sensitivity of the retina, and prevent or annihilate perception.
But again, what happens along the nerves of the retina from the extremities covering the back of the ocular globe to those that are routed in the brain? Is it a vibration or an infinite series of vibrationcules passed on to the nervous fibrils and transmitted all the way to the cerebral centre? Is it an impulsive movement instantaneously communicated to the animal spirits that flow in each of these fibrils? Is it an electric phenomenon that occurs between the luminous fluid and the fluid of the nerves? etc. etc. You can choose the hypothesis you like, but in each case you will only imagine or picture (se représenter) outlines of movements or arbitrary modes of movement that have no relationship with the sensation or perception of the self, nor with any phenomenon of internal sense. It was long thought that to explain vision, it sufficed to say how the image of the external object formed itself in miniature on the retina by the passage and crossing of beams in the pupil, their refraction in the aqueous humour of the cornea, etc.: all purely physical facts, such as those that explain the workings of the darkroom. By imagining that the soul did nothing more than contemplate such images or unite itself with them, one created altogether imaginary difficulties as to what causes us to see objects right side up whose images are upside down on the retina, or to see one object though there are two images. But a more healthy psychology evinces the insufficiency and emptiness of these explanations. As it has been quite rightly said, images do not really exist anywhere, and those that are assumed to be traced on the retina in order to explain vision or the representation that is produced of an object in the soul have no more substance than the vain simulacra or flickering shadows of bodies, the tenuia rerum simulacra of Lucretius and Epicurus.
All the physicist’s investigations are thus restricted here to determining or to conjecturing that:
(1)there is a change, or rather, a certain movement produced in the nerve fibres of the retina, and propagated by the effect of the initial contact of light beams, or by a particular fluid, to an indeterminate point in the brain;
(2)corresponding to this change is an immediate particular impression or affection that is scarcely noticed, because it is ordinarily very weak when the light beams act upon a healthy organ;
(3)corresponding to this immediate impression wrought upon the nerve fibres of the retina and transmitted, either by these fibres or by a particular fluid, all the way to the brain, is an external intuition of the colour spectrum, in addition to the image of an extended object with a certain shape and colour, in accordance with the hyperphysical laws coordinating the senses of sight and touch.
Here we have three correspondent facts whose intimate connection we can observe, deduce or foresee by a kind of habitual reasoning, but without being able to establish or conceive of any type of relation between them other than that of succession or simultaneity, and not of analogy or resemblance, nor of causality or necessary dependence.
Who indeed could say what type of analogy or dependence exists between the movement of the luminous fluid, and that of the nerves, or between the latter and the more or less perceptible impression that the eye experiences due to the contact of the beams, or between this contact and the external intuition of colour, or between this intuition and the perception of the coloured object? Who can explain how one of these effects can bring about or produce the other?
Observe that the only fact that is clearly and immediately known here, is the representation or the intuition itself of a coloured object; or rather in certain cases, the sensation of light; all the rest is not known as a part of perception, but rather deduced from certain experiments or external observations, from certain arguments whose principles idealism denies, though it is forced to acknowledge representation itself as a phenomenon of the mind.
How, then, shall we explain the primitive fact by the deduced fact, the certain from the uncertain, the clear from the obscure? And yet this is what all the authors of the physical explanations that we are presently discussing claim to do. Now this is how they justify, if not their success, at least their attempts.
We do not know what an idea in the soul itself is. It is thus not at so obscure a source that we should study the phenomena of the mind with a view to forming clear ideas of it,7 and the most uncertain hypothesis on the mechanical workings of the brain to which these phenomena are linked will always teach us more than even the most concentrated, the most thorough internal observation, since otherwise we would be like the spider of which Bacon speaks: tamquam aranea texens telam…8
Now, since it has been clearly proven that our ideas originate in the senses, and that there is no difference between the senses and the organs,9 we need only focus all of our attention on the latter and study what happens in the organ when it transmits to the soul the impressions of objects that produce ideas. All that can happen, however, in the organs (external and internal), in the nerves and in the brain, are movements. It is quite true that
we do not know how certain movements can produce certain sensations and ideas in the soul, but we know10 at least that we only have ideas in consequence of the movements that are aroused in certain fibres of the sensory organs and of the brain, and this is enough to justify hypothesizing about these fibres and about their movements, as well as about ideas, in order to see them as natural signs of ideas; thus we can study these signs, and the result of their possible combinations; and we can then legitimately deduce from them the order in which these ideas were generated in the soul. Indeed, as soon as it is proved that the ideas are linked to the movements of sensory fibres, then the type of fibres in question, the order in which they are agitated, the relationship, the connection we can establish between them, the physical effects that the more or less repeated action of objects can work upon them, will give us the origin of all that the soul experiences.
Preface to the Analytical Essay
Such is the substance of a hypothesis that, once we admit its first principle, is perfectly coherent in its consequences, and will truly seem to convert and to translate the internal science of the ideas and of the faculties of the human mind into a sort of external dynamic, or theory of the movement of the brain’s fibres.
I shall make several remarks on this bold transformation, remarks that can be extended to all like systems of explanation.
(1) I shall first ask how we know so positively that such perceptions or ideas only take place in the mind in consequence of certain movements aroused in certain fibres of the brain. And upon what experimental or observational truth, either external or internal, can this correlation or essential dependence be grounded? We know by intimate sense and by consciousness that there are within us sensations, perceptions, ideas, various intellectual acts that the mind performs upon the raw material given by the external senses. These facts of intimate sense can receive no higher degree of elucidation than what they already enjoy at the source where they must necessarily be studied and distinguished, in order for us to form truly reflective ideas of them.
We know on one the hand, and by a rather roundabout route, namely the anatomical dissections performed on the dead, that in our organized machine there are a brain and nerves, and the experiments attempted upon the living have shown that these nerves and this brain collaborate as instruments or as organic conditions to create animal sensations, and even, albeit more indirectly (see the preceding article), to create the regular and complete perceptions of the thinking being. But anatomy and physiology have not discovered anything in the brain resembling those fibres that can be divided into an infinite number of types and arrangements and are capable of an infinite variety of movements. These extraordinarily numerous traces that are said to form and remain in the cerebral pulp utterly escape the scrutiny of the eye and the most delicate investigations of the observer.
(2) But let us assume that the fibre movements in question are such as they are assumed to be, and that they correspond exactly to the phenomena of the mind; this correspondence can only be admitted as a kind of pre-established harmony between the movements of the fibres and the ideas or operations that they are supposed to represent or exhibit (figurer). For no matter what we do, there will always be absolute heterogeneity or complete want of analogy between the two orders of facts. But since it is not necessary for there to be any resemblance between the sign and the thing signified, this heterogeneity will not prevent us from taking certain fibres or movements for symbolic or figurative, if not natural, signs of the corresponding ideas.
It will follow from this harmonious connection that if a superior intelligence were to read the brain from the outside in, and knew in advance the secret relations these organic movements have with ideas, or merely their parallelism, it would discover the whole series of the latter by the representation of the former, just as we penetrate into the secrets of an author’s thought by means of the written or printed characters that represent it. However, there are a number of essential distinctions that must be made.
First of all, the organic signs in question could teach the superior intelligence what is happening concomitantly in the interior of the feeling and thinking organized being only by placing it as it were in the shoes of this being, by making it feel and think like it, by a form of imitation or of sympathy; and such, to our thinking, is indeed the chief effect of natural as well as artificial signs. But when it is a question of what is happening in ourselves, of those modes, ideas or even operations whose internal apperception or immediate feeling we have or can have directly, independent of any imaginary conception of the interplay or movement of fibres, what need do we have to resort to these means? When we have the thing signified, what use is the sign? When that which is represented (le représenté) is right there, why go so far seeking after that which represents it (le représentant)? When we are able to communicate immediately with our thought, why call on the aid of a foreign intermediary who may be unfaithful?
But is it a question merely of the external communication of the phenomena of a wholly internal sense, whether one wishes to express or manifest them on the exterior or to explain them, as it were, with tangible natural or symbolic signs? I would like to observe that the expressive sign of an idea or of a fact, in order to fulfil its role, must suggest to the mind how this idea or fact was conceived, without altering or changing its nature. If instead of directing our attention towards that which is signified, it does nothing but turn away or distract our attention from it, either by making us focus on the sign itself or by directing the mind to another altogether different type of idea, it will no longer be a mere true representative sign: it will itself be the principal object, or a subject of diversion and of transformation, converting one system of ideas into another.
Such precisely is the role that fibre movements play when they are substituted for ideas, which they are supposed to represent, and when one seeks to reason about them as if they were the ideas themselves. When we are thinking about these movements or when we are laboriously following all the hypothetical details of so complicated a machine, it is indeed quite difficult not to forget that in all this, we are only dealing with tangible signs intended to represent reflective operations or internal phenomena, and the mind, which the signs ought to guide towards these phenomena, after dwelling so long on the former, ends up losing sight of the latter. After reasoning so long upon the movements of fibres, as if they were feelings or ideas, we end up convincing ourselves that one represents the nature of the other and does not differ from it, as the habit of spoken signs often convinces us that words express the essence of things.
In consequence, the object of psychology, when completely distorted in this way, will appear identical to that of physics or of a psychology of the brain and of its nervous fibres. And in virtue of this complete transformation of one system of ideas into another altogether heterogeneous one, we end up wondering whether all these operations of the soul are anything other than movements, series or repetitions of movements.11
What! Are there only movements or repetitions of movements in those intimate acts through which the self wills, acts, recognizes himself as the same, remembers, judges, reflects? And shall we ever be able to acquire the ideas pertaining to these acts, like the idea of the self, of its unity or identity in time, by seeking them out in external space, by imagining movements, vibrations of fibres, etc.?
It is indeed only by seeking within itself, as Leibniz understood quite well and supremely expressed,12 it is only in the intimate sentiment of its own acts, that the soul finds the idea of substance, force, cause and identity, which, when transposed onto the phenomena of external nature, establish between one another those forms of coordination or of connection through which they appear to us.
Indeed, there is another who also thought that we can know the nature of certain ideas in the soul, where we should exclusively study them and search after their source: that philosopher, as wise as he is profound,13 who expressly stated that we have just as clear knowledge of reflective ideas, such as willing, judging, remembering, etc., as of any sensory idea. But what indeed are reflective ideas if not ideas whose exclusive source is the soul, the self, and that can only be conceived there? It is true that there are two different kinds of clarity, and the one that pertains to the facts of internal sense is not the same as the one that hinges on the external senses, to which one attempts to reduce everything.
Ch. Bonnet, along with all the other authors who apply physical doctrines to psychology, does not tire of saying that the soul does not know itself, and that, as a result, it cannot know all that is distinctive and exclusive in it, unless it has the proper means or signs to represent it, or to throw it into a sort of relief outside of itself in organic objects or instruments, etc. Again, he confuses objective knowledge with internal or subjective knowledge, the image with the feeling or idea proper, external intuition with the immediate internal apperception, the symbol or schema with the reality of signified thought.
Perhaps the soul does not know its nature or its essence as object or as noumene; and what are we given to know in this manner? But far from not knowing itself as ego, as primitive thinking subject of consciousness, on the contrary it can have no clearer apperception, no more evident knowledge than this, and without it nothing can really be perceived or known in the outside world.
But it was not my task to establish any particular doctrine on the origin or the reality of our knowledge. I only had to point out the basis of a necessary distinction between two systems of knowledge or ideas, one representational and the other reflective, a distinction that is too often ignored, and whose neglect could alone have brought about the physical explanations that I have sought to analyse as to their means and their aim, and upon which I ask to make yet one last observation.
It has been said14 that all the ideas or operations of the mind are subordinate to the interaction and movements of the organic fibres in the senses and brain, as these movements themselves are subordinate to the action of objects. For this principle to be true, or even probable, it was necessary to reduce the whole of psychological phenomena to passive modifications of our sensitivity, to ignore completely all the truly active faculties of intelligence and human will … This is what the authors of the physical explanations whom we are discussing did, to the extent that they could and indeed they would have had more difficulty employing these explanations in the general and exclusive manner that they propose, if they had given full consideration to the initial action, which is born out of hyper-organic force, and of the intimate sentiment that by essence accompanies this action, or to its most immediate results, which can only be conceived or reflected upon in the very bosom of the subject from which it emanates.
The entire system of human understanding is reduced, under Hartley’s view, to associations of ideas or of images that come directly from the senses or can be reduced to them. These connections between ideas, however, are all represented by mechanical associations between vibrations and vibrationcules that are produced in the sensory or cerebral fibres corresponding to these ideas. The physical laws that preside over these series of vibrations are the same as those that regulate the phenomena of the mind. The will finds itself enveloped in them, and in all the circumstances of this fatum of the body, one seeks in vain what might be due to the foresight or activity of the mind.
Ch. Bonnet, like Condillac, seeks to deduce everything from a simple passive sensation brought about by the action of an external object. He makes no distinction between purely affective sensation and perception. Under his view, these two modes only really differ in degree, more or less as we have seen, from the two types of sensation that are physiologically distinguished under the names of organic and animal.
Whence it follows that, sensation being merely the most immediate result of the object’s initial action, that is, an impression received by the nerve endings and propagated all the way to the brain, the internal perception of a passive modification that the soul (or self) experiences and with which it is assumed to be identical, will itself be nothing other than a circumstantial result of the same movements and will be explained in the same way.
All the rest is but a consequence of this first step or of the hypothetically posited identity between sensation – or a certain passive modification due to a foreign action – and the perception of the self, which distinguishes itself from this modification and discovers it only through an action that it controls. To confuse two things that are so different, is it not to confuse the object with the light that illuminates it?
As a result of the first principle of identity, the reproduction of the same sensation in the absence of the object is again nothing more than the same fibre movements reproduced either spontaneously or by some intestinal organic cause. Memory and imagination differ only by the magnitude of the shock received by the fibres in the brain.
Remembrance, which constitutes the first of these faculties and distinguishes it essentially from the second, and which is nothing other than the identity recognized by the self, is a repetition of the same modification at two different moments. This purely intellectual or reflective faculty, which all physical explanations fail to explain, is itself nothing but a result of the movement of these same fibres, whose state and disposition, having changed as a result of the initial impression, will transmit a weaker impression to the soul when they are put in motion the second time. It will make it think or feel that the sensation is not new, that it was already present,15 as if there were some relationship between an impression – or an attenuated movement, or even a sensation that has become less lively – and the wholly reflective act through which the self recognizes the identity of the repeated modification by recognizing its own identity, as if it were sufficient to determine the conditions or laws of this sensory attenuation (dégradation sensitive) in order to explain those of intellectual remembrance.
In the same way, the passive habits of the organs are confused with the active habits of the motor and thinking subject, and as a result of this confusion they are given similar, equally mechanistic explanations, although in fact everything is contrary in these two systems of habits.
The same repetition that imperceptibly attenuates, alters and erases passive sensation and all the subordinate faculties that originate in it serves, on the contrary, to perfect, illuminate and develop the perception of the mind, as well as all the intellectual operations whose true principle or source is the soul’s motor activity – a supremely fitting proof of the essential difference or even the opposition between the laws that govern living and feeling (sensible) organized beings on the one hand, and moral and intelligent beings on the other.16
One might think that Ch. Bonnet very clearly recognized this activity of the soul, and that he attributes to it the greatest influence possible over all the operations of thought and even of sensitivity. But I do not know to what extent we ought to consider active (at least in the sense reflection attaches to this word) that force of the soul that is otherwise considered as always and essentially subordinate to the action of external objects; which only acts upon the fibres as a result of the movements that have already been transmitted to them, and which in sum does nothing but react and thereby increase the intensity of these movements, never acting to produce them by its own laws or decisions.
No one admires more than I the depth and intellectual force of Ch. Bonnet; no one respects more the feelings and intentions of so supremely moral and religious a philosopher; and the importance that I have given to examining his doctrine sufficiently proves the rank it holds in my thought, and the felt esteem that it inspires in me in many respects. However, I shall observe in conclusion that the number of great and beautiful truths spread throughout the psychological writings of this philosopher is altogether independent of the physical hypotheses regarding the movement of the brain’s fibres to which he felt obliged to attach his ideas. I feel justified in asserting that there is not a single one of these important truths that the author did not find within himself, by personal reflection, independent of all mechanical considerations, and that he would not have expounded upon just as well or better in the ordinary language of reflection, free from all those complicated and symbolic signs that he so patently abused.
If these hypotheses, which seem to explain everything, do not in fact explain or illuminate anything, and if they are of no direct use in discovering psychological truths or expressing them precisely and correctly, we may conclude that they are truly useless to the science of the phenomena of the human mind. I shall add that they are illusory and dangerous, when one seeks to base the foundations of science upon them. The example of Bonnet is supremely fitting proof. Without the obsession of physical explanations, he would have certainly given more weight to the activity of the soul; he would not have reduced the faculties to passive functions; he would not have gone astray in a labyrinth in which it is futile to seek to reconcile human liberty with the necessity of organic laws; in sum, he would have had a better conception of all the phenomena in question by studying them at their source, rather than by transforming or distorting them to fit into his system of physical explanations.
§2 Of a system of explanation based upon the location of the faculties of the mind in the particular organic centres, and of the craniological hypothesis in particular
Nature itself seems to have divided our sensations pertaining to the outside world into five classes or types circumscribed by equally many separate organic seats or instruments, where they seem in some sense to be located: the sensations of touch, sight, hearing, taste and smell. Thus, the type of decomposition or analysis representative of that faculty which is expressed in physiological language under the general heading external sensitivity is indicated and set out in advance.
This analysis is indeed based solely on circumstances that, appearing automatically to the senses or to the imagination, do not require a reflective return to the act of perception itself, or to the variable role that the individual subject may play in it, passive when it feels, active when it perceives and judges.
Considered in this last respect, the sensations that are grouped together into the same class or type because they are located in the same place would perhaps exhibit notable differences if they were subjected to another, more profound analysis, although this analysis, it is true, would no longer be illuminated by that direct light particular to things that can be represented spatially or that have an effect on definite points of external space.
Space and location (l’espace et le lieu) being after all, as a famous school argued, the forms of our sensory intuitions, we are naturally and almost inexorably inclined to dress up in these forms even our most intellectual ideas or notions, and it seems as though the mind cannot conceive what the imagination cannot locate. Language and popular opinion, no less than the systems and prejudices of philosophers, sufficiently justify the generality of this observation. Since sensations and images are more or less sharply distinguished from one another in proportion as the organs they affect are naturally separate or circumscribed, and since in this case it is not difficult to circumscribe the proper domain of the faculties to which they are attributed, why should we not seek to imitate nature itself in some fashion, or to follow the path that it indicates to us, by founding – upon the division established between the organic sites attributed to the various faculties, whether this division be natural or hypothetical, real or probable – the distinctions or classifications established between these faculties themselves, both those whose object can be represented externally in space, and those whose subject, hidden in the depths of the self, reveals itself only to intimate sense? And would that not be the most appropriate means to pass on to the latter the degree of apparent clarity and facility that purely reflective ideas seem to borrow from the sensory (sensible) images with which one manages to align them?
But if we immediately recognize the real division between our external senses by their use or the application of one of them, such as touch or sight, to the others, we have no such direct or certain means of recognizing or assessing the degree of separation between the various sites that must be attributed to more hidden faculties, or to phenomena of internal sense, whose division into types or classes can be established in advance by altogether different considerations or from altogether different points of view.
Let us see how one goes about compensating for this lack of natural immediate and tangible natural data, and ascertain what more or less plausible reasons might justify a division between the cerebral organic sites assigned to the faculties or phenomena of the mind, whose distinction is claimed to emerge from this very physiological division, and to be confirmed and verified by this means alone.
We have already seen how in the systems of Hartley and Ch. Bonnet the analysis of the ideas and of the elementary faculties of the understanding is reduced to an almost anatomical decomposition of the fibres and fibrils in the senses and brain, to which these authors claim to ascribe each elementary mode or phenomenon of the mind.
The number of sensory (sensitifs) or intellectual elements has no other bound, as it were, than that of the elements of the nerve fibres. Each idea, each complete sensation, which only affects the soul in a certain state of complexity, is represented by a bundle of fibres, each animated by a movement or a vibrationcule that is particular to it. Thus, not only are there as many distinct and separate organs as there are types of sensations, but further still, each specific sense, such as sight, touch, etc., allows within its composition for an equal number of small distinct organs, each separate and suited to an individual sensation or to an elementary impression. The smell of a rose, for instance, has a fibre expressly distinct from that suited to the carnation; furthermore, each of these fibres is itself composed of fibrils, each appropriate to a particular odorous molecule; and so on ad infinitum.
These fibres or fibrils, uniting together from all different parts, converge at the seat of the soul, which they form through their union, and which is thus nothing other, as Ch. Bonnet puts it in his picturesque language, than a miniature neurology (neurologie en miniature); just imagine the extraordinary composition of this little central organ in which the soul is supposedly present in its own special way! Within this central organ, organized in such an admirable way that nothing gets mixed up in it and everything manages to reach it and stay preserved as distinctly as attested by the phenomena of imagination, memory, remembrance, comparison, etc., we can thus posit as many particular divisions not only as there are specifically distinct external senses, or types of sensation, but even as there are fibres and fibrils suited to each elementary sensation or impression, respectively, and therefore as many special faculties of perception, memory, imagination, etc., as there are partial organic divisions in the general seat of the soul.
Thus, the perception of colour will be carried out in a different location in the central organ from the perception of sounds. Since each sensation must afterward be transformed into an idea or a memory image (image souvenir) or a judgement, etc. in the cerebral division where it was received or transmitted, in this same seat of the soul there will be not only particular districts for memory, imagination and comparison, considered as general faculties or faculties common to all the types of sensation for which they can be used, but also as many circumscribed divisions corresponding to the special faculties of memory, imagination and judgement, as there are sensations or impressions, either specific or elementary – for instance, the remembrance or the imagining of odours, as distinct from the corresponding faculties sharing the same name.
If I have stopped a moment here to develop this part of Ch. Bonnet and Hartley’s systems, of which I had already so extensively spoken before, it is merely to point out how this distinction between special faculties, with which a currently famous doctor has been almost exclusively credited, is already contained in very familiar doctrines, of which it is an immediate consequence, and how it contains all the difficulties and objections we had already raised against these doctrines.
It is true that the division of cerebral seats such as we have just set out, and the localization of the special faculties purportedly ascribed to them, here requires, as it were, the eyes of faith or imagination. This division does not reveal itself by any tangible sign taken from inside nor a fortiori from outside the organism (l’organisation), and what scalpel would be delicate enough to reach that miniature neurology and penetrate such an infinitesimally small order? Thus, the divisions in question were only presented in theory as a probable hypothesis or as a mere induction from experience or indeed as symbols suitable for representing to the mind or explaining the corresponding distinction between internal phenomena; their authors never pretended to make them into direct objects of experience or into a means of recognizing or visually representing the thinking being’s most intimate abstract faculties, the mind or heart’s most secret dispositions. This attempt was reserved for our times, and the honour belongs, I believe, quite entirely to Doctor Gall.
But before moving on to an abridged examination of this particular system, we shall make a few observations applicable to all the hypotheses regarding the localization of the soul and its faculties.
The oldest system of this kind, as well as the most widespread and most probable, appears to be that which only admits of one common centre or sensorium commune for all the intellectual modes or acts attributed to the same thinking subject, a single seat for a single and indivisible soul or self. But when it comes to assigning this true seat a definite place in the brain, all opinions diverge, and the physiologists turned metaphysicians agree no more among themselves than the metaphysicians transformed into physiologists. Descartes housed the soul in the pineal gland in view of the thinking subject’s unity, given, he argued, that all the parts of the brain are double, and that the gland is unique.
Lapeyronie and Lancisi drew on recent experiments to modify this seat and transport it to the corpus callosum; this opinion was itself overturned, and the soul was sent travelling to the different regions of the brain successively, until finally it seems to have settled down in our time in that sort of collar that joins the medulla oblongata to the cerebellum, where injuries are always fatal, and seem to whisk away feeling and life in one single blow. We may nonetheless rightly doubt whether new experiments or new facts from physiology or comparative anatomy will not again destroy this latest opinion. ‘Anatomy,’ wrote the illustrious Haller to Ch. Bonnet, at a time when this kind of investigation was much more common than today,17 ‘anatomy is mute as to the soul’s proper seat.’ It is indeed probable that it will forever remain so, at least in the sense in which one has so vainly attempted to make it speak.
It would perhaps be desirable that, by more clearly distinguishing the domain of reflection, or what pertains to our own subjectivity, from the domain of imagination and all that exists for us only by objectifying itself externally, it would be desirable, I say, for us to recognize: (1) that the metaphysical simplicity of the self that exists and perceives itself as one in the act of thought (from which we deduce, by an ontological principle, the absolute simplicity of a noumenal force, of a lasting substance, even outside the exercise of thought) has no relationship, no essential analogy with the type of physical simplicity we objectively attribute to an atom or an indivisible point taken to be the soul’s location or the seat from which it carries out all the operations whose distinct ideas are given to us by a wholly intimate sense, where in sum it perceives, believes, incites, judges, remembers, etc.; (2) that the more or less narrow bounds assigned to the sensorium commune, even supposing that they were as well established by physiological experiments as they are now uncertain, could not in any way enlighten us on the ineffable link that indissolubly unites – in the same act (fait) of consciousness and from the very origin of any possible perception – the two elements of the primitive duality: the subject and the object of thought; the living force and that to which it is applied; effort and corporal resistance; the self and the non-self; in sum, in a more common and less dogmatic language, the soul and the body; (3) that these same physiological experiments and all the considerations and facts of this order will thus necessarily be unavailing when it comes to establishing a relationship between the multifarious and diverse internal phenomena and one or several equally variable and multifarious seats, not only with respect to their succession in time, but in a very different respect – their simultaneous coordination in space or in the cerebral expanse (l’étendue cérèbrale).
A similar relation will indeed always be, by virtue of the laws that define our thinking nature, the stumbling block of all the theories and hypotheses whose objective it is to define or explain this relation, and which will only serve to prove the weakness of the human mind, to lay bare its necessary limits, and in sum to make even clearer the absolute heterogeneity separating the two orders of ideas and facts that only the most complete ignorance or thoughtlessness could attempt to equate.
Surely the unity of the centre at which all the sensory-motor nerves converge, or the unity of the organic seat where the soul supposedly carries out all its particular operations, is no better proved by physiological observations or experiments, or is not more susceptible to being so proved, than is the multiplicity of centres; but it must be admitted that this first supposition, admitted though not proved by Haller and Bonnet, has the advantage of establishing a certain harmony between the separate points of view of imagination and reflection, by representing to the imagination – through the figure or tangible symbol (symbole sensible) of a unique centre to which the acts of the intellect are ascribed – what reflection conceives as the authentic individual unity of the same self, whereas in the contrary system there seems to be a kind of discordance between the sign or symbol and the thing signified or represented, between separate organic seats that are so inappropriately and in such a roundabout way said to perceive, judge, remember, each in its own way, and the individual, precise, unequivocal meaning that reflection attaches to each of these intellectual signs.
Thus, wise minds, on their guard against precipitous inductions and rejecting hypotheses that no direct experimental fact or fact of intimate sense could confirm, have agreed throughout the ages to classify among the most haphazard conjectures, and the most disavowed, as it were, by common sense, any system that attempts to locate or disperse, as it were (as if they were physical objects), the phenomena of the mind, between which only simple metaphysical distinctions can be established or imagined.
When Willis, among others, attempted to assign separate divisions of the brain to the various intellectual faculties by housing the imagination in the corpus callosum, memory in the cortical substance, judgement in the corpus canalis, the wisest physiologists and metaphysicians joined in rejecting such a hypothesis as devoid of any plausibility and as being unsupported by observation. They objected that, far from being able to establish some precise relationship between the functions of the brain taken as a whole, or certain parts of its substance, and the perceptions, sentiments, intellectual or moral acts, of which it is considered to be the unique instrument (instrument propre), we are not even able to determine all the relationships of simple organization and the necessary or subordinate role that the brain plays in the functions of physical or animal life; that most direct observations or experiments are often in this last respect uncertain and misleading; that the anatomist’s scalpel, liable to go astray in that pulpy mass, has difficulty unravelling even a few distinct parts, and leaves veiled not only the existence of various others but above all the usage for which nature might have intended them; that all the real discoveries made upon the anatomy of the brain can scarcely have any other goal than to determine a small number of new circumstances pertaining to the form, connections and tissue of certain parts of the brain unknown to previous anatomists and that each time we think we are moving further ahead or especially each time we pretend to establish some determinate relationship between details of physical organization and facts of sentiment or internal experience, we merely wander in the vagueness of these hybrid hypotheses (hypothèses mixtes), which, attempting to embrace two sciences, accord with neither, and are rejected by both at once.
It is upon the confusion or the false identity established between the operations of the intellect18 and the material they are exercised upon, between the active faculties of thought and the passive functions of sensitivity, between the images that are dependent on the nature of received impressions or modifications and the ideas or acts of the mind that are in no way dependent on them, remaining the same whatever may be the nature of these variable and multiple impressions; it is, I say, upon such a confusion of ideas and principles that any hypothesis is founded that attempts to locate or disperse various cerebral seats, those faculties of the mind that, by the nature of their use and above all by the nature of the purely reflective ideas that correspond to them, can have no relationship to space or location. It will thus suffice to re-establish the essential distinctions that were erased by these false assimilations in order to make all hypotheses of this kind vanish like shadows.
These arguments, which were, I believe, victoriously brought to bear against Willis’s and other similar systems, could be applied with renewed force to a recent hypothesis of Doctor Gall’s pertaining to the same subject.
This author has exhibited two quite different types of genius, that of the physiologist, who instructs and astonishes us by the sagacity and depth of his observations on the nerves and the brain, and that of the superficial and systematic metaphysician or moralist, who surprises us in another fashion with his casual assertions and inductions, his illusory analogies, and his frivolous explanations.
He would perhaps have caused less ado in certain circles, but would also have called to his hypothesis more serious attention on the part of those whose chief study is man in his intellectual, moral and physical dimensions, had he more solidly connected this hypothesis to his fine physiological doctrine, or rather had he been able to derive, from the experimental or observational facts of the latter, data suitable for establishing the former, or for providing it with the degree of coherence or plausibility that it lacks.
But Doctor Gall’s doctrine on the distinction between certain so-called special intellectual faculties, which he claims to link to equally many separate divisions or seats distributed throughout the entire expanse of the cerebral mass … this doctrine, I say, which seems to me in contradiction with all the real data of a healthy psychology, is no more capable of being justified by direct physiological experimentation; and however great the author’s sagacity, however great the dexterity and finesse of his scalpel, he seems indeed to have sensed that such means abandoned him, when it came to assigning separate organs to various intellectual and moral faculties, and to establishing or explaining the divisions that might exist between these latter, by appealing to the separation of the organic seats attributed to them.
He thus does not seem at first to have bothered to go digging into the depths of the brain to distinguish each of the divisions in which a given corresponding faculty was to be housed, and one can see from the treatise he bequeathed to us that his anatomy of the nerves and brain has an altogether different goal, and takes a more useful, less uncertain and less vague direction.
The craniological hypothesis rests entirely on purely external signs, which do not require the scalpel’s aid to be recognized, which show themselves to the simple touch, and which thus have a usage that is much easier, more general, and more suited to the taste and dispositions of the multitude.
These signs and their practical use are not established by reference to any scholarly theory. In any case, their establishment does not suppose any knowledge about what underlies the relationship that connects signs to the objects signified, namely a certain distinct protuberance of the skull and the faculty, the disposition of the mind or heart that is supposed to correspond to it. This relationship is thus at first presented solely for what it is, namely a mere hypothesis, which may be impossible to verify a priori by any kind of direct physiological or psychological observation, but whose legitimacy one claims to establish (a posteriori) by the invariable correspondence existing between certain protuberances on the skull, which can be perceived through the senses of sight and touch, and certain special faculties characterizing individuals, whether men or animals, in whom the same protuberances are observed. Whence it follows that one can continuously adjudge the hidden faculties by the pretty bumps that can be seen; and by extending these empirical results to the theory of the human mind, one can also determine that there are special faculties that are distinct and separate from one another, in their use, as are the cerebral centres and organs in which and by which they are exercised, etc.
The craniological doctrine rests entirely upon the most absolute empiricism. The reasoning that follows from it, or the consequences that can be deduced from it, do not change its substance, and are external to it. It is simply a question of fact, or a mere relationship between facts.
All individuals, then, whether man or animal, whose skull presents a visible protuberance at a certain place, is of such and such a disposition of mind or of character: he has a good memory, or a lively imagination, or talent for a certain art, or courage, etc. For the contrary disposition, the skull will exhibit an indentation rather than a protuberance.
Here we have a new and perhaps quite remarkable connection between the physical structure of the cranial bone and the intellectual or moral faculties.19 But does this relationship exist in nature, or is it but a figment of imagination? Is it a positive and real fact founded on an adequate number of sure observations constantly verified across the immense variety of cases or circumstances in which it is applicable, or rather a mere hypothesis founded upon a few particular inductions precipitously or erroneously generalized? It is either one or the other. In the first alternative, craniology or the art of knowing man’s intellectual and moral faculties by the skull’s protuberances is a de facto certainty (une certitude de fait), though it is not founded upon any physiological or psychological theory, and remains beyond all explanation; and how many physical truths, the very ones whose practical function or application is most useful or most extensive, fall into the same category? In the second alternative, the hypothesis, presenting no justification for its current acceptance, must be, if not outright rejected, at least put on hold pending further information, and until it has in its favour that mass of probabilities on which physical or purely empirical certainty is founded, when reasoning cannot fill the gaps left by observation, and attach an isolated branch to the totality of the immutable laws of nature.
We would thus have nothing to say about this doctrine, considered in its relation to the subject of this treatise, if Dr Gall had thought fit to confine himself to the empirical point of view or the mere factual relationship that links the protuberances of the cranium to so many special faculties. But in presenting to the common eye bare facts or signs (which are alone within his competence), he felt he could not go without engaging in a more in-depth debate with scholars, the purpose of which is perhaps to align so far as possible his craniological hypothesis, his physiological doctrine, or his partition of the nervous system and brain, with his system of special faculties, which are supposedly divisible in proportion to the seats to which they are hypothetically ascribed.
Without wishing or pretending to undertake the detailed examination of these explanations that by itself would provide the subject of a long treatise, I shall merely refer to the preceding reflections and limit myself below to summarizing all that is most directly related to my subject, observing: (1) The general and external structure of the solid skull, being entirely molded after the internal form of the pulpy cerebral mass, which is housed in it as in its container, all the details concerning the contained substance’s shape and form correspond exactly to the cranium that contains it (la boîte osseuse contenante); therefore, there are as many swellings or tubercles spread out on the surface of the brain, as there are visible protuberances on the skull; the bone protuberances act as a casing for these swellings, which are housed in them more or less as the soft organized substance of madrapora and coral are housed in the solid and scaly offshoots that represent the zoophyte body to us in the form of a branchy plant; but continuing this comparison, which seems to conform quite well to Doctor Gall’s point of view, just as each polypus arm or entire polypary branch is by itself a tiny, complete organized machine that can live and function separately from the common stem or the whole animal, so each one of the tubercles housed in the bone protuberance is a particular small organ acting as the seat of the faculty whose natural predominance or habitual use gave it a sufficient degree of development to make it sensorial (sensible). This special faculty is determined in just this way, and it can be observed, studied in its sign as well as in its isolation from all the other faculties.
Here we begin to see how the (craniological) hypothesis tends to link the psychological division to the physiological divisions previously established by direct observation or by the anatomical dissection of the brain. This dissection, carried out in a new way and begun at the base of the encephalon, teaches us, according to Doctor Gall, that the nerves, instead of descending from the brain, which is considered as the common stem or matrix, towards the spinal cord and the lower organs, on the contrary head upward from these organs towards this same spinal cord, which forms the chief and sole line of communication between the different parts of the nervous system. This system is not, as had been thought, like a tree whose roots form a single stump and branch out in various offshoots and ramifications; it is rather a network whose separate parts each enjoy their own particular functions but at the same time participate, in proportion to their value, in the organization and functions of the whole. The great spinal cord acts all along its length as the meeting point for the threads of the network that lead to it, and thus enables them to communicate with one another. Mr Gall (and this is the novel part of his system that is most important for the main purpose he has in view) has observed a series of swellings along this cord, from which an equal number of pairs of nerves emerge, each forming an individual system. The brain or the cerebellum itself forms one of these swellings, which is merely bigger and more considerable than the others, having its own partial tubercles or protuberances, etc.
This new physiological system may be well founded; and although the direct dissections or observations upon which it rests do not yet seem to have been generally accepted by physiologists on all points, no one denies that they are quite ingenious and conducive to extending the boundaries of science; but even if their physiological results were proved with the greatest certainty, we would still need to close the immense gap that shall forever separate this order of facts from the phenomena of the mind and internal sense. The division of the general nervous system into small individual systems, each originating in a tubercle of the spinal cord, would prove nothing about the division of the special faculties of the intellect, and might even have no relation to it, and the craniological hypothesis would forever remain a hypothesis.
But one can see by this broad and imperfect presentation of the new system how it is the prelude to the psychological consequence that there is no longer a unique centre for the functions of organic or animal life, nor for those of intellect life and thought; or how, since each function has its own particular protuberance in the spinal cord that acts as a little brain, we must conclude by analogy that the special faculties are also dispersed or separated without regard for the unity of the self. Here, then, everything is less subordinate to a single power, less united in every sense of the word, than in other systems.20
(2) The parallel divisions of organic centres and of intellectual faculties, which one tends to prove reciprocally, by applying one to the other, refers directly or indirectly to some internal classification of the phenomena of intelligence; for since we have a vulgar language to express these phenomena, since we speak of memory, imagination, judgement and reasoning before establishing any systematic division between these faculties, or before even seeking to carry out any regular analysis, and since we are understood by others by more or less understanding ourselves, it must be that we already have in our minds some general and more or less reflective notion of the internal phenomena expressed by the habitual terms of language; which supposes pre-established divisions and well- or poorly made classifications of this order of facts.
When we later come to establish a doctrine whose purpose is to find or to recognize the organs or seats of certain faculties and thus to distinguish them by material signs, our starting point is necessarily the classifications of language, whose signs we borrow.
(1) Now, it can happen that we use these signs such as we find them already established, without seeking to analyse their foundation or reflective value; this is what the authors of the physiological hypotheses have often done, such as Willis and others, up to and perhaps including Doctor Gall, who, thinking they are capable of designating the seats of the various faculties in the brain, assumed without further inquiry that this real diversity corresponded to the conventional terms of our languages, as if nature had proportioned the number of cerebral divisions to that of the artificial and purely logical distinctions that we fancy to establish, in considering a single subject often from various abstract points of view, in examining one single capacity or faculty of the mind, one single disposition of the heart in those delicate and subtle nuances relative to given fortuitous circumstances, customs, mores and habits of our societies.21
(2) It could happen, on the contrary, that before founding a system of physiological division between cerebral centres assigned to various faculties, we borrow the foundations of an artificial classification of these faculties from some system of metaphysics, that we seek out the groundwork of a regular and truly analytic classification of the phenomena of the mind or of the operations of the intellect, either in our own reflection or in some scientific theory we are determined to adopt.
For instance, when Mr Pinel attributes to a madman the ability to exercise certain faculties nominally classified as attention, meditation and contemplation, the exercise of which is, he claims, separate from that of certain others, his base or his starting point is the conventional classification of these phenomena such as they are deduced in the particular theory of Condillac, where all the faculties of the intellect, considered from a solely passive point of view, are taken, as it were, from within sensation, or are nothing other than sensation itself, which purportedly transforms itself to produce them;22 and it is in this sense alone that Mr Pinel was able to claim that a madman contemplates, meditates, judges, compares, etc., whereas in fact he merely feels. But it seems obvious to me that taking another less arbitrary, more real basis for his classification, or one more consistent with the facts of human nature, Mr Pinel would have found that these hyper-sensory faculties such as contemplation and attention could in no way be truly separate, neither from one another, nor from the fundamental apperception (of the self) or the conscium sui, which is the basis for all intellectual and moral existence, nor therefore be attributed to a true madman.
Here we have a firm example of what happens when one tries to combine these two diverse doctrines or hypotheses. The physiologist, obliged to build on the more or less indeterminate signs of a language that is not his own, or looking to some metaphysical system for support, will feel he must follow its path, and adapt to it the investigations or facts that fall within his domain. As the number of classes and signs of arbitrary division and subdivision increases in the pre-established system, the systematic physiologist feels obliged to increase the number of cerebral centres in order to house each supposedly elementary faculty, each form, each category, etc.; and indeed, if Dr Gall had adopted the metaphysical doctrine of his illustrious compatriot Kant, would he not have had to multiply the skull’s protuberances in proportion to the number of theoretical divisions in which this system abounds? But what actual utility can there be in grafting, as it were, a physiological hypothesis onto a hypothesis of another order? In what way can these artificial means really advance the science of intellectual and moral man, by appealing to the science of physical man, or advance this latter by appealing to the former? Does one not see that by seeking to bring together two sciences in what is most arbitrary, most uncertain, most obscure in them, we are merely adding artifice upon artifice, uncertainty upon uncertainty, obscurity upon obscurity? And how, from the heart of darkness in which nature appears to have wrapped the functions of the nerves, can we hope to borrow a few rays of light to illuminate the phenomena of internal sense, which in any case already bear within them their own kind of light – non ex fumo dare lucem?23
Indeed, if, necessarily building upon the classifications of a pre-established language, the mind first seeks to link the signs that express its various faculties to so many truly distinct phenomena of its intimate sense, or if a given purely psychological division of these phenomena of the mind were fixed once and for all by reflection and justified by the use of a suitable criterion, wouldn’t psychological science’s goal be perfectly met? And what more could one look or ask for? What new light could come from the outside? It would perhaps be peculiar and maybe even useful to a certain extent, from a social or external point of view, to be able, as it were, to make perceptible to the eye, or to make palpable to the touch, those phenomena that belong to a wholly internal sense, just as we illuminate or confirm the testimony of an external sense by that of another. But we have sufficiently seen how deceptive and illusory the means used to perform this sort of transposition or symbolic interpretation are, how liable they are to alter, to distort everything they portray, similar to those curve-faced mirrors that stretch, separate, transpose the parts of the object presented to them, disfiguring it to the point that it is no longer the object we see, but something else altogether.
Let us conclude from all that precedes:
(1)that craniology24 and all similar systems, whose purpose is to establish and explain the psychological distinction separating the faculties of the intellect, by a parallel division of the cerebral centres physiologically assigned to these faculties, can only be founded on a sort of hidden relationship, or on an altogether illusory empiricism, which no direct experiment nor legitimate induction from any order of facts can justify;
(2)that the hypothesis of a multiplicity of seats attributed in a cerebral space to intellectual acts that by essence bear the seal of thinking unity (de l’unité pensante), offends the laws of psychology and the primitive facts of intimate sense;
(3)that such doctrines continually confuse the fatum of the organism with the foresight of the mind, equate the active faculties of intelligence with the faculties or functions of passive and animal sensitivity, which, not having the same necessary relationship to personal unity or individuality, can to a certain extent be studied or observed in its organic signs, as we shall have occasion to point out;
(4)that each time we attempt to assign organic centres to certain intellectual faculties, we must assume that these faculties are given previously in number and in kind, by virtue either of an analysis or a true, reflective division or of a purely logical and artificial division that physiologists adopt temporarily, claiming to verify it, to explain it, or in sum to give it a surer grounding in the facts of organic nature; but that such a classification, instead of molding itself, as it were, to the positive facts taken from this organic nature, merely passes its artificial imprint on to these facts, and forces them to conform to its hypothetical divisions – a general result that, although more directly applicable to the particular systems of explanation with which this article is concerned, ought also to be extended to those systems that we examined prior.
In going all the way back to the common principle or source of all these systems that attempt to give a physical or physiological explanation of the phenomena of the mind, in seeking to show that they are all founded on an illusory assimilation perpetually established between the phenomena of the individual self, which are misunderstood with respect to their nature, their character, and their particular meaning, and another order of facts completely foreign to the self, we have perhaps made several useful steps for the science of man.
It is perhaps only given to the genius to blaze new trails and to bring light to the darkest regions of science; but being incapable of so lofty a flight, we have merely sought to dissipate certain illusions or false shadows, liable to lead us astray from the outset, and to send up, as it were, a few of those signals that indicate perilous waters from afar, and preserve travellers from them.
Conclusion of the first part of the treatise and introduction to the second part
We felt the need to insist somewhat expansively and with all the necessary details on the motives that might win acceptance for the opinion stated at the beginning of the illustrious academy’s programme. Those who currently deny the utility of physical doctrines or experiments used to explain the phenomena of the mind and internal sense are fully justified.
Their denial is justified in perhaps a rather curious way by the history of that infinite multitude of haphazard and strange systems that, from Democritus through to Dr Gall, have attempted to found – upon the anatomy of the nerves and the dissection of the brain – knowledge of the soul’s seat and of the immediate instruments of its intimate operations, as well as the interplay and functions of these instruments.
But this denial can be confirmed, I believe, in a still more useful and instructive way, by deducing the uselessness and emptiness of the explanations in question from the very nature of things or from the nature of the absolute heterogeneity separating the two orders of facts that are compared and applied to one another, and that is perhaps the only way to protect the mind from overly futile attempts; that is, to close off the entrance to a dangerous maze, and to redirect the time and energy being wasted in search of impossible explanations towards the quest for new facts or the laws governing them.
In moving on to the second part of the programme, in which we must discuss the inverse opinion, held by those who think it necessary to reject psychological observations or reasons in investigations whose object is the body or who restrict the application to certain pathological alterations of the living organic body, I shall first note that if by this expression – psychological reasons – what is meant is some system of explanation of organic or vital activity by the direct influence of the soul or thinking subject, as if we wanted, for instance, to link the vital functions, such as the various secretions of the liver, spleen and lungs, the pulsations of the arteries, the beating of the heart, and all the regular or abnormal circumstances of the dynamic (jeu) of life, to a certain class of phenomena of the mind, which by essence fall within the domain of consciousness and which can only be given to individual internal sense, we see clearly that all that was observed previously with respect to the heterogeneity of these two orders of facts proved in advance the uselessness and emptiness of this second inverse mode of explanation, or in other words that it is equally impossible to find the cause (raison) of the phenomena of the living body in those of the mind as it is to explain the phenomena of the self by the properties of living or animal organization. The reciprocity between the principles and the consequences of these two propositions is so evident that it is enough simply to state them. In fact, it follows from all that we said previously, and we need not dwell upon it longer.
But if, putting aside all systems of explanation founded on illusory analogies or comparisons, we limit ourselves to asking to what extent the observations or investigations that have as their object certain functions characteristic of the organized body or the living animal, can be linked to certain psychological investigations that have as their object certain affections or passions of the soul or of the self-same subject who feels or suffers (pâtit), and thinks, wills or acts; that is, to what extent and in what precise type of phenomena any given branch of experimental – as opposed to rational – psychology, might come in contact with some given branch of animal physics, again experimental and not speculative or hypothetical, in the search for causes; to what extent a double experience can illuminate these two factual branches by their parallelism or even their correspondence; in sum, what one (of these branches) has done or can do for the other, then the question changes: it is no longer a matter of explaining or of seeking out hypothetical causes, but merely of observing types of simultaneous facts; and this connection, which is truly inexplicable in theory and completely transcends our theoretical outlook as well as our vain hypotheses: is it anything more than a fact of a particular hybrid kind, in which two different types of observation, which are situated, as it were, on their common limit, coincide? And this very connection, so observed, either in its regular state or in its abnormalities, will all the more deserve the philosopher’s attention in that it unites the most important and fundamental laws of the science of man, considered as a hybrid being, living, feeling and thinking. It is no longer a matter of the theoretical relations that two sciences so different in principle may bear to one another, but only of the homologous points, as it were, on which a certain practical part of one might be compared with a certain equally practical part of the other.
All our encyclopaedic divisions of the sciences, as well as all the classes into which we sort the things and beings we need to study or wish to expound upon, are more or less arbitrary products of man. It is quite rare for them to express, interpret or imitate perfectly the work of nature itself. The scope of our intelligence or the limits of our knowledge grow or shrink successively, whereas nature is fixed, always consonant with itself, throughout the immense variety of its simultaneous or successive productions, coordinated in time and space.
In the current state of our knowledge, we are justified in distinguishing three sciences whose respective objects are the properties or motion of brute bodies, the functions or phenomena of living organized bodies, and lastly the phenomena observed in beings endowed with intelligence and will, that is, physics, physiology and psychology.
But it is striking that, as we rise higher in the hierarchy, these three great divisions or classes of properties and phenomena seem, as it were, to encroach on one another and tend to make each other more complicated, first by uniting two by two, as in animal existence, then three by three, as in the human constitution.
The laws of physics steadfastly and uniformly govern brute bodies, which are exclusively subject to these laws; the laws of physiology are distinct but not separate from those of physics in every living organized body, which in addition has its own particular laws as a living being; lastly, all the intelligent beings we know have organized bodies that, as living beings, participate in the laws of physics and physiology while at the same time having their own truly hyper-organic as well as hyper-physical laws.
A certain wholly systematic philosophy only recognized two classes of beings: machines or pure automatons, and thinking beings. It did not therefore recognize an intermediary science between physics or mechanics and psychology, or between the science of bodies and the science of minds. Psychology was therefore the exclusive science of the phenomena of the mind and of internal sense; all that did not emerge immediately from this internal sense, or that was not a thought, had to be a mechanical effect that could and should be explained by the laws of motion or the properties of material shapes (l’étendue figurée), whereas the phenomena of the mind could only be explained by themselves or by their own laws (from which, in passing, the faculties and ideas innate to the soul necessarily derived, for where else would they have come from?). We have seen the troublesome consequences of this too absolute point of view exhibited in Descartes’ doctrine.
But as soon as we have recognized the laws specific to living bodies, which are distinct and separate from those of brute matter, another kind of assimilation opposed to that of Cartesianism tended to occur between the phenomena of life and organics (de la vie et de l’organisation) and those of sensation on the one hand, which did not seem to differ essentially from them, and those of thought on the other hand, which were said to originate exclusively in sensation, according to the famous axiom: nihil ist in intellectu … Physiology has had the fate of being dragged along now by physics, now by psychology: it encompasses a subject that belongs also to psychology. This second assimilation was chiefly favoured by Stahl’s doctrine. This philosopher doctor, adopting Descartes’ exclusive principle, according to which there can only be two kinds of beings – bodies and minds – was naturally forced to conclude that the vital and organic functions belong to the soul, solely because they could not be attributed to material bodies, which are governed by altogether different laws. Thus, physiology proper, whose foundations Stahl was the first to lay down as an independent science distinct from physics, was now, inversely, to be identified with psychology, or to become an essential part of the science of the mind, as it was before of the science of bodies.
Just as a small intermediary state between two others that are stronger than it is often at risk of losing its name and existence, if the more powerful states do not feel the need to respect its limits out of their own self-interest, so was the domain of physiology bound to be invaded successively, first by physics, under the rule of a wholly mechanistic doctrine, and next by psychology, extended more than fortified by the system of the animists.
But to follow through with our comparison, if the intermediary state succeeds in gathering enough strength to win its independence, it can then in turn usurp one of its two neighbours by forming a coalition with the other; is this not what happened to physiology, which, urged on in its progress by the successors of Stahl, and bolstered by the new discoveries that enriched the physical sciences, has seemingly sought to invade the entire domain of the soul, and push its conquests all the way to the phenomena of the mind and of internal sense?
It would be curious and interesting to follow in detail all the circumstances of this mutual action and reaction between the three sciences, which converge on one and the same object, namely man, considered in relation to the three principles or elementary forces that constitute his complete being.
May the reader reflect for a moment on the immensity of research, the degree of methodological perfection, and in sum the force of genius that was needed to recognize the two forces, one tangential and one attractive, that contribute to the trajectories and elliptical motion of the planets, and to assign to each their respective contribution; and the problem of determining the relationship between the forces that reciprocally compound or cancel one another in the same thinking, moving and feeling organic whole, to how superior an order of difficulty does it belong! On how different a combination of faculties – both rarer and more difficult to exercise – is it founded! What depth of reflection, and more, what finesse and tact, what immensity of acquired knowledge, what acquaintance with a double observation, in sum what philosophical talent! All too conscious of all that we lack to venture to solve so great a problem, let us confine ourselves here to analysing its main parameters.
First, there is no doubt but that the living body gives rise to various purely physical phenomena, such as the decomposition of atmospheric air in the lungs, the interplay of elective affinities among the different humours that form and unform within the organized machine, the refraction of light beams as they pass through the three humours of the eye before arriving at the retina, the way in which the sonorous fluid makes its way to the eardrum, and makes the spiral lamina vibrate, the way in which the sapid molecules are dissolved by the saliva, the way in which the bone parts arrange themselves into all manner of levers to execute and transmit movements, etc.
But these phenomena become more complex in living beings when combined with those specific to (vital) organization, such that in any resulting physiological product, it is very difficult to separate out the contribution of pure physics, and we expose ourselves to the gravest of errors by claiming to ascertain the order of succession between movements, to evaluate the absolute quantity of the movements and phenomena observed in the living being when assimilated to dead matter. Second, the distinction between various vital properties unequally distributed among the different organs, the order of subordination and dependence established by nature between the functions of the same organic whole, lastly the regular classification of phenomena of this kind, necessarily lead the physiological observer to establish certain relationships that may exist between these properties, these organic functions and activities, which fall strictly within the domain of his science, and facts of another order that he can neither see nor imagine, nor verify by any sense or external instrument, but that he is at times obliged to integrate into his results or in the aim of his experiments. If his goal, for instance, is to recognize whether a certain part of a living being is, as we say, sensitive or non-sensitive to the impression of a particular stimulus, the experiment will have to take into account phenomena that can scarcely be grasped other than by a wholly internal sense, or by a sort of sympathy that temporarily places the surgeon in the patient’s shoes – phenomena that can never be captured by direct observation. It is thus that the varying degrees of sensitivity present in animals are not perceived, but rather concluded or inferred, with greater or lesser certainty, from certain contractions or movements with which the observer associates them.
But how to distinguish precisely between the impression that proceeds from the external stimulus and that which is added to the total sensory product by the internal disposition of the animal, such as the general state of distress the organism is in, the current degree of nervous excitability of the irritated organ or of the whole system, various internal conditions that can absorb or divide and distract its sensitivity, such as the fear with which it is gripped during the operation, etc.? To avoid this complication, an analysis of which would be quite difficult to perform, it is well known that physiologists, severing the knot they cannot untie, find it simpler to cut or detach the nerve stems through which the irritated organ communicates with the brain. But then, the integrity of the system being broken, the sensitivity that was before animal becomes purely organic, or rather, there is no longer sensitivity in the strict sense, but rather a simple vital property, which under any given heading, irritability for instance, can thus be studied in its binary combination with some physical force as in the previous case.
Third, let us add a will to that sensory motor force characteristic of animals, which by its action alone so alters and complicates all the results of the physical experiments in which it appears, and in which it occasions so much variation and uncertainty. Here we have another yet higher degree of complication and another cause of disturbance and anomaly, no longer solely with respect to the physical and vital effects, but also with respect to the products of animal sensitivity and contractility. What legitimate conclusion, for example, could one draw from the immobility of Scévola’s arm on the burning coals, in evaluating the degree of pain that he is experiencing or in judging his insensitivity? This experience, which has already been cited and through which we can summarize all those that repeatedly take place (perhaps in a less emphatic and striking fashion) in the depths of our consciousness each time the law of the mind, in opposition to the law of the body,25 stops or changes the fatum,26 – does this experience not seem to cancel out the effect of any organic or animal force or property? On the contrary: these forces subsist in a subject exceedingly worthy of our admiration; they are merely subordinate to a superior power, which, unable to destroy or modify them in themselves, changes and stops all signs of their manifestation. Annihilate this force created by a sublime act of will, and the arm retracts by mere instinct, which is sensitive to the initial impression of pain. Cut the brachia, and the arm remains immobile, but here it is the immobility of death, and there, that of life, of moral life, far superior to that which produces the movement of animal retraction. Who would dare posit between these antagonistic facts an assimilation or identity contrary to the facts of external or internal sense? Who would dare say that the will is not an autonomous force (force propre), a force sui juris, but merely an effect (indeed well hidden and very complicated) of the affinity connecting all the parts that compose living machines, combined with the central force of the globe and the action of all external objects?
I am assuming here that the reader acknowledges the three divisions established by Bichat between the different modes of muscular contractility and the physiological foundations of these divisions. I am not speaking of non-sensory organic contractility, which does not concern our purpose; nor do I have find that there is any difficulty on the subject of sensory contractility (la contractilité sensible); to this contractility correspond the special sensations of a movement devoid of effort that the self does not attribute to itself as cause.
But it seems to me that Bichat confused the most distinct ideas and facts by identifying animal contractility with voluntary contractility in the last of his categories, and I feel I must call attention to this inaccuracy by distinguishing two modes that he confounds either inadvertently, or with a view to conserving a certain symmetry between his divisions, although he was led by his own principles to separate them.
‘The locomotive muscles,’ he writes (p. 123 of his excellent work, entitled Physiological Investigations on Life and Death, etc.):
can be activated in two ways: (1) By the will; (2) by the sympathies. This latter mode of action occurs when an internal organ is aroused (affection), the brain is also aroused (s’affecte) and brings about involuntary movements in the locomotive muscles. In this way, a passion bear its influence on the liver; the brain, sympathetically aroused, arouses the voluntary muscles; it is then in the liver that the underlying principle of their movements is found, which movements, in this case, belong to the class of those of organic life; so that the muscles, although always set in motion by the brain, can nonetheless, by their functions, belong in turn to both lives.
We can now conceive what the movements of the fetus are. They belong to the same class as several of those of the adult, which have not yet been sufficiently distinguished; they are the same as those produced by the passions on the voluntary muscles. They resemble that of a man sleeping who, although no dream agitates his mind, moves more or less vigorously. For instance, there is nothing more common than violent movements during sleep following laborious digestion; here, the stomach, working vigorously, agitates the mind, which in turn sets the locomotive muscles in motion.
In this respect, let us distinguish two types of locomotion during sleep: one, as it were voluntary, produced by dreams, is a derivative of animal life; the other, resulting from the internal organs, finds its principle in the organic life to which it belongs: this is precisely the life of the fetus.
I could find various other examples of involuntary and therefore organic movements, carried out in the adult by the voluntary muscles and apt to give an idea of those of the fetus, but these suffice. Let us simply note that the organic movements, as well as the sympathetic disturbance of the brain, which is its source, slowly dispose this organ to perceive sensations and the muscles to carry out the movements of animal life that begin after birth.
Once these distinctions, established with such accuracy, sagacity and depth, have been posited, why confuse this mode of contractility carried out by the sympathetic reaction of the brain with that which is performed by its own direct action? Why not organize into two different classes: (1) animal contractility, determined by that sympathetic reaction of the brain that is the most general cause of the movement of animals, who are subject to the influence of their needs and appetites; and (2) the contractility specific to man, who, directed by a self-moving principle, or a hyper-organic force, can emancipate himself from the chains of affections and passions? By distinguishing these two classes or types of contraction, Bichat could have escaped a difficulty that he creates for himself and that he confesses he cannot resolve.
Why, he asks, does sensory organic contractility never transform into animal or voluntary contractility, whereas nervous organic sensitivity becomes animal as it increases by degrees (pp. 103 and 104)? This difficulty alone should have made the author notice the fundamental flaw of his classification and the gap that exists in his symmetrical division of the modes of contractility. Indeed, to preserve the analogy between the classes of various modes of sensitivity and contractility, he had to link organic sensation to organic contraction, and therefore imagined that the latter becomes sensory in the same way the former becomes animal – that is, by increasing by degrees. But by linking voluntary contraction with animal sensation, all analogy fails; one ends up comparing heterogeneous things, for we are no longer dealing with nervous or muscular impressions, both of which are felt when they attain that degree at which they can be transmitted to the brain, rather than remaining concentrated in their particular organ; but on the one hand, it is an impression transmitted to the centre, and on the other, a willed action and a movement transferred, inversely, from the motor centre to the muscle for which this centre is the sole principle of its contraction. Sensitivity and will, analysed according to two opposing physiological principles, are thus heterogeneous and incomparable elements.
Why be surprised, moreover, that a simple muscular sensation does not turn into an act of will and that the sensory contractions of the heart and stomach cannot enter into the realm of this power, given that we have established that these mechanisms of organic life do not communicate directly with the unique centre of voluntary contractility? What absurdities can one be led into by this obsession to generalize and to reduce everything to the systematic unity of a principle! Surely someone who explained gravity by attributing an express will to heavy objects that tend towards the centre of the earth would be no less absurd than he who pretends to explain the will by a central force or interplay of affinities.
Where did one ever see a better application of Cicero’s perspicacious remark: nihil est tam absurdam quod non dictum sit ab aliquo philosophorum?27
Let us move past these uncertainties, and in the successive encroachment on each other’s limits perpetrated by the three sciences we have been comparing, we can nonetheless see that the realm belonging to physics proper has remained the best circumscribed of all, and that the most important conquests achieved by contemporaries in physiology as well as in the analysis of human faculties have contributed to restricting this science within the proper limits in which it should henceforth remain enclosed.
But the two new perspectives from which the two essential components of the science of man have been conceived, the comparisons that the great observers have claimed to make between them, the kind of analogy or identity of object to which they have claimed to reduce them – in sum, as we have already seen, the common classes and divisions in which they enveloped the phenomena of life and of animal sensitivity, and those of life and of internal sense – could only increase our uncertainty as to their respective limits, or even make us doubt whether these limits really exist in organized, living and thinking nature, or whether the totality of all these phenomena, different from one another solely in the degree to which they possess one single like property or faculty, rather in fact constitute one single science, that of the functions and laws of sensitivity, where the general expression sensitivity or faculty of feeling would receive that unlimited range of meaning that certain modern doctrines have attributed to it, where living is feeling or thinking, willing merely feeling.
Without reproducing here the objections already made against this unity of divisions and classes, against the particular system for the derivation of faculties in which the physiologist and the metaphysician concur, in appearance, in a certain commonality of language, explanation and phenomenic point of view, I shall merely summarize the above by observing that man quite certainly unites within him two kinds of faculties that we cannot refuse to distinguish when considering the facts of intimate sense, even though we would equate them, as to their principle, with the absolute, productive force; that in man, there are or seem to be two kinds of laws resulting from the double relation that he bears, on the one hand, as a living being, to objects, by the impressions they produce on his various organs, and on the other, to himself, or to his own modifications as thinking subject, capable of reflecting, acting and willing.
In virtue of these first laws, the total life of the organized being is a kind of derivative of all the passive impressions simultaneously received by the various organs, whence there arises that multitude of obscure affections that incessantly modify the animal and push it in a blind direction, without the least participation on the part of the person or self.
In virtue of the second laws alone, which are truly hyper-sensitive, man is endowed with a life of relation and consciousness. Not only does he live, and feel, but in addition he has the apperception28 of his individual existence; he has the idea or consciousness of his sensation. Not only does he have or bear relations to the beings surrounding him, but he also apperceives these relations; far more, he extends them, incessantly changes them or himself creates new ones, in the exercise of his activity, of that free power of effort or of will that constitutes his personality and characterizes his nature.
Indeed, everything this power accomplishes is duplicated as it were, as apperception, in the consciousness of the same self; everything that is done outside it, or outside its participation and collaboration in the purely sensory being, is there merely as affection or obscure immediate simple perception. In the latter case, the animal is devoid of self (sans moi); only in the former case do we find a person constituted as such for itself and therefore the exclusive origin of all intellectual faculties, or of all phenomena of the mind or of internal sense.
Now, suppose we restrict psychology to being merely the science pertaining to these latter intellectual phenomena, of the laws of their succession or of their derivation from the primitive fact of consciousness, of the conditions under which they are carried out, of the means and signs through which they appear in a wholly internal experience, etc.; in this case, I persist in maintaining that psychology is completely external to physical and physiological doctrines and experiments, and that there is no intelligible connection between them, no theoretically admissible explanation, and I prove this by all that was said in the first part of this treatise.
But suppose we give the science called psychology an extension that indeed seems attributable to it, understanding by this term not only the phenomena distinctive of the self and internal sense, or the products of the activity of willing and of thought, but in addition all the passive affections of animal sensitivity, which precede, prepare and perhaps bring about the constitution of the person in time (amènent dans le temps la constitution personelle), the obscure perceptions that only need a ray of light of consciousness to illuminate, develop and rise up to the height of the idea – these appetites, penchants and determinations which, it is true, are still blind and subordinate to the fatum of the body, but which, falling under the rule of an enlightened power, can become the auxiliaries, the instruments and the motives of its activity and unite itself with the most elevated sentiments, with the most noble passions of the human heart – finally, suppose we include in psychology all that touches as it were the self, without being the self nor belonging to it, all that which, though it does not yet fall within the domain of internal sense, of our reflective individuality, can become the object of a sort of immediate internal tact that in certain individuals is chiefly linked to the most simple affections and the most fugitive impressions, indeed to organic activity or to the most obscure products of the animate machine’s dynamic (jeu).
Suppose finally we understand the term psychology as that important branch of the science of man that endeavours not only to recognize, to establish the very important and numerous phenomena of this class of obscure perceptions, to distinguish them at their source, or by the signs announcing them in the living organism, but moreover that studies their relationship or their de facto connection (liaison de fait) with the products of another order, with the direction and form of the ideas of the mind, and the development or the mode of exercise of higher-order faculties.
Then, perhaps, psychology, insofar as we include in it this particular order of facts, will be intimately tied up with physiology, and although unable to borrow from it, nor to provide it with any of those supposed explanations that are never more than vicious circles, each science will glean useful data from the other, in order to obtain the most complete knowledge possible of a subject that to a certain extent is common to them both – that is, internal man considered solely as feeling, or as susceptible to affections or passions (this last word being taken in its full range).
This being established, in the second part I shall seek to analyse all the modes of passive sensation that psychology and physiology grasp each from the point of view specific to it; from there we shall determine their common relations, the kind of link that unites them, and the kinds of reciprocal aid they can lend one another.
Second part
Of an order of sensory phenomena considered from the double perspective of physiology and psychology, and of the common relations of these two sciences and of the reciprocal aid they can lend one another.
The light distinctive of and internal to consciousness does not suddenly illuminate man as soon as he is born into the world of phenomena, and the constitutive fact of personal individuality, truly first in the order of facts pertaining to apperceived or reflective existence, is not first absolutely in the order of time, or in the succession of phenomena of purely animal or sensory life.
Man begins to live and to feel, without knowing his life (vivit et est vitae nescius ipse suae).29
This multitude of affections and secret impressions, of appetites, of penchants and of determinations that appear in the awakening animal, constitute sensory life and form the particular domain of instinct, blind in its principle, and necessitated in its acts.
Born and carried out outside of the will (vouloir) and of thought, these first determinations of sensitivity, having not yet received that imprint or intellectual form through which they are adapted to internal sense, remain forever removed from it, and cannot be duplicated there in the form of apperceptions, nor reproduced in the form of memories or remembrance; thus, animal or purely sensory life is always in the present. We never fall back into it.
In the development and full exercise of all our faculties, if a purely affective sensitivity comes to operate at that superior degree of energy that blinds the mind and subjugates the will, we exist without consciousness, without self, or without the possibility of going back to these same sensations, which all the more defy remembrance in that the person has more completely identified himself with them or absorbed himself in them.30
But these animal sensations, devoid of consciousness or personality, or reduced and gleaned from that state of simplicity that I express by the term pure affection, seem to me distinguishable only in one of the following two ways, either (1) insofar as they are grasped by a certain internal tact, or secret and natural sympathy, foreign to all reflection, which makes us feel or sense it immediately, first within ourselves, then in organized beings like us; or (2) insofar as they are to a certain extent represented in certain signs that the observation of living nature provides, or in the study of the functions and conditions of the dynamic of life and of the most immediate organic impressions, of which the affections seem to be the most immediate result, even if they are not completely identical to them.
But in the implementation of these two means of distinguishing and noticing the pure phenomena in question, the psychologist and the physiologist obviously can and ought to help one another and illuminate one another on a subject of study or of observation that is common to them both.
Perhaps this internal tact we are speaking of is not less necessary to the physiologist doctor than to the moralist metaphysician – and after all, isn’t this the first and the chief tie that unites them, that inspires in them that particular attraction that each feels for the science of the other, that constant need they experience to communicate with one another and to agree?
Perhaps this affective state, considered in that kind of native simplicity conceived and expressed so well by a certain philosopher doctor, when he said that man, simple in vitality, is double in humanity (homo simplex in vitalitate duplex est in humanitate31) – this state inherent to the very act of living, and variable like the modes of this act, which necessarily precedes, in the order of time, the birth of the self and the development of any thinking faculty, while being the most important subject and an end in itself for physiological studies, provides the physiologist with an essential starting point, and with data he cannot go without, if at least he does not want to begin or end up with the gloom of certain innate ideas: if he is convinced that the mind can conceive nothing absolute, he seeks to grasp or better fix his subject by comparisons and contrasts, and to trace more exactly the contour separating light from darkness, and the self from that which it is not.
From this point of view, then, the physiological considerations concerning all the phenomena prior to the self and independent from individual apperception, would be, as it were, the essential prolegomena to any complete analysis of the phenomena of the mind or of internal sense; indeed, all that is subordinate, in the same living, feeling and thinking being, to the exclusive laws of vitality or animal sensitivity, and therefore all that is outside the laws of intelligence, enter into psychology’s particular domain. It would therefore fall to psychology to determine, by way of external observation, all the organic circumstances that may be ascribed to these modes of exercising a passive and, if I dare say so, impersonal sensitivity, to those obscure affections or perceptions that subsist and manifest themselves by certain signs while the self is asleep or thought is absent. Psychology would seek to ascribe them to their source, to their respective instruments or determinant causes, to designate their effects or their characteristics in the regular or altered order of the vital functions that fall directly within its immediate domain; lastly, in determining these phenomena in their physical aspects, it would prepare us better to evaluate the degree of influence they can have in the moral sphere.
It is in this way that, starting from the first determinations of sensitivity, or of animal instinct, physiology could perhaps succeed, by an alliance propitious for the progress of the science of moral man, in shedding new light upon the hybrid phenomena that constitute the passions of the intelligent being and, drawing still nearer to the physiological object, to fix to a certain extent the organic conditions that correspond to the spontaneous production, the persistence, or the forced return of certain persistent images or spectres, which appear to be the products of certain alterations or pathological states whose seat is the brain or the nervous system, or sometimes certain internal organs. Finally, exploring the domain of physical sensitivity in its full extension, and above all adhering to that class of obscure vital impressions whose difficult analysis still remains rather imperfect, physiology could manage to circumscribe its own limits: by helping us better to know man as a sensory being, simple in vitality, it would lead to, but necessarily stop at the sphere of the thinking and willing being, double in humanity.
To this general picture of the precious data with which physiology could provide the science of intellectual and moral man, if we now contrasted the services that the science of the phenomena of the mind and of internal sense could in turn render to that of the functions of sensory life (la vie sensitive), we should see that they are not less important nor less numerous; and internal observation teaches us first that the regular exercise of the operations of thought, promoted by a certain mode of the vital functions or by certain dispositions inherent to the nervous system and to passive sensitivity, in turn influences these dispositions extraordinarily, and can bring about changes sometimes advantageous, sometimes detrimental.
Who is not familiar with the organic effects due to imagination and to the passions, which contribute in so remarkable a fashion to the foresight of the mind and to the fatum of the body; which arise successively now in one, now in the other; now leave the mind to reach the organs, now leave the organs, where they originate, to act upon the mind and to disrupt and modify it so profoundly? Who is not familiar with the admirable effects the moralist doctor produces by the sole art with which he seizes the imagination, the sentiments, and the ideas of a patient? And who does not bless in his heart the name of that benefactor of humanity who by the sole application of these psychological views to the treatment of the insane, by administering a purely moral therapy, still manages each day to uplift these degraded beings deprived of the greatest prerogative of their nature, to save them both from manic furies and from bouts of melancholic apathy, or from so many other total or partial eclipses of the intelligence, which aggrieve the heart and shame human reason?32
Considering the connection and mutual relations between these two sciences from these two points of view, we shall divide the second part of this work into two parts. The first will include the analysis of the phenomena of the organism, or of passive sensation, external or internal, which are linked to certain ideas or feelings of the soul, correspond to them, or contribute to bringing them about. The second will treat of the influence that certain ideas of the mind or sentiments of the soul may have upon affective phenomena and the workings of the organs.
Section one
Abridged analysis of the phenomena of animal sensitivity; of the immediate affections or obscure perception, which arise in the body, and directly or indirectly influence the phenomena of the mind.
I divide these phenomena into two classes, one of which is composed of all the immediate impressions received by the nerve endings of the organs of the external senses, and the other of impressions immediately received or produced by the very dynamic of life (le jeu même de la vie), at the centre of the internal organs; this division of facts is essentially related, as one can see, to physiological considerations or observations.
Here and in all that follows we shall assume a well-founded distinction that is recognized today by the most profound psychologists,33 although disregarded and concealed by those who have claimed to deduce all the phenomena and powers of the human mind from passive sensation: namely the distinction that exists between the purely affective part and the representative part of any single perception or external sensation. I cannot stop here to prove what has been shown elsewhere, in an analysis (ex professo) of the human faculties, namely that any clear or complete perception, which indivisibly contains the two halves of the primitive duality, the subject (self) and object (non-self), is essentially founded on the combination of the motor activity of the soul and of the hyper-organic force; that the organs on which and through which this force is exercised are mere organs or instruments of representation, whence it follows quite clearly, contrary to Locke and his disciples, that the first ideas of sensation are neither simple nor passive, and do not derive ready-made from the external world through the channel of the senses.
As for the organs that are situated outside the motor force’s domain, they can be nothing other than the seats of passive affections, which are immediate products either of the contact of bodies, or of those intestinal and spontaneous movements of which the dynamic of life is composed: affections merely felt, in a more or less obscure way, by the animal, without any apperception of the self, nor any representation of foreign existence.
This being established, we see clearly: (1) how these impressions or obscure affections are, by their nature and their particular character, as well as by the organic seat in which they arise, situated outside of the mind’s sphere of activity and of knowledge’s circle, and how by their mode of production or receptivity they enter into the domain of the science that studies these very functions of organic or animal sensitivity, of which they are the elements or raw material; (2) how the psychologist can be led by a more complete and developed analysis of the total phenomenon of sensation, or of perception, which for him is no longer simple (le simple), to a truly simple element (un simple véritable) of instinctive affection, and to find natural elements or signs,34 in a science that ends where consciousness begins.
Let us endeavour to study these little known signs, perhaps too often neglected by metaphysicians.
Article one
External affective impressions.
§1 The affections of external touch
By including under this heading all the affections whose seat is spread out along the entire surface of the human body, we shall find that these immediate impressions are far more varied and numerous than the imagination can conceive and, above all, that the resources of our languages, which are only rich in signs designating objects, and quite poor in signs designating the modifications relating to ourselves, do not enable us to express them.
To these impressions we must ascribe a multitude of sympathetic influences, exerted by various ambient fluids on the absorbing pores of the skin and by these latter on the various internal organs, whose functions, now invigorated, now impaired, bring about an immediate sensation of well-being or discomfort in the sensitive being, and a host of variable affections still more obscure in themselves than in the external causes or agents to which they are linked.
Whence, in part, the successive variations we experience in the sentiment of existence due to changes in habitat, climate, season and temperature;35 whence, too, the sudden effect that the actions of certain contagious miasma have on our sensitivity, and that are hidden principles of a multitude of illnesses, now transmitted by immediate contact, now transported from place to place on those invisible and airy fluids that at times create a nefarious solidarity among the inhabitants of the most distant regions of the globe.
To obscure impressions of this kind, we must ascribe, in large degree, the source of that secret sympathy or antipathy operating between individuals that attract or repel one another at first sight, perhaps according as their vital atmospheres are in harmony or opposition in their reciprocal contact. Is it indeed not probable that several extraordinary phenomena of this kind would tend to make us believe that in each living organism there exists a more or less marked power to act from afar, or to create an influence outside itself in a certain sphere of activity similar to the atmospheres surrounding the planets?36
Without further insisting on these phenomena that are not studied enough and that can still offer the observer so many curious and interesting details, I shall merely point out here that it falls to physiology, assisted by an improved physics and chemistry, to enrich and to extend directly a branch of facts that intersects with the science of the phenomena of the mind, and can to a certain extent illuminate or complete its analysis.
§2 Of the affections of smell and taste
Each external sense being immediately subordinate, with respect to the order of immediate affections or impressions we are discussing, to the immediate contact of the object or fluid to which they naturally correspond, (philosophers) were able, from this point of view in truth quite partial, to assimilate, somewhat legitimately, all external senses with that of touch.
Indeed, this sort of passive touch, which must be clearly distinguished from active tact, is modified in a special way in each of the particular organs, and first becomes the particular seat of the affective part, which, although a mere element or sign of intellectual perception, can nonetheless constitute animal sensation as a whole.
It is thus that the sensations of smell and taste, which are wholly adapted to instinct, still preserve, even in man, the predominant affective character that they have at their source.
The olfactory or sapid molecules indeed act on their respective organs by a true immediate contact, and they seem to come and seek them out or to operate on them by virtue of a sort of instinctive sympathy or affinity of choice (affinité de choix).
Quite different from the senses of perception, activated on the one hand by the will, and on the other hand aroused by the fluids interposed between them and the objects perceived, smell and taste immediately receive the impression of the material corpuscles to which they correspond and that reach them in that state of extreme division, which is alone favourable to the combinations of a sort of wholly transcendent animal chemistry. It is also for this reason that the sensations of smell and taste in particular have been considered rightly as particular alterations of the general touch of the skin, to which the mucous membranes are analogous.37 These three organs are indeed linked by the common relation between the sympathetic affections for which they are the respective seats.
We have already noted the intimate sympathy that links the sense of smell to the sixth sense, the extraordinary effect that the various impressions of this organ have upon the entire system and thereby upon the general sentiment of existence, now pleasant, now disagreeable. It is through this phenomenon that that remarkable sympathy operates which makes a mother attached to her young, and the young to their mother, and that makes it so that during mating season the two sexes seek one another out, recognize one another from afar, and precipitate towards one another; here we cannot doubt but that there is special feature that distinguishes animal emanations, either in the species or in the individual, a feature that animals, whose sense of smell is the most refined, never mistake. It even appears that that animal atmosphere that we were discussing above is variously modified according to the particular passions that the being from which it emanates experiences, and that it is instinct alone that teaches animals to differentiate these passions by their sense of smell, and to adapt their actions to it.
As for the sense of taste, we are not unfamiliar with the direct sympathies that link it to the functions of the internal organs or of the stomach in particular, all of whose vicissitudes and whims it follows. The internal impressions of this organ (viscère), which craves or rejects food according as it experiences a general affection of well-being or of discomfort, are always more or less mixed in with the sensations pertaining to the sense of taste, alter them, distort them, and contribute to giving them that character of indistinct impressions, inherent in the multiplicity of elements of which it is composed.
§3 Of the affections of sight
We have just considered the affective impressions from the point of view of external animal sensations relating to instinct, whose base, or at least whose predominant part, they constitute. If we now consider them from the point of view of sensations relating to perception or knowledge, of which they are an obscure and subordinate element, we find first, for the sense of sight, that corresponding to the immediate action of the luminous fluid on the retina is a particular affection that, remaining mixed up in the total phenomenon of objective representation, not distinguishing itself when this phenomenon takes place, not raising itself to the height of idea when it is alone and outside of objective representation, never itself produces an image.
Aside from the cases in which light beams act en masse upon the external organ and in which there is nothing more than a simple affection without any visual representation, there is little doubt but that there is also an impression relating particularly to each tone, to each shade of light, and it is for this very reason that this tint or that mixture of colours becomes more agreeable to us than any other, as a stimulant for the physical sensitivity of the eye, to that exact degree that constitutes the immediate pleasure associated with the use of this sense. I say immediate pleasure, because the direct visual affection I am speaking of here, pleasant or disagreeable in itself, has almost nothing in common with that pleasure of comparison and reflection which is afforded the trained eye by the extension and variety of perspectives, the vividness of sights, the harmonious proportions of figures, the concordant tones of colours. This sentiment of the beautiful, of the grand, for which sight is the primary organ, derives from another more elevated source and is only born of an intellectual effort that this is not the place to discuss. We shall merely observe as the principal mark of distinction that these superior sentiments derive from knowledge and are necessary effects of it, whereas the immediate affections long precede it and are independent from it, which suffices to justify a distinction that is established in Descartes’ physiology.
The phenomena of direct vision, considered from the particular point of view that we are considering here, seem to exhibit a sort of vibratory property particularly characteristic of the immediate organ of sight; in virtue of this vibratility (vibratilité), impressions remain in the external sense with more or less force and duration, even after the external cause has stopped acting; it is this material shock that Buffon speaks of, etc.; spontaneously reproduced, these impressions can also combine together, follow one another in all different ways, doing so without any collaboration from perceptive activity and against the very efforts of the self, which vainly attempts to repudiate these adamant spectres.
Whence a faculty that I have characterized elsewhere under the heading passive immediate intuition, a faculty that is spontaneous in its exercise, independent of thought and of all reflexive operations, which, like all the determinations of instinct of which it is a part, subsists solely by virtue of the laws of the organism and of the type of cerebral elasticity that reproduces it. It is to such an innate intuition, as it were (for it precedes all experience), that we must ascribe those admirable phenomena pertaining to the instinct of certain animals that, after birth, reach immediatlely for the visible object adapted by nature to their nutritive needs. It is thus that there sometimes appear in the dark of night those spectres of the imagination that succeed one another before our eyes, successively take on a thousand bizarre forms, while the will is unable to turn away from them the organ of internal intuition from which they seem to arise. Those images that are now mobile, now faint, manic delirium, etc., are thus produced.
It is by giving full consideration to these direct sympathetic affections, of which the eye is a special sense, that one can evaluate the particular and too little observed nature that differentiates the immediate impressions made upon this organ by the light beams reflected by animate bodies, from those that are occasioned by other purely material objects: these initial impressions of light, modified by the animate organs that reflect them, especially those that emanate, as by scintillation, from those enlivened eyes in which sentiment and life shine, certainly produce rather particular immediate affections. How many unperceived impressions of this kind are communicated and exchanged immediately between various individuals who are unwittingly attracted or repulsed by a regard that penetrates them? It is by means of this living flame cast by the eye into the variable affections of the sensory soul that a passionate being energizes those who come near it and forces them, as it were, to harmonize with it (se monter à son unisson). I said the sensory soul: observe, indeed, that this is that purely affective part of man, whose special mirror is the eye; it is this affective part that paints itself whole in this mirror, and that can be read in it by a pure effect of sympathy; not so, or by similar means, do the phenomena of the mind or of the will penetrate and transmit themselves to the outside world.
§4 Of the affections of hearing
The sense of hearing, assisted by its supremely active tutor, speech and the voice, holds one of the highest ranks among those of intelligence. But we must still abstract from it, as it were, a very notable purely affective part that, confused in its ordinary state with the clear perception of successive and coordinated sounds, can nonetheless distinguish itself from these latter and emerge separate from them, in certain very particular modes of passive listening.
We cannot help, for example, but recognize the immediate effects of a material and truly imperceptible part of the sonorous or better soniferous (sonifère) impression that, starting from the primitively agitated external sense or even without the collaboration of this sense, stirs up all of internal sensitivity at its chief sources: thus, completely deaf have individuals been observed to experience particular affections in various regions of the body, especially in the epigastria, when one produces sounds of a certain timbre, and especially when they place their hand on the instrument from which these sounds emanate.38 There is no doubt but that the very nerves of touch are the true conduits of the affective impressions, which are immediate products of the shock or of a sort of sonorous undulation. In a state of perfect hearing, there is also a certain quality of sound, a certain timbre of voice or instrument, which arouses by itself, and independent of any effect related to the sense of auditory perception, supremely affective impressions, conducive now to awakening, now to calming various passions, at times to curing, at others to producing certain nervous illnesses. I myself have been witness to the extraordinary effects produced by the soft and melancholy sounds of a harmonica. I have seen people, too sensitive to withstand these sounds, shudder all over their body upon the first impression of them, be moved, shed tears and end up fainting.
Once again, similar affections, which are due to the immediate impression of sound, must be clearly distinguished and may even be separated from perception (de la partie perceptive) or from that rapid judgement that helps the ear perceive a harmonious pitch or melodious suite; even when these affections predominate, perception dims over (s’obscurcit); the more the sensory being is affected, the less the intelligent being evaluates and judges.
Note that the strictly affective part of auditory phenomena pertains to what one calls timbre in a sound and accent in a voice, and it is also for this reason that hearing is one of the chief organs of that sympathy which brings together and intimately bonds all beings endowed with the faculty to feel and to manifest what they feel by the various modifications of their voice, for each passion or emotion of sensory being (l’être sensitif).
Nature seems to have linked to each passion a particular accent that expresses it and made all those capable of understanding its sign sympathize with it. It is nature itself that inspires this profound cry of the soul, which all souls hear and to which they all reply in unison. Articulate speech, true intellectual expression is still far from the crib of infancy, and already a native instinct modifies the first wails to express appetites, needs, affections and incipient passions; already the mother, schooled by the same teacher, understands this kind of language; she replies in turn by other accented signs whose meaning sympathy explains and whose value it fixes.
This sympathetic power that accents and voices possess is also found in all the languages of primitive peoples, who have more sensations than ideas to communicate to one another. Such is also the extraordinary influence of those impassioned orators, who must learn to seize the inflections fit for moving the soul and to imitate or reproduce the sympathetic signs linked by nature to each of the passions he wishes to arouse. Such is that magic power not only of articulate speech as a symbol of intelligence, but of the accented voice as a talisman of sensitivity.
I cannot, without stepping outside the boundaries of my subject, which I have perhaps already exceeded, push any further the interesting overview of phenomena of this kind. It suffices for my purpose that those phenomena which I just laid out manifest that type of connection that quite certainly exists in this respect between the general facts of organized and feeling (sentante) nature, and those of a superior – intelligent and moral – nature. The various observations performed on the ill, the partial lesions of sensitivity, in certain external organs, its alterations in states of mania, delirium and vapor, especially in those very odd cases of paralysis in which external sensitivity is extinguished while perceptibility and motility subsist, all these facts and a multitude of others that strike the eye of the physiologist and of the experienced doctor, are as it were so many data that it is not a matter of explaining, but clarifying, verifying and tying together in a complete theory of the science of man. The contribution of physiology to this science emerges from all that we have just said: whence there will also follow a more precise application of that maxim of the father of medicine, which must be restricted within the limits that we attempted to establish previously: quod de natura hominis manifestum quidpiam [cognoscere] non aliunde possibili fuit quam ex arte medica (Hippocrates).39
Second article
Of internal affective impressions.
We place under this heading all those impressions received by the nerve endings of internal organs or produced in the very centre of these organs by certain intestinal causes that arouse them and immediately act upon them. These organs are made up of mucous membranes of the same nature as those that cover the internal of the nostrils and the surface of the tongue, which are the respective seats of the sensations of odour and flavor and whose external agents act on them immediately.
But it is remarkable that the impressions made upon such organs, thus disposed by bodies that immediately touch them, can only affect the sensory (sensitif) being, while there is nothing perceived by the self.40
On the contrary, any perceived and represented object does not really act through itself on the sensory organ that represents it, but rather through an interposed medium or fluid, and the immediate impression of this fluid, which merely gives the soul the initial warning as it were of the presence of an external cause, or acts as a sign, as Reid says, is not perceived in itself, but always remains at the level of the most obscure affections.
But in comparing the organic conditions and circumstances that are respectively linked to each of the types of sensory and perceptive phenomena, we find that in the first case, the same membrane that is the immediate seat of the received impression is also that of the sensory function, which would no longer take place at all if the membrane were taken away, and would be different if the tissue or the structure of the same part were to change; in the second case, on the contrary, it is no longer the directly aroused or impressed membrane that is the seat of the perceptive function; this latter extends the impression further and no longer even has any relation to it. What relation, indeed, can one conceive between the faint impression of the luminous fluid on the retina, and the perception or idea of the external object, etc.? Thus the conjunctiva, though receiving an impression of light in a healthy eye, does not perceptibly contribute to visual perception, and if it becomes too involved in it, as happens in ophthalmia, or in a massive bombardment of light beams, there no longer is perception. The same effect occurs in the membrane that covers the auditory nerves and whose particular impressions have no essential and immediate relation to the clear perception of sounds.
Here we have a very marked difference in organic condition between the impressions that simply affect without representing, and those that represent, or serve to represent without affecting: a difference that, in concordance with the difference established by the testimony of intimate sense, helps us to establish the connections that exist between the two sciences and the ways in which they can help one another. We can infer from the important observation that we have just presented:
(1)that even supposing that physiology managed to explain affection by some interplay of organs, all these explicative theories would not even touch upon the phenomena of the mind’s perception and the relation of externality, or causality on which it is founded;
(2)that there exists a real relationship between the organs of our passive external sensations, which are more suited to animal life and to instinctive needs than to knowledge; whence the character of exclusive or predominant sensitivity that is common to them and that to a certain extent explains the sympathies of physical sensitivity we have spoken about;
(3)that in any given stimulation of internal organs, insofar as the part that receives the impression is at the same time the seat of sensory function, there can only be simple, passive and immediate affections in these organs, without any perception of the object or cause of immediate stimulation, which, not acting outside of the organ, cannot be perceived outside the self, and which has no sense of its own to represent it to the soul.
Thus, these multiple affections whose common derivative is physical life are not reflected in an internal sense. The kind of immediate touch that grasps them, or becomes them, is not consciousness; for it does not know itself, does not illuminate itself, and while these modifications incessantly vary, there is someone who remains and who knows it. The former is to the immediate affections of the sensitive soul what the latter is to the ideas or operations of the mind, to the products of its activity, and the difference that separates them and that precludes the thoughtful observer from confusing them, is that the latter has the ability to retire within itself (se replier sur lui-même) and to maintain itself present to a concentrated internal view; the other does not have any grip from which to grasp itself in any of its variable forms and disappears in the very instant that the self wishes to observe it more closely (l’approfondir), like Eurydice, whom a glance repels into the shadows.
If, then, we cannot follow them nor reach them directly by any appropriate sense, let us seek at least to link them to some signs that might help us to recognize them, by adopting that perspective from which the observer of the physical aspect of man meets up, collaborates and communicates with the immediate touch of the sensitive soul. Let us attempt to turn the discoveries of one to the advantage of the other.
To recognize these immediate internal affections, we would need, as it were, to catch their signs in the stages and circumstances of life in which they are dominant and isolated; in this state of native simplicity (simplex in vitalitate) in which the external senses are still silent and as it were untainted by impressions (vièrge d’impressions), where the power of effort and will that is constitutive of the self, the source of all the functions of an active and super-animal life, is merely virtual, still waiting to take action, or completely suspended; in those states in which the indelible imprint of an individual’s organic temperament, to which his moral character is intimately linked, emerges in all its truth, without being modified, altered or disguised by so-called mental habits or the rule of an enlightened will; lastly in those cases in which the soul, deflected as it were by a sort of abnormal cause from the laws relating to its essence, no longer directs the immediate instrument of its operations, and lets it wander at the mercy of all the intestinal impulses. Such is the state that the fetus is in, or the newborn, or the individual during sleep, delirium or mania, which provide such extensive and instructive subjects of observation for the scrutinizer of the physical and moral in man.
Let us successively examine these various states, and let us seek out in them the signs as well as the effects of the internal affections pertaining to them.
§1 Immediate instinctual affections linked to the internal life of the fetus and of the nascent being
The determinations of animal instinct, revealed by unequivocal signs from the first moments of the individual’s birth, are not formed in that very instant. We need to go further back to determine its origin and to recognize the first general features of this sensory (sentante) nature, subordinate throughout its development to the law of continuity, from which it never strays neither in the living nor in the dead.
Scarcely does the nascent being make its debut in external life, when it announces tastes and dislikes relating to the objects of this life. It executes various coordinated movements, suited to these same objects and tending towards the goal of preservation and nutrition. Now, if it is true that nature never makes any sudden leaps, shouldn’t these appetites, these movements, refer back to a previous mode of existence in which they were prepared and preordained for the current end; but in what could this mode of life of the fetus have consisted before any external sense was turned on or activated by the objects pertaining to it, if not in the purely internal impressions of the organs that are generally recognized as being the only ones at work during gestation or the time at which the organic seed develops, is nourished and grows in the mother’s womb.
The internal life of the fetus is not isolated and independent; like a piece of fruit having not yet reached full ripeness, it receives all the principles of its development from the animate tree that bears it; all the ingredients of life come to it only after passing through the internal organs of the sensitive being to whom its whole existence is linked.
Thus will the child be able to participate in all the organic phenomena that take place in the mother’s womb and, as a result, in the immediate affections that are linked to them; but he will obviously participate only in these modes of specific impression; identity of organic functions, communality of internal immediate affections: such is the knot of sympathy that binds these two beings together, one of which, complete (parfait), is in possession of two lives, and the other, incomplete (imparfait), still enjoys but one.41
Organic sympathy finds its originating principle (principe prochain) in the tendency towards instinct, which seems to be a primordial law of organized nature: all the organs of the fetus that do not require the action of external objects in order to be activated will thus start by bringing themselves in tune with the mother’s corresponding organs, and will repeat or imitate their functions. The internal life of the fetus will thus be complete before its relational life begins.
All the immediate impressions that hinge upon this initial life will be received and transmitted, either directly by its own organs, or sympathetically by the analogous ones of the mother, to the partial nerve centres, and will bring about the movements of instinct and that whole series of affective phenomena that can thereby imprint a sort of inalterable character on the physical temperament and as a result on the moral character. This is how far back one must go to find the source of various passions that escape the pure analysis of intellectual and moral phenomena, and of all the habits that may pertain to them.
It is through similar initial determinations of sensitivity, which are forged in the mother’s own womb, and which quickly take on all the characteristics of energy, obstinacy and inflexibility typical of our oldest habits, that one can account, to a certain extent, not only for the appetites, penchants and inclinations of the nascent animal, but moreover for certain precocious passions, certain marked sympathies and antipathies towards certain things or persons, though one shall never be able to explain the obscure causes of this invincible attraction or repulsion.
Thus did Mary Stuart’s unfortunate son, James VI, king of England and Scotland, having felt in his mother’s womb the repercussions of the fear that had shaken the latter at the sight of the deadly sword about to stab her lover, David Rizzio, experience a shock or involuntary trembling his whole life on seeing an unsheathed sword, despite all the efforts he made to surmount this disposition of the organs, so much force does nature have, as the philosopher historian42 who relates this fact observes, so unknown are the ways in which it operates. Thus, the most mild affections, the strongest and most constant penchants of human nature, especially those that hinge upon the preservation of the individual, the perpetuation of the race and the maintenance of the social state, such as the general sympathy that makes man tend towards man, the more specific sympathy that produces the attraction of the sexes, the need to propagate, as well as to commiserate, to love, to admire, etc., may pass invariably from mother to child, extend throughout all ages, all places, and thus mark the character of individuals, as well as the character common to the species, with a stamp that cannot be erased.
§2 Internal affections constitutive of the temperament and linked to the variable modes of the fundamental and immediate sentiment of internal life
That set of determinations that we may rightfully include under the heading instinct does not remain limited to the first stage of human life. The circle of phenomena over which that blind power continues to range, during the developmental progress of external life, far from narrowing, can on the contrary take on an even greater extension by meeting up at certain points with that of the passive habits that pertain to the functions of this new life. But beyond this circle in which instinct, the habits and all the modes of animal sensitivity are enveloped lies invariably the sphere of activity in which man, who has become double (duplex in humanitate), appears. Once again, we are not talking about a single order of facts, or of elements reducible to a single principle, to a single feeling faculty (faculté sentante). This inferior faculty does not transform itself 43 to produce the superior ones; rather there are really two orders of distinct and separate facts; so far as our minds are capable of rightly applying the principle of causality, or of recognizing and judging the difference of causes by the heterogeneity of effects, there are truly two principles, two forces that, without ever transforming into one another, act together, each in its domain, conspire and oppose one another, with each in turn having an unfair advantage … Who among us is not at every moment actor and witness to these intestinal battles?
There is not a single one of the internal parts of our body, said in his naive language a philosopher44 who was an assiduous observer of such phenomena, which does not often act against our will; they each have their own particular passions or affections that awaken them or put them to sleep without our leave.
Indeed, we clearly recognize the characteristics and signs of these affections peculiar to each part of the animate machine, or of those partial passions, as it were, in those sorts of appetites, of sudden stimulations, which start out in an organic centre, where they arose, such as in the sixth sense, the stomach, the heart, etc., extend out by a sort of consensus, take hold of all sensitivity, subjugate the imagination and end up absorbing any sentiment pertaining to the self, without whose knowledge all these brusque and automatic movements are executed and tend towards the object of passion with all the blindness, all the fatum of primitive instinct. It is here that we can speak of the triumph of a truly animal sensitivity.
It is from the habitual and more moderate cooperation of the immediate impressions of all these internal organs that affect one another by reciprocal sympathy that the general sentiment, or that sort of immediate vital sense, of which we have spoken derives, just as it is from the alternative predominance of each of these partial instruments45 or from the variable manner in which their functions are carried out that the various modes of this sense derive, modes that are quite variable from individual to individual or in the same individual at different times.
The modes of this fleeting life thus flow like waves into the river that sweeps us away, and we find no place to throw down anchor. It is through them that we become, without any foreign cause and often without any possible return back to ourselves, alternatively sad and giddy, etc.
§3 Of the immediate internal affections that correspond to the states of sleep, dreaming, delirium, and mental alteration. The relationship that physiology can establish between these different types of phenomena, from which the philosophy of the human mind can also draw useful considerations
A judicious and profound analysis of the phenomena of the mind and of internal sense rightfully establishes, by purely psychological considerations, that the state of sleep consists in a temporary or periodic suspension of the exercise of the will, and of all the strictly intellectual phenomena that hinge essentially on this hyper-organic force. The exposition of Mr Dugald Stewart’s doctrine on this subject conforms perfectly to my point of view. I shall limit myself here to deducing from it several important consequences supremely conducive to illuminating the subject of the question with which we are occupied.
(1)We know first of all, on the one hand, by the immediate testimony of intimate sense, that sleep differs from wakefulness only insofar as in the former state the self, which participates as a witness or as an agent in all the phenomena within its domain, is absent, and takes no active nor passive part in these phenomena during sleep. But on the other hand, it can be proved that the essential difference that exists between the two compared states hinges on the fact that the will or power of effort and of movement that is fully exerted in a waking state is suspended during sleep; whence it clearly follows that the apperception of the self is identical to that of the effort constitutive of wakefulness, just as the absence of this self, which characterizes sleep, is identical to the nullity of this effort, or to the suspension of the power that carries it out.
(2)This double identity, which I regard as a fundamental principle in psychology, emerges eminently from all the causes able to bring on sleep solely by suspending the will (or from the diversion or as it were the absorption of the self), as well as from all the singular circumstances and phenomena of passive sensitivity or imagination that are linked to this state in which individual personality is absent.
Among the circumstances relating to the state of sleep, those that strike us first are that persistence or even that excess of energy that various affections of sensitivity take on and the exclusive or predominate influence that they have upon the production or arousal of certain images that are associated with them by nature or by habit; moreover, the absolute independence that these affections and internal intuitions enjoy from any exercise of the will, from any presence of the self, and therefore from any intellectual phenomenon strictly speaking; in sum, the inverse relations that can be established by indubitable observations or experiments between these sensory or fantastic products of sleep and certain organic states of the viscera such as the stomach, the heart, the liver, etc.; it is thus possible to apply these phenomena directly to the physiological theories that align themselves in this regard with the facts of psychology itself.
(3)The phenomena of sleep observed in the way in which they follow upon one another and upon certain organic causes, indeed also serve to illuminate the joining or contact points between the two sciences, as well as to fix their limits.
But pressed for time, and myself startled at the extent of this treatise, I shall make haste to come to the most remarkable phenomena that accompany this state in which intellectual and moral life being suspended along with the will, which is their principle or soul, organic life as a whole, absolutely independent from this enlightened power, and an entire part of animal life that can also be exercised without its participation, reign supreme, and giving way to various phenomena that quite clearly cannot be attributed to them alone, thereby indicate the extent of their particular domain and circumscribe its limits. I am speaking of dreams and reveries (des songes et des rêves), the observation of which seems to me instructive for the metaphysician and the physiologist in that it can:
(1)bring the metaphysician and moralist to trace more exactly the limits separating the intellectual from the sensory in that spontaneous mode of exercise of the imagination that produces dreams, or even to unveil certain intimate secrets of thinking nature by the very aberrations of its principle; and
(2)call the physiologist’s attention to singular and too little observed relations between the accidental lesions of certain internal organs and the nature of dreams, or what is the same, between certain immediate internal affections that prevail during a certain individual’s sleep and the sort of spectres that then come and besiege his imagination.
And first, as to the causes that bring on sleep, it is not difficult to show that they act by making the influence of the internal organs predominate over that of the immediate instruments of the mind’s operations or of the will’s acts, the brain and the nerves, or by suspending the free exercise of the power of effort, and as a result, the apperception of the self.
If I were permitted to borrow the language of physiology, or to enter into the details of the delicate experiments and observations carried out or to be carried out on this quite peculiar branch of the phenomena of animalism, I would emphasize in accordance with great masters how the state of sleep is brought on by any cause that tends to concentrate the sensory and motor forces in particular internal organs, and thus to intercept or weaken the sympathy or reciprocal communication of all the parts of the system either between themselves, or with the general and common centre. I would speak of the effects of narcotics and liquors, which consist in first stimulating internal sensitivity, in letting the organs predominate, in thereby bringing about those flashes of spontaneous imagination that are so far removed from the calm, even and protracted light of intelligence, effects that are soon followed by a necessary collapse, in which the soul, already diverted from its laws, or stifled in its reign, seems to abandon the body, scarcely produces the degree of effort necessary to support it, and end us up handing it over to the laws of physics. I shall point out with respect to this successive invasion of the phenomena of sleep how delirium or mental alteration are, as it were, only a degree or circumstance of the same essential condition on which this state depends, namely the progressive suspension of the exercise of will and of effort, and as a direct result the obfuscation and total eclipse of the sentiment of the self, and of all that is strictly intellectual, etc.
If I were further permitted to give this subject the time and degree of development that it deserves, I would now lay the base of a new classification of dreams and reveries in which they would be ascribed to their organic causes or to the seats of these causes. I would show how the different parallel types of delirium, of vesania, or of alteration relating to the same cause can enter into equal or parallel classes.
I would distinguish, for instance:
(1)dreams or reveries that I would call affective or organic as having their seat in internal organs and as always being accompanied by more or less lively immediate affections;
(2)intuitive dreams or visions, which are in all probability due to a direct stimulation of the brain, are not accompanied by deep affections, and have a character of mobility and lightness that is peculiar to them;
(3)hybrid dreams in which there is a mixture of truly intellectual and sensory phenomena, the principle of thought or the self staying awake while the organs of external life are still asleep. Aren’t these kinds of dreams that are typical of studious and meditative men similar to that sort of ecstatic delirium in which at times, on the point of death, when animal life seems all but extinguished, intellectual life takes on a heightened elevation and perhaps already participates in the form that it is about to assume? In this latter case, the dream’s cause and seat appear to come from outside of internal organization.
I could also show how the confusion of these various causes, seats, or circumstances of dreams and of the types of mental alteration corresponding to them ended up leading astray two philosopher doctors whose salutary views were particularly focused on this last subject.46
However, it suffices here to point out a new salient proof of the services that the physiological or medical practice can render psychology, as well as those that the theory of the latter can render the practice of the former.
By dwelling a moment upon the character of organic dreams, which particularly interest us here, we observe that there could not be a more distinct relationship than that which on the one hand links the type of immediate affections that accompany a dream to the internal organs that are predominate and that are their seat, and on the other hand, the nature of these affections to the kind of spectre that besieges the imagination in various forms. It is thus that, falling asleep on an empty stomach, we dream of a table covered with meats we crave. If the stomach is too full, spectres appear that compress it and hinder any movement we wish to make to ward them off as in a nightmare. The sixth sense, aroused during a period of abstinence from amorous pleasure, brings about voluptuous dreams in which the imagination embraces a fantastic object and in this pleasant illusion fulfils nature’s wish. The bilious plethora creates sombre spectres that arouse either fright or anger or hate and incite the individual to flee, or to brave chimerical perils; the sanguineous plethora presents the image of bloody combats, and we are all familiar with the case in which Galien recognized the diagnosis of this plethora in the nature of a dream, and made the prognosis of a haemorrhage that was verified by the eventual outcome.
I abridge these examples to arrive at certain circumstances surrounding these phenomena that concern psychology more particularly, and that seem to me quite conducive to demonstrating still further the ties that unite it with physiological doctrines in the particular respect we are now considering.
Affective dreams have a certain character of depth, of persistence, whose effect not only manifests itself during sleep, but often extends further into the waking man’s internal dispositions and frame of mind. How much more enamoured, for instance, in the happy cessation of expansive and tender sentiments, does one often feel for the object to which he owes the pleasures of a dream without even having any recollection of it? Conversely, can’t a certain dreadful sentiment with which a bad dream filled our soul during the night bear an influence upon the secret dispositions of the day following it? How many good and bad actions might have their hidden source in the immediate affections that are the products of dreams already far removed from our remembrance?
What I believe I have confirmed by my own experience at least is that the sensory disposition that brought on the dream or that results from it long outlives the picture produced by the imagination (especially when this affection was profound) and can even contribute to resuscitating the latter by way of that sort of natural affinity that links certain affections of the sensitive soul to certain images of the mind. It is remarkable that in this reproduction of the spectres of sleep there is never perfect remembrance; the self cannot recognize itself in a mode in which it never really existed or that it was not able as it were to endow with the form of its personal identity. From another point of view, this reproduced dream does not affect us as if it were new; only the sensitive soul claims ownership of it by that sort of instinctive or sympathetic premonition similar to that which makes a mother recognize a child she has not seen since birth. In these instances the mind experiences a kind of unease, discomfort or uncertainty in linking to the familiar chain of existence an image that it cannot attribute to itself as past nor regard as altogether new and foreign.
I have also observed in myself another psychological effect that the immediate affections persisting after a dream have on this quite remarkable phenomenon of our moral existence that we call belief. Awakened, for instance, by a frightening dream, I found myself firmly believing in the actual existence of a spectre that had struck me and believing in it for as long as the passive affection of the immediate sentiment of fear lasted, so that if the same fearful disposition had persisted, nothing would have prevented me from believing that in some mysterious region there existed such and such a spectre, of such and such a colour, having such and such a form that my imagination retraced.47
This experience seems to me quite conducive to distinguishing three elements that are closely linked in one single product of passive imagination and that psychological analysis has not yet clearly distinguished, namely the image, the sentiment, or the immediate affection that is associated with it and that tints it as it were with its own colour, and lastly the belief that follows this affection and that adjusts itself to it. I thus believe we can conclude that there is a sort of faith or mechanical belief, the result of our animal or purely sensory nature, and quite different from that of intelligence, which reasons out its motives for believing, by disassociating affections and ideas so as to reduce these latter to their real and actual value.
I thus consider that a good analysis of dreams, considered from the double physiological-psychological standpoint, can be just as useful to the waking senses as the history of insanity, likewise considered from this double standpoint, can be useful to the wisest of men.
Second section
How certain functions or phenomena of the mind linked to spectres of the soul can influence the dispositions or functions pertaining to the body.
In the class of sensory phenomena that we have just examined, we felt warranted in expressly including those of a passive imagination subordinate in its exercise to the immediate affections of external or internal physical sensitivity. The products of this type of imagination have been insightfully analysed by several physiologists who dealt ex professo with the branch of facts we designate as moral or intellectual; it is indeed in this direction that they sought to determine the mutual relations between the physical or organic and what they call the moral in man – moral, which in the physiologists’ sense can be further reduced to the functions or results of the functions of the various organs, internal as well as external.48
If we wished to limit ourselves here to this viewpoint after having shown in the previous section by a sufficiently large number of examples how the immediate affections of sensitivity could determine a certain mode in the production of images or spectres, and thus give way to what is called moral or intellectual phenomena, we would not need to insist further to prove by similar experiments or observations that these same phenomena, taking the initiative through some given cause, can in turn determine a series of corresponding sensitive functions and thus proportionately influence the functions of the internal organs that are the seats of the latter.
As a result of this same viewpoint, we should have already established not only the reciprocal connections, but also the kind of identity that exists between the two sciences, considered from the common point of view of their organic functions or their most immediate results.
Indeed, we have previously seen how internal affectability, aroused first, activates the imagination, or brings with it certain spectres analogous in kind to our dominant impressions, without stepping outside the same confine of facts, but merely turning them around. It will now be easy to show through various examples how the imagination can be spontaneously activated by a series of dispositions of the central organ that is its seat, that is, of the brain and of the nervous system of animal life, without any direct or indirect influence of the self or of internal sensitivity, and how the production of these spontaneous images, which no longer have the same character of depth, of persistence, of affective energy, nor therefore of reality, can arouse this dulled sensitivity at its main sources, bring it into harmony with them, and produce (déterminer) predominant images that transmit their direction to it after receiving its own.
The affections of sorrow, joy and timidity, or of courage, hope and fear can thus arise now from certain causes that can only act on the imagination, now (or more often, as we have seen) from those immediate affections all relating to causes that act directly on internal sensitivity and thus give the objects of the imagination itself the form and colour peculiar to them.
Thus, in erotic dreams, for example, as well as in the reveries of the same sort that the waking man may have, it is now the predisposed internal organ that awakens the imagination, now the imagination, arousing itself with certain spectres that it produces and caresses, which awakens the sense that on its own is dozing and inert. There are easy-to-recognize characteristics that distinguish these two modes of arousal, one sensory and the other imaginary, one of which corresponds to fickle, superficial and shifting tastes and appetites, whereas the other constitutes the animal passions, which are vigorous, deep and stirring like the fatum.
Thus again, with respect to the different types of mental alteration, the observer, borrowing – it is true – the data of a reflective sense, or the enlightenment of psychological analysis, can distinguish the distinctive colour of the spectres pursuing the madman, or the kind of affections that accompany them, and even the absence of these latter, if the cause of alteration is inherent to certain primitively injured or altered viscera.
Now, if this cause carries the object into the heart of imagination itself, whose functions it immediately subverts, it is evident that in this case the treatment must be administered according to a psychological or moral plan, and in the other case, according to purely organic or physical views. To choose among the objects most conducive to awakening ideas or sentiments contrary to those that pursue the madman, to shield from his view all the objects that are linked to his predominant delirium, to create a strong diversion for all the habits of his imagination, etc., such is the substance of this moral treatment, whose details psychology can do so much to illuminate, and whose means to justify.
By generalizing here the results of the preceding analyses and applying them to all the facts of the same kind, in which imagination and internal immediate affectability are present, follow upon another, and predominate over one another successively, after having likewise distinguished all the hybrid modes that are included under the too vague and too general heading passions of the soul as sensory passions and imaginative passions, we would still find ourselves induced to form an altogether separate class of intellectual passions in which there reigns a moral sensitivity that is to the ideas of the mind what physical sensitivity is to the spectres or spontaneous products of the imagination.
It would follow from this division, as we have already sufficiently shown in all that precedes, that the role that passive imagination plays in a given series of affective phenomena does not characterize the intellectual or moral aspects of a passion, and that it is not in this direction that we may claim to adapt physiological doctrines or experiments to an order of facts that is in fact quite removed from them by nature. On the contrary, all the signs of this fatum peculiar to the organism in the forced production of certain images, the character now of mobility, now of obstinate persistence, the power that these spectres possess to subjugate thought, to enchain the will, to obfuscate the light of consciousness; such indeed is the nature of the physical passions that, of whatever nature their means, their products or their results may be, constitute, at the very heart of thought, a sort of spiritual reflex (automatisme), to which the laws of physiology may to a certain extent be rightfully applied.
But here it is expressly a matter of the intellectual passions or the relations that the phenomena pertaining to the mind may have with the affections of the sensitive soul, and as a result with certain functions of the organs immediately linked to these affections. This is a sort of transcendental physiology whose subject seems indeed to defy those who, wishing to analyse the relationship between the physical and moral in man, were not able to see this moral dimension except in further physical effects.
The brevity of time and the length of this treatise allow me only to present a few abridged observations on this last subject. The imagination or the faculty of internal intuition, forms as it were the link between the two natures, or if you prefer, between the two sorts of elements that constitute double man (duplex in humanitate). But while on the one hand imagination communicates with the internal organism that arouses it with its immediate impressions and that it affects with its spectres, on the other it corresponds with the hyper-organic force, which dictates its laws to it, when the reverse is not true. Imagination, thus regulated by the will, acts upon the sensitive soul, and produces that superior order of affections we call moral sentiments.
The order of subordination that I have just indicated seems to result from a simple fact of intimate sense or from a very consistent observation, although so often unknown or concealed: namely that moral sentiment only emerges following an intellectual effort or certain perceptions or comparisons of the mind (such is the sentiment of the beautiful, of admiration, of surprise, etc.), whereas immediate affection, as its name indicates, precedes all perception, and often produces its entire effect in the organism before there is even any apprehension of the mind.
Perhaps the will has absolutely no dominion over its affections, nor even any direct influence on its moral sentiments,49 but it does have an influence on the ideas or images of the mind, especially insofar as they are linked to conventional signs (signes institués); these images can in turn awaken the affections or sentiments to which they are associated by nature or by habit.
Whence the possibility of arousing certain affections in the sensitive soul, and as a result certain revolutions in the organs of internal life, with a certain intellectual regimen, a certain direction impressed upon the will or the understanding, as well as of influencing these other faculties to a certain extent with a certain regimen, either physical or moral. To gain serenity and be content with ourselves and with our acts – that is all…
The circumstances of this double regimen
Let us indicate the principle circumstances of this double regimen and the observations that, in this superior order of relations, are the foundation for the harmony between the two sciences or between the two parts of the complete science of man, and for the type of services that they can mutually render one another.
(1) Each of us can observe in himself that that the direct perceptions of the senses, the images of intuition, as well as the most elaborate ideas of intelligence, received, produced and contemplated in turn with variable internal affective dispositions, for instance, with an immediate sentiment of well-being or of discomfort, of extreme force or of weakness, of self-confidence or of discouragement, of activity or of indolence, in sum of organic equilibrium or of organic turmoil – that the perceptions, I say, or intellectual ideas corresponding to each of these affective states, seem to adapt to the tenor of internal sensitivity and to taint itself as it were with its distinctive colours; this, in passing, is a notable circumstance that gives our moral and psychological ideas in particular such a variable form in certain individuals, or in the same individual at different times, and that as a result prevents certain truths of consciousness or of intimate sense from equally penetrating into all minds, from there enjoying an equal clarity even when expressed unequivocally (sous les expressions même univoques); this, in a word, is what so often renders these truths incommunicable by the signs of language, and will always preclude them, whatever Locke and Condillac may have said, from being proved like mathematical truths, which are the most separated from any affective mixture.
But, since, firstly, the modes of internal sensitivity have such a marked influence on the way in which each individual feels about his own ideas, or since his intellectual progress truly depends on this very disposition, or on the degree of confidence he attaches to the products of his understanding, on the force with which he adheres to them, on the sentiment of internal calm or serenity with which he contemplates them; and since, secondly, there is an art, although little known, little practised, and hardly susceptible to being reduced to fixed rules, a wholly physiological art, that of directly influencing the general tenor of internal sensitivity, either by the regular combination of appropriate dietetic means or a certain use of things that medicine describes as unnatural, or by the use of certain substances recognized for their stimulating, calming or mollifying effects; by directing more in-depth analyses and more varied observations in this direction, physiology could thus to a certain extent perfect its means by immediately modifying internal sensitivity, individual temperament and as a result the dispositions of the moral character, and lastly, in a more mediate way, the faculties of the mind, whose inaction or mobility, whose pleasant or arduous exercise, are linked to these dispositions. If ever we had a good theoretical and practical treatise on the great art of good living, of right acting and right thinking,50 surely this book, the most useful of any that could written, would be the work of a physiologist ex professo who would unite the spirit of his science with the most extensive psychological and moral knowledge.51
(2) But it must be recognized that in the order of phenomena that we are considering here, the predominant influence seems indeed to come from psychology; or in other words, there seems to be still more ways to act upon the immediate affections of sensitivity, on the organic dispositions of the body, with a certain regimen of the mind, than to influence the phenomena of the mind with a certain order of modifications impressed upon the body; and we can establish the truth of this result in advance from all that was already said about the relative independence of the principle that wills, acts and thinks in man, and about its superiority, and about the sort of uniqueness (l’espèce de mise-à-part) of any fact pertaining to intimate sense or the self, considered with respect to that which is organic or purely passive in animals.
If, for instance, as we cannot doubt from experience, a given mode of exercising thought turns out to be facilitated by certain sensory dispositions that relate to the machine, there is no doubt but that a vigorous and strong will often fights against the organic obstacles in the way of its goal, and manages to triumph over them or even to change these dispositions altogether, to induce (déterminer) an altogether different series of organic movements and thus to break the chains of the fatum (quod fati foedera rumpat).
The author of this treatise, of a weak and sickly constitution, bears within him the living example of this dominion or mediate influence that the will can exercise upon the organic and affective dispositions of the body, by a direct effort that it exercises upon the operations of the mind, or on the ideas, which it tends to reduce to a certain regular pattern (type). How many times has he observed in himself how an intellectual effort undertaken by fighting against the most marked organic inertia or against an affective state of turmoil, of unease, of suffering, produced, after an obstinate and protracted effort, a state of activity, of serenity, of internal calm and equilibrium?
How much does he experience each day how the very functions of the most crude organism bends and adapts itself to the exercise of thought, by adhering to the same intervals of indolence and activity: for example, digestion, the organic secretions or excretions are or are not carried out, according as one does or does not work at his habitual hours, etc.?
These observations and a host of others that each of us could carry out on ourselves, if we were less distracted by the external world (du dehors), more accustomed to seize and to conserve an empire of will (un empire de vouloir) that our immediate affections tend incessantly to usurp, but that can extend over these affections themselves, to an unlimited point, which no man has perhaps yet conceived nor tried to attain. All these facts, I say, of internal experience, prove rather clearly the infinitely precious aide that even practical physiology or medicine stands to gain from a more exact knowledge of the active faculties of man and of the moral or intellectual regimen that is to be prescribed to them in order to change the modifications of a depraved sensitivity, to remedy various organic disorders or, what is still better, to prevent them, stop them from arising or from becoming ingrained, by certain diversions of the ideas or by the opposing effort of a vigorous will.
The reader is familiar with the method of scolding iron that Boerhaave so propitiously used, in the hospital of Haarlem, to stop the convulsive trembling of several children whom a particular sympathetic affection incited to imitate one another; there is no doubt but that similar diversions, and especially the acquired habit of a greater dominion over oneself, would succeed in cutting out from the root nearly all the causes of nervous illnesses and even of several other organic alterations.
(3) It is another fact of internal observation that the health of the soul influences that of the body at least as much as the latter does the former; the imperfect harmony that the will produces and conserves between the ideas of the mind and the moral sentiments can quite certainly bring about or to a certain extent maintain that other harmony between the functions of the organs or the immediate affections of sensitivity that constitutes the healthy state and the well-being of the machine.
These two kinds of health sometimes coincide wonderfully in certain privileged beings in whom the physical and the moral, each well regulated in its respective order, support one another and better themselves through one another. But the example of such a harmony must be rare, and it is precisely with the objective of making it more common that the two sciences we are discussing can, perhaps successfully, unite all their theoretical insights and all the data of a double observation, internal and external.
When the physical is not properly adjusted, the soul is necessarily affected by this disorder in a sombre and painful way. If the self then allows itself to be absorbed, as it were, by these painful affections, the disorder increases and redoubles by this very same cause; but it is possible and it happens in certain cases that the self morally suffers or takes pleasure while the sensory principle is affected in a contrary way, or even that a given moral sentiment is founded upon an opposite affection.
We thus sometimes take pleasure in our sad affections, in our sorrows, in our woes; we ourselves experience a certain melancholy enjoyment, by participating as sympathizing witnesses in these movements of our internal sensitivity; or a truly intellectual and moral contentment in bearing witness to a superior force within us that does not allow itself to be overcome. Conversely, it can happen that our intellectual being is internally afflicted by a sort of uncontrolled joy, which our sensitive being experiences, and which our good sense condemns and represses.
In the rear of the theatre of consciousness there then occurs an effect similar to that which we experience during dramatic performances. This interesting observation could not escape the attention of a philosopher so supremely reflective as Descartes. ‘When we read of strange adventures,’ he says in his Treatise on the Passions [§ 135],
in a book or see them acted out on the stage, this sometimes rouses sadness in us, sometimes joy, or love, or hatred, and generally any of the passions, depending on what kinds objects are presented to our imagination. But we also get pleasure from feeling these passions aroused in us, and this pleasure is an intellectual joy that can originate in sadness as much in any of the other passions.
Here indeed is the intellectual component of passion. How could we confuse it with the sensory component; how could we fail to distinguish immediate affection from reflective and truly moral sentiment?
Now, in the ordinary modes of our sensitive and moral life, these affections and sentiments can be in harmony and reinforce one another – which preserves the health of the soul and of the body – whence internal anguish is born, a state of turmoil and of disorder, moral as well as physical.
It seems certain to me, for instance, that in the abominable passion of crime, the intimate sentiments and the cry of the soul that the villain seeks in vain to muffle, constitutes a state of perpetual torment at the very heart of a brutal and savage joy. The ineffable pleasures of charity, on the contrary, increase in duration and intensity by the active participation of the soul, which experiences the pleasant affection of satisfied moral instinct, and consents to it, in all the range of meanings that this word can take on, and redoubles it by sharing it … Thus the usual state of a charitable soul is the most agreeable that it is man’s lot to experience in his current mode of existence. It is the most perfect type of health the soul can have, as well as an efficient means to achieve the health of the body.
What shall we say of those purely intellectual enjoyments, so agreeable, so elevated, which derive from the very exercise of the most noble faculties of the mind and of the soul, to the contemplation or discovery of that eternal and immutable truth towards which a superior nature gravitates?
Do you feel all that is ineffable and almost divine in that intellectual or moral enjoyment of the true and the beautiful, whose image fills the soul with an enthusiasm such as that which inspires the poet with those strokes of the sublime or reveals to the geometer that admirable chain of relations that ties together rotating spheres and all the parts of this immense universe?
Do you believe that raptures such as those of a Pythagoras, or of a Archimedes, on first catching sight of a truth so ardently sought after, are not quite conducive to establishing, between the life of the soul and that of the body, that precious solidarity that conveys to one the energy and the sort of immortality belonging to the other?
It is perhaps for this reason that one finds among the most distinguished scholars such a great many examples of longevity, and of exemption from certain infirmities that attack those men whose animal life is worn out more quickly by the very inertia or indolence of their intellectual and moral life.
(4) However, it is in the coming together of the two lives and in their equal participation that one finds the enjoyments that are more natural and more accessible to the common man, dominated by so many kinds of imperious needs. But in this very mixture of the impressions of the organism and the sentiments of the soul and the ideas of the mind, we shall still have many occasions to note to what extent the activity or the energy of one can influence the happy and regular succession of the other; and especially to what extent the hybrid enjoyments, in which the intellectual element predominates, are more lively and pure! It is thus that when, at the dinner table, or after a meal, we give ourselves up to the charms of an animated and instructive conversation, to the pleasures of poetry, music and all that which can impart a certain degree of animation to the mind, the organic functions are carried out with more ease, and even the pleasures related to the satisfaction of our needs becomes more agreeable!
How much we would have to say about the hybrid pleasure of love, in which the phenomena of both lives accompany one another, succeed one another, or predominate over one another in an alternative order of influence that so often blends the physical and the moral aspects of passion; in which the senses borrow from the imagination that charm, that irresistible allure imparted to the loved object, and in which purely sensual pleasure plays so subordinate a role…
How unequivocally a thousand detailed facts prove to the observer of phenomena relating to the sick and to the healthy man the particular influence upon the accidental circumstances of a given illness that is exercised by the ideas and sentiments with which the individual is struck, the confidence he has in the person caring for him, the hope of being cured that he holds out for certain remedies, or, on the contrary, unfavourable bias, mistrust, fear…
But I forget that I am not here giving a complete course on moral therapy, and it suffices to show by several incontestable examples that the science of moral and intellectual man could illuminate the practical science of physical man, just as the latter could provide the former with useful applied data (données d’application). This is what I believe I have shown in this last section, from which one may deduce as a general result that those who disdainfully reject psychological considerations in investigations whose object is the body, or who restrict their use to their application to certain illnesses, are just as unjustified in their refusal as are those who believe they could explain the phenomena of the mind and of internal sense by physical doctrines or experiments.
1 ‘The bodily machines are at the service of the minds, and what in the mind is providence, in the body is fate.’ Leibniz, Epistola ad Hanschium de Philosophia Platonic sive de Enthusiasmo Plantonico (1707).
2 ‘Nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses.’ Leibniz, New Essays on Human Understanding, II, I, §2.
3 Thomas Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind. (Note from the author.)
4 Biran uses the word ‘affection’ – which in French has a somewhat broader range of meaning than in English – to refer to the various impressions and modifications of sensory experience. For lack of a satisfactory equivalent in English, I have opted to translate the word directly as ‘affection’, with the caveat that this word is used here as a term of art rather than in its ordinary sense. (Note from the translator.)
5 The preeminence that Bacon gave to the physical sciences finds itself aptly expressed in the remarkable passage of the book De Augmentaris [Scientiarum, I. 31]: “the human mind, if it acts [upon matter, and contemplates the nature of things, and the works of God, operates according to the matter, and is limited thereby: but if it works upon itself (like the spider weaving its web) then it has no end, but produces cobwebs of learning, admirable indeed for the finesse of the thread and of the work; but of no substance or profit.”] (Note from the author.)
6 Th. Reid. ‘Section 21: Nature’s Way of Bringing About Sense Perception’, in An Inquiry into the Human Mind. (Note from the author.)
7 Ch. Bonnet, preface. (Note from the author.)
8 ‘Like the spider weaving its web’. See supra note [5].
9 False identity perpetually supposed by those who engage in physical explanations, the source of all the deviations and illusions of these systems. (Note from the author.)
10 How do we know? And with what kind of science are we dealing? (Note from the author.)
11 Bonnet, Elements of Psychology. He states in his Analytical Essay §75: I declare ‘that I do not claim to equate the idea with the occasion of the idea: but I do not know the idea at all, and I know somewhat the occasion of the idea’. Surely we know an idea in our mind by intimate sense or reflection better than we know the occasion of the idea or the movement of fibres by representation. (Note from the author.)
12 “It is not less natural to the mind to exercise reflective acts or to contemplate itself than to perceive things outside itself; or rather, it does not know external things except by the knowledge of things that are within itself.” Leibniz. Animadversiones Circa Assertiones Aliquas Theoriae Medicae Verae clar, Stalii; Cum Elusdem Leibnitii ad Stahlianas Observationes Responsionibus, Dutens. II, 2, 145. (Note from the author.)
13 Locke, Essay on Human Understanding, [book II, ch. 6]. (Note from the author.)
14 See Ch. Bonnet, Analytical Essay on the Faculties of the Soul, and Hartley, Physical Explanation of the Senses. (Note from the author).
15 I will not get into the details of this explanation, which seems to have caused the author of the Analytical Essay much trouble, and ask the reader to consult the work itself to judge the insufficiency of physical explanations when it comes to truly intellectual or purely reflective phenomena. (Note from the author.)
16 Only active and intelligent beings have a force in them that enables them to break free from the sphere of habits, etc. (Note from the author.)
17 Physical sensualism and transcendental idealism must equally repel this kind of investigation; according to the former system, sensation is everywhere and the soul nowhere; according to the latter, material organization is but a pure phenomenon, a figment of the imagination, and the soul cannot be in a corporal place, since this place has no reality. (Note from the author.)
18 ‘I believe,’ says Dr Hufeland quite rightly in his remarks on the system of Dr Gall, ‘that one must carefully distinguish between the intellect (or that which represents) insofar as it relates to the external world and must be put in contact with it, and the intellect (in the strict sense), which has consciousness of its own operations, which reflects upon them, etc.’ (Note from the author.)
19 Such is the relationship assigned by Camper between the obtuseness of [an animal’s] facial angle and its degree of intelligence. This relationship, which it seems one can verify exactly by ascending the animal scale from fish to men, can nonetheless only be established empirically and is not thereby more certain. Perhaps one should have stopped there. (Note from the author.)
20 Dr Gall also seems to consider the real or absolute unity of the self as a simple abstraction of the mind, when he expressly attributes the particular sentiment of one’s self to the organ of each special faculty. And he indeed needed to do so in order to be able to reconcile the separation of these special faculties with the intimate sentiment that is linked to the exercise of each of them. It follows that the self is nothing more than a composite sentiment, or a sort of derivative of all the other individual sentiments, which indeed amounts to annihilating its individuality, or real unity, which is the basis of all metaphysics. (Note from the author.)
21 Is it not peculiar, for instance, to see Dr Gall seriously claim to assign separate organs and as a result special faculties to flirtation, guile, vanity, pride, hypocrisy, dishonesty, as if all these artificial products, born of certain forms of society, were stamped with nature’s seal? (Note from the author.)
22 See Condillac’s Logic. (Note from the author.)
23 “[Not] to give light from smoke.” Horace. Ars Poetica, verse 143.
24 Having only had to consider Mr Gall’s doctrine with respect to the hypothetical explanations that I set out to combat, I was not able to expand upon the objections to which I think this doctrine is susceptible, chiefly with respect to the localization of the faculties, affections, and passions, instincts, animal appetites, etc., whose particular seats it claims to assign to certain protuberances of the brain. Although it is acknowledged that many headless creatures exhibit faculties of belief, etc., I shall confine myself here to an objection that, I believe, attacks the craniological hypothesis in its most immediate consequences, just as everything we have seen in the text radically attacks it in its principle or at its base.
Animals, he claims, have the same organs as we have relative to external sensations. In most animals, several of these organs are even more refined and unrestricted than ours; why then do they not have the same moral or intellectual faculties, if not because in the interior of our brain there are particular organs that we have and of which they are devoid?
This argument, well founded insofar as one uses it as factual proof to establish a general relationship such as the one Camper founded upon the obtuseness of the facial angle or the contraction of the cerebral cavity; this argument, I say, proves nothing in favour of Gall’s hypothetical division, and can even be turned against his system advantageously. Indeed, one could say to him: man having several faculties that animals have not, it follows, on your account, that the organization of the human brain must include various parts that are foreign to an animal’s brain; but men from all countries, from all ages, must have and must have had these organs you speak of, and, quite certainly, the same man has them at all times; why then is there so extraordinary a difference between individuals of our species who are subject to various accidental circumstances concerning country, climate, institutions? How is it, above all, if the superiority of the faculties depends solely on the multiplicity of cerebral organs, that any given man finds himself so different, according to the climate, season, temperature, etc. (Note from the author.)
25 “But I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind.” [Saint Paul, Letter to the Romans, 7:22–23.] (Note from the author.)
26 “That breaks the laws of destiny.” [Lucrelius, De Rerum Natura, II, 251–287.] (Note from the author.)
27 “Nothing so absurd can be said that some philosopher has not said it.” Cicero, De Divitatione, II, LVII, 119.
28 I always take the word apperception in Leibniz’s sense: apperceptio est perceptio cum reflexione conjuncta [apperception is perception joined with reflection]. (Note from the author.)
29 “He lives and is unconscious of his own life.” Ovid. Tristia, I, III, 12.
30 Condillac and Bonnet in their common hypothesis of an animated statue seek rather vainly to deduce all the intellectual operations from a simple sensation that the statue’s soul becomes, or with which it is said to be identified. How did Bonnet in particular not see that this complete identification of the soul with each of the successive or simple modes of passive sensation radically destroys the personality and prevents it from arising, far from being its source, as these two metaphysicians concur in supposing? (Note from the author.)
31 “We have thus succeeded little by little in distinguishing the nerves; we have found that some nerves, enabling sensation and movement, derive from the brain; and that other nerves, serving no such function, have their origin in the cerebellum. Suppose that we conserve all the sensitive parts of the human body, but that we remove the heart.” Herman Boerhaave, Praelectiones Academicae De Morbis Nervorum, Lugduni Batavorum, 1761, II, 496–497.
32 See The Treatise on Mental Insanity, by M. Pinel. (Note from the author.)
33 See Th. Reid. An Inquiry into the Human Mind, Dugald Stewart, Degérando, etc. (Note from the author.)
34 Th. Reid in fact considers the immediate affections we are discussing as signs instituted by nature to induce the mind to perceive or represent completely external objects. He notes quite rightly that impressions of this kind, which have few or no proper names in our habitual languages, are often non-sensory, and always unperceived or imperceptible by themselves, the natural sign thus disappearing before the thing signified. It seems to me that in this part of a work full of the most astute and judicious observations, Reid falls into the mistake common to metaphysicians of too precipitously generalizing particular facts, or of supposing that what pertains to a given external sense, such as sight for instance, indiscriminately applies to all the other senses or to all the sensory and intellectual products that may be attached to them. Reid holds, for instance, that any immediate, more or less affective, impression made upon any given external sense, naturally suggests to the mind the perception or the idea of the object, or of the external cause of which it is the sign; but even supposing that this were true (which I do not believe) of the immediate impressions made upon the retina by light beams, we would be fully justified in doubting, and in my opinion in denying, that such is the case for the impressions of hearing, smell, taste, which by essence are purely affective and are linked only secondarily, or in virtue of our habits, to the phenomena of objective representation.
35 Quod caeli mutatur in horas temperies, animi quoque simul et pectora mutant. [“Just as the temperature of the air changes according to the hour, so do minds and feelings change.” (Unknown source.)] (Note from the author.)
36 The reader is familiar with the ideas of Reil, who attempted to explain the action of the nerves though a similar atmosphere that he attributes to each nervous organ or partial instrument of sensitivity. (Note from the author.)
37 The mucous membranes corresponding to the senses of smell and taste, which are continuous with those of the respiratory and digestive tracts, essentially form the organ, or are the immediate and necessary seat of its function, which would cease if the membrane were removed or lost its sensitivity. The conjunctiva and the membrane of the ear canal, on the contrary, have no use in the respective phenomena of vision and hearing. These membranes are not the seats of the perceptions pertaining to these two senses; neither can they be classified as mucous membranes. Whence we may conclude that between the sensations of smell and taste and the purely internal affections, there is an analogy with respect to their organic conditions and their modes of receiving impressions, an analogy that explains their likeness of character and that shows us how these impressions, equally foreign to all perceptive forms, cannot be grouped under the class of perceptions to which the activity of the soul essentially and directly contributes.
38 A famous Parisian school teacher for deaf and mute children observed these results in his students, who were accustomed to describing their impressions as well as to expressing, with as much energy as truth, their sentiments or ideas. It was also discovered some time ago, in elephants from the Musuem of Natural History, that the tonalities of certain instruments can have an extraordinary effect upon the immediate affections that we are discussing, and through them upon certain passions that are linked to them, such as love, anger, fury, etc. (Note from the author.)
39 “[T]hat positive knowledge about human nature is not possible except by the medical art.” Hippocrates, De veteri medicina.
40 The functions of passive touch ought not be cited as an objection against me here, since it is not the object that first acts on the sensory organ and through it on the soul but, on the contrary, it is the soul or the hyper-organic motor force that first acts upon the sense and through it upon the object, which is only perceived or represented by its own force of resistance or antitypia, and not at all by its affective qualities. Take away these two forces, and the perceptions of touch (toucher) are reduced to the passive and immediate impressions of tact (tact), which affect without representing. (Note from the author.)
41 If it were well established that the traces of the mother’s imagination can in certain cases leave a visible mark on some part of the child’s body, we should then have to say that these imprints are transmitted by the action of the sensitive soul, and surely only a very high degree of emotion or affective stimulation, linked to the products of the mother’s imagination, can bring about the transmission of these images through the affections with which they are associated. (Note from the author.)
42 Voltaire, General History. (Note from the author.)
43 Condillac’s doctrine. (Note from the author.)
44 See the Essays of Michel de Montaigne. (Note from the author.)
45 The reader is familiar with the ancient division of temperaments – sanguine, bilious, [melancholy, pituitous, or phlegmatic]; and one can see in the works of our most famous French physiologists, such as Cabanis, Bichat, Dumas, Richerand, how much this divisionis illuminated or clarified either by the predominance that various phenomena of this order demonstrate in certain internal organs, such as the heart, the chest, the liver, etc., or more generally by that of the two systems – sensory and motor. One can also see above all how important distinctions in the form of the moral character and the natural direction of the mind’s ideas are linked by observation itself to these new doctrines on temperament; quite a fitting example to bring to light the kind of connection that exists between the class of facts with which the physiologist deals, and the corresponding particular class of internal phenomena that fall within the domain of psychology. (Note from the author.)
46 Doctor Pinel, in his Treatise on Mental Insanity, ascribes everything to intellectual causes, and directs all his methods of treatment in this direction. Doctor Prost, on the contrary, sees in mental alterations mere organic causes, alterations or lesions of the abdominal viscera. Wouldn’t it be possible to recognize by the very characteristics of the vesania whether their causes are purely organic, or moral first and intellectual by consequence? I do not doubt but that a series of observations carried out from the double physical and moral standpoint on this subject would succeed in illuminating the practice of art.
47 Th. Reid, in his work on the understanding, attacks the opinion of those who make belief in the reality of an object depend on the vivacity of the idea or image that represents it, etc. But it seems to me that he himself can be successfully challenged by experiments similar to those that I have just related, in which the kind and degree of the affective sentiment associated with an image indeed seems to be the fundamental principle of the belief in the reality of the object. It is true that we must clearly distinguish here the affection itself from the image, as well as this latter from belief; and this is what the philosophers of whom Reid speaks too often confused.
48 See the work of M. Cabanis entitled The Relationship between the Physical and Moral in Man, a work inspired by the spirit of physiological science and very rich in facts, especially of that kind that are only perceptible to the internal tact that we are discussing, but that, by singularly restricting, from too systematic a point of view, the meaning of the term moral, completely leaves out the whole intellectual and truly moral part of the phenomena of man double in humanity (duplex in humanitate). This great work seems to me supremely conducive to showing on the one hand the abuse and the danger of physiological doctrines in the explanation or deduction of the phenomena of internal sense, and on the other the type of truly useful applications one can make of these doctrines to a particular class of sensory phenomena that occupy a necessary place in the philosophy of the human mind. (Note from the author.)
49 It does not fall to this power to awaken or imitate any of those impressions that form the basis of our existence, which is immediately happy or unhappy. These likeable or pleasant affections, which depend upon an even higher moral nature, are equally outside the limits of our power; much worse, they would lose all the natural sway that they have to move us and would even cease to exist, in the instant in which the will sought to dictate laws to them and to reproduce or to imitate their supreme charm. (Note from the author.)
50 Mr Cabanis, at the time of his death, so ill-fated for the progress of the science of man, pondered the foundations of that important work that he wished to entitle Art of Living, and that was to be followed by a more extensive investigation to which this latter was merely the introduction and whose title was to be Perfecting the Human Species. (Note from the author.)
51 “For the mind depends so much on the temperament and disposition of the bodily organs that, if it is possible to find a means of rendering men wiser and cleverer than they have hitherto been. I believe that it is in medicine that it must be sought.” Descartes, Discourse on the Method, VI. The philosophers of antiquity, the Pythagoreans especially, had recognized this truth and the physical regimen was of first importance in their precepts and principles of wisdom.