A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern, Volume 2 of 2 by J. M. Robertson

of biology, long before the day of Darwin. The protagonist in this case was the physician P.-J.-G. Cabanis (1737-1808), the colleague of Laplace in the School of Sciences. Growing up in the generation of the Revolution, Cabanis had met, in the salon of Madame Helvétius, d'Holbach, Diderot, D'Alembert, Condorcet, Laplace, Condillac, Volney, Franklin, and Jefferson, and became the physician of Mirabeau. His treatise on the Rapports du physique et du morale de l'homme (1796-1802) [1884] might be described as the systematic application to psychology of that "positive" method to which all the keenest thought of the eighteenth century had been tending, yet with much of the literary or rhetorical tone by which the French writers of that age had nearly all been characterized. For Cabanis, the psychology of Helvétius and Condillac had been hampered by their ignorance of physiology; [1885] and he easily put aside the primary errors, such as the "equality of minds" and the entity of "the soul," which they took over from previous thinkers. His own work is on the whole the most searching and original handling of the main problems of psycho-physiology that had yet been achieved; and to this day its suggestiveness has not been exhausted. But Cabanis, in his turn, made the mistake of Helvétius and Condillac. Not content with presenting the results of his study in the province in which he was relatively master, he undertook to reach ultimate truth in those of ethics and philosophy, in which he was not so. In the preface to the Rapports he lays down an emphatically agnostic conviction as to final causes: "ignorance the most invincible," he declares, is all that is possible to man on that issue. [1886] But not only does he in his main work freely and loosely generalize on the phenomena of history and overleap the ethical problem: he penned shortly before his death a Lettre sur les causes premières, addressed to Fauriel, [1887] in which the aging intelligence is seen reverting to à priori processes, and concluding in favour of a "sort of stoic pantheism" [1888] with a balance towards normal theism and a belief in immortality. The final doctrine did not in the least affect the argument of the earlier, which was simply one of positive science; but the clerical world, which had in the usual fashion denounced the scientific doctrine, not on the score of any attack by Cabanis upon religion, but because of its incompatibility with the notion of the soul, naturally made much of the mystical, [1889] and accorded its framer authority from that moment. As for the conception of "vitalism" put forward in the Letter to Fauriel by way of explanation of the phenomena of life, it is but a reversion to the earlier doctrine of Stahl, of which Cabanis had been a partisan in his youth. [1890] The fact remains that he gave an enduring impulse to positive science, [1891] his own final vacillation failing to arrest the employment of the method he had inherited and improved. Most people know him solely through one misquotation, the famous phrase that "the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile." This is not only an imperfect statement of his doctrine: it suppresses precisely the idea by which Cabanis differentiates from pure "sensationalism." What he taught was that "impressions, reaching the brain, set it in activity, as aliments reaching the stomach excite it to a more abundant secretion of gastric juice.... The function proper to the first is to perceive particular impressions, to attach to them signs, to combine different impressions, to separate them, to draw from them judgments and determinations, as the function of the second is to act on nutritive substances," etc. [1892] It is after this statement of the known processus, and after pointing out that there is as much of pure inference in the one case as in the other, that he concludes: "The brain in a manner digests impressions, and makes organically the secretion of thought" and this conclusion, he points out, disposes of the difficulty of those who "cannot conceive how judging, reasoning, imagining, can ever be anything else than feeling. The difficulty ceases when one recognizes, in these different operations, the action of the brain upon the impressions which are passed on to it." The doctrine is, in short, an elementary truth of psychological science, as distinguished from the pseudo-science of the Ego considered as an entity. To that pseudo-science Cabanis gave a vital wound; and his derided formula is for true science to-day almost a truism. The attacks made upon his doctrine in the next generation only served to emphasize anew the eternal dilemma of theism. On the one hand his final "vitalism" was repugnant to those who, on traditional lines, insisted upon a distinction between "soul" and "vital force"; on the other hand, those who sought to make a philosophic case for theism against him made the usual plunge into pantheism, and were reproached accordingly by the orthodox. [1893] All that remained was the indisputable "positive" gain.