P. Flourens

“ Now, the consciousness which gives me the unity of the moi, gives me not less assuredly the continuity of the moi. Descartes’ admirable words are: “I find that there is in us an intellectual memory.” [180]
The consciousness tells me that I am one, and Gall insists that I am multiple; the consciousness tells me I am free, and Gall avers that there is no moral liberty; the consciousness endows me with the continuity of my [124] understanding, but Cabanis and Broussais tell me that my understanding is nothing but an act. ”

“ The understanding survives the loss of sight and hearing. It might survive the loss of all the senses. To interrupt the communication between the sense and the brain, is enough to insure the loss of the sense. The mere compression of the brain, which abolishes the intellection, abolishes all the senses. Far, therefore, from being organs of the intelligence, the organs of the senses are not even organs of the senses, they do not even exercise their functions as organs of the senses, except through the medium of the intelligence, and this intelligence resides only in the brain. ”

“ Now here is the sum and the substance of Gall’s psycology. For the understanding, essentially a unit faculty, he substitutes a multitude of little understandings or faculties, distinct and isolate. And, as these faculties, which perform just as he wills them to do—which he multiplies according to his pleasure, [32] seem in his eyes to explain certain phenomena which are not well explained by the lights of ordinary philosophy, he triumphs!
He does not perceive that an explanation, which is words merely, adapts itself to any and to every thing. ”

“ If, in the same manner, I examine the memory, the imagination, or any other one of my faculties, I find not one that is not very limited and very small. Within me there is only my will or my liberty of free will, which I feel to be so great that I conceive not the idea of another more full and of greater extent. ”

“ There is a most complete difference between instinct and understanding.
“In instinct all is blind, necessary, and invariable. In understanding every thing is elective, conditional, and modifiable.
“The beaver which builds its house, and the bird that constructs its nest, act only by instinct.
“The dog and the horse, that learn even the meaning of several of our words, and who pay obedience to us, do so by understanding.
“In instinct all is innate. The beaver builds without having learned to build: all that he does is from fatality. ”

“ Thus, we find that the faculties alone are [58] possessed of forces. These forces alone are endowed with organs; and these organs, by which they are kept separate from each other, separate them to distances sufficiently great to hinder, in certain cases, one given faculty from exercising any influence over another. Therefore, there is no such thing as unity; there is no unit faculty, no unit understanding; there is no me; and if there be no me, there can be no soul.
In the same way he abolishes the freewill. ”

“ The brain alone, therefore, is the organ of the soul;—is it the whole brain—the brain taken en masse? Gall thought so, and Spurzheim followed Gall’s opinion; and all the [30] phrenologists who have come after them have followed the examples of Gall and Spurzheim.
Yet, after all, it amounts to nothing. If we deprive an animal of its cerebellum, it loses only its locomotive action. If we deprive it of its tubercula quadrigemina, it loses its sight only; if we destroy its medulla oblongata, it loses its respiratory movements, and in consequence thereof, its life. ”

“ He very properly distinguishes the senses from the understanding; but, as will be elsewhere seen, he endows each sense with all the attributes of the understanding. He escapes from one error only to fall into another. ”

“ Indeed, Spurzheim’s expedient for rendering himself master of the primary faculties is very simple. He creates a word: he calls the instinct of propagation amativity, the propensity to steal, convoitivity; courage is combativity, &c. &c.
Gall and Spurzheim talk a great deal about nomenclature; but they do not perceive, that as to nomenclature, the first difficulty, and [108] indeed the only one, is to get at simple facts. Whoever has come to simple facts, is very nigh to a good nomenclature. ”

“ Gall had located the instinct of murder in a given part of the brain; and he supposed, be it understood, that this part existed only in the brain of the carnivorous animals. But see, it is found in the brain of the herbivora; and one would suppose that the phrenologists would be in trouble about it. Don’t deceive yourself, the instinct of murder is the instinct of destruction. Spurzheim denominates it destructivity; and the herbivorous animals must possess it, for they eat plants and consequently destroy them. ”

“ Memory, judgment, imagination, &c., in a word, all our faculties, are therefore of the soul, and therefore come from the soul, and not from the senses.
There is no philosopher who has exaggerated more than Helvetius the influence of the senses upon the intelligence. But Helvetius says, “In whatsoever manner we interrogate experience, she always answers that any greater or lesser superiority of mind is independent of any greater or lesser perfection of the senses.” [17]
But I leave Helvetius and Condillac, and I return to Descartes, to Willis, to Lapeyronie, to Haller, Sœmmerring, Cuvier, &c. ”

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

“ By the distinction that separates blind and necessary actions from elective and conditional ones—or, in a word, instinct from intelligence—all contradiction disappears, and order succeeds to confusion. Whatever in animals is understanding, does not in any degree approach the excellence of the human understanding; and whatsoever, under the appearance of understanding, seemed superior to the human understanding, is in fact a mere result of a mechanical and blind force. ”

“ If we are materialists because we do not admit the existence of a unit-faculty of the soul, but recognise several primitive faculties, we ask whether the ordinary division of the faculties of the soul into understanding, will, attention, memory, judgment, imagination, and [67] affections and passions, expresses nothing more than a primitive unit-faculty? ”

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

“ In animals there are, therefore, two distinct and primary forces—instinct and understanding. As long as our conceptions of these forces were confused, all [135] our views and opinions in regard to the actions of animals remained obscure and contradictory. Among these actions, some exhibited man every where superior to the brute; while others appeared to accord to the brute creation the superiority over man—a contradiction almost as deplorable as absurd! ”

“ Thus there is no mind (pure hypothesis) ; no faculties but those of the organs (the faculties are the acts of material organs) ; no understanding, except as a simple phenomenon of the nervous action (understanding and all its manifestations are phenomena of nervous action) ; consequently, there is no psycology; there is nothing but physiology; and even (for it should be clearly understood) nothing but Broussais’s physiology. ”

“ They do not possess reflection, that supreme faculty with which the mind of man is endowed, and which enables him to turn his intellectual power inwards, so as to study and know the nature of his own understanding.
“Reflection, thus defined, is then the boundary that separates human intelligence from that of the brute creation: and in fact it cannot be denied that this furnishes a strong line of demarcation between them. Thought, which contemplates itself; understanding, which sees itself and studies itself; knowledge, which knows itself ”

“ In order to have a just view of human responsibility, it is indispensable to entertain the justest notions of the nature of the human mind. If Phrenology be an unsubstantial hypothesis, no phrenologist is fit to be a [viii] juror, a judge, or a legislator: for since all human law—the whole social compact—and indeed all divine law, as relative to human propensities and actions—is founded on some real nature of the soul and mind, there is risk that manifestly erroneous conceptions of the freewill, of the conscience, of the judgment, and the perceptive powers, &c. ”

“ And take good care to observe further, that if there be in us any thing that belongs to the consciousness, it is evidently and par excellence the sense of our personal unity; or what is more, the consciousness of our moral liberty. ”

“ There are thousands among the young and ardent and curious of our countrymen and countrywomen, whose minds may be likewise led astray from the truth; but if it be mischievous [ix] for the judge and the juror and the legislator to entertain erroneous views upon the nature of the understanding, the mind, or the soul, it is equally to be deprecated where the error is sown broadcast in the land. ”

“ What they ought to know, what they ought to be told, is, that although Providence has left to man the power to do evil, he has also endowed him with the power to do good. That which man ought to know, that which [64] should be instilled into his mind and heart is, that he has a free power, and that this power ought not to be misdirected; and that he who in his own nature misdirects it, no matter under what form of philosophy he takes refuge, is a being who degrades his nature. ”

“ The animal may, therefore, lose all that Gall calls surface of the brain, without losing any of his faculties. Therefore it cannot be that the organs of the faculties reside at the surface of the brain.
And comparative anatomy is not less opposite to Gall’s opinions than is direct experiment itself. I shall not follow him here in the detail of his localizations. How could these localizations have any meaning? He does not even know whether an organ is a fascicle of fibres, or a fibre. ”

“ Gall did not foresee that a physiological experiment (and a very sure one it is) would one day demonstrate that the sense receives the impression but does not perceive it, and that, consequently, it is endowed neither with conscience nor reminiscence, &c.
When the cerebral lobes or hemispheres [97] are removed from an animal, the animal immediately loses its sight.
And yet nothing, as regards the eyes themselves, has been changed; objects continue to be depicted upon the retina, the iris retains its contractility, and the optic nerve its excitability. ”

“ So we perceive, in the first place, contractility explains innervation; and then, that something more is wanting. And as nervous contractility is nothing but a mental fiction (a nerve never moves, never contracts, when it is touched) the whole matter tapers down to this something more, or to that other thing. ”

“ This being conceded, it is evident that the entire brain cannot be divided, as the phrenologists divide it, into a number of small organs, each of which is the seat of a distinct intellectual faculty; for the entire brain does not serve the purposes of what is called the intelligence. The hemispheres alone are the seats of the intellectual power; and consequently, the question as to whether the organ, the seat of the intelligence may be divided into several distinct organs, is a question relative solely to the uses and powers of the hemispheres. ”

“ In one word, animals feel, know, think; but man is the only one of all created beings to whom has been given the power of feeling that he feels, of knowing that he knows, and of thinking that he thinks. ”

“ Those of Gall’s opinions which it seems ought not to be adopted, are: that in which he supposes the nerve fibres to be born (he understands the word to the letter) of the gray matter; that in which he contends that the convolutions of the brain are merely foldings of the medullary fibres, and can therefore be unfolded; that in which he compares the rete mucosum of the skin to the gray matter of the encephalon, &c., &c. ”

“ Gall, in an especial manner, contends against the assertion of Bichat, who remarks that “The influence of the passions is exerted invariably upon the organic life, and not upon the animal life; all the signs that characterise them are referable to the former and not to the latter. Gestures, which are the mute exponents of the sentiments and the understanding, afford a remarkable proof of this truth. When we wish [22] to signify something relative to the memory, the imagination, to our perception, to the judgment, &c. ”

“ He observed and studied always, and with so much the greater success [138] because “people never suspected that they had to do (these are his own words) with a man who knew perfectly well that the basis of human character continues to be always the same, and that merely the objects that interest us change with the progress of years.” ”