PHYSIOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY 73 



THE MOVEMENT TOWARDS "PHYSIOLOGICAL" 



PSYCHOLOGY. II 



By Professor R. M. WENLEY 



UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN 



IV 



THIS brings us at length to the true physiological line, and to the 

 rapid assimilation of psychology to positive science. The start- 

 ing point lies in that French group whom Napoleon nicknamed con- 

 temptuously, les Ideologues: Cabanis, de Tracy, Laromiguiere, and 

 Maine de Biran. 1 Cabanis and de Tracy were the leaders in all essen- 

 tials. Their movement formed part of the mighty revolutionary up- 

 heaval. By analysis of sensations and ideas they proposed to discover a 

 method of remoulding society, government and education for practical 

 purposes. De Tracy (175-1-1836) elaborated what Beneke would have 

 termed the " inner " side of ideology. His noteworthy efforts lie in 

 the fields of language, grammar and logic, of economics and govern- 

 ment, of morals and education. Yet the influence of science upon him, 

 as upon his fellows, produced results that should receive notice here. 

 He anticipated Comte in the view that knowledge, properly so called, 

 consists in an organized system of the sciences ; " positive science," 

 as he declares, and to him, more than to Comte and his pupils, we owe 

 this term, now beatified. In the second place, and coming to the 

 physiological reference, he was the first to recognize the importance 

 of muscular activity as a factor in consciousness. 2 This formed his 

 point of contact with Cabanis, who studied what Beneke would have 

 called the " outer " — the physiological accompaniments of psychological 

 processes. 



Cabanis (1757-1808) inherited the English sensational tendencies 

 represented in France by Condillac, but he added that acquaintance 

 with the human body which he acquired as a physician. In his person 

 the philosophical and physiological lines coincided. His principal 

 work, " Rapports du Physique et du Morale de l'Homme," grew out of 

 a series of papers read before the French Institute and published in its 

 proceedings for 1798-99. So far as he possessed any consistent phil- 

 osophical standpoint, Cabanis was a pantheist (and, in speculative 

 physiology, therefore, a vitalist), as his posthumous " Lettres sur les 

 Causes premieres" (1824) and his discussion of the Stoics in the 



*Cf! "Les Ideologues," Fr. Picavet (1891). 

 2 Ibid., pp. 377, 337 f. 



