74 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



'' Eapports " show. Nevertheless, later materialists find warrant for 

 their most striking metajDhor in his pages. As the liver secretes bile 

 and the kidneys urine, so the brain secretes thought; thus ran Karl 

 Vogt's raucous challenge (1847). Cabanis employed the very phrase 

 " secretion of thought " which, as his editor, Peisse, says, " has remained 

 celebrated." But the classical passage, also in the te Eapports," reads 

 as follows : " In order to arrive at a correct idea of those operations 

 from which thought arises, we must consider the brain as a particular 

 organ, destined specially to produce it in the same way as the stomach 

 and the intestines are there to perform digestion, the liver to filter the 

 bile, the parotid, maxillary and sublingual glands to prepare the 

 salivary juice." 3 This is the clear summons to a physiological psy- 

 chology. Very naturally, Cabanis aimed to supply what Condillac 

 omitted. Condillac's sensationalism, like that of the English school, 

 found basis in the external senses. It therefore missed those organic 

 and internal changes which physiology alone could set forth. Cabanis, 

 accordingly, insisted that multitudes of impressions proceed continually 

 from the internal organs to the brain, and that the conditions of the 

 cerebro-spinal system form a determining factor in this process. Or, 

 to be more emphatic, as it continues to maintain its unstable equi- 

 librium, the organism originates vital feelings within itself — feelings 

 that bear no direct reference to the external world. That is, the im- 

 pressions of Locke and Hume do not play upon a tabula rasa, but are 

 met, and twisted, by these organic feelings. The unconscious joins up 

 with the conscious. Of this process instinct offers a conspicuous 

 example, Here, primordial experiences, traceable to the embryo, pro- 

 vide a foundation of organic sensation which (in the light of the 

 doctrine of evolution) would explain away psychological processes as 

 automatic — as epiphenomena of the bodily substrate. In this respect 

 Cabanis was a prophet. Nevertheless, despite his studies of age, sex, 

 temperament, sensibility, irritability, habit, climate, the foetus and 

 instinct, he fails to work through his great theme with the necessary 

 grasp upon detail. His epoch would not let him. Yet he saw the 

 promised land afar off. For, to him, psychology was already a natural 

 science. It traffics with phenomena, never with metaphysical realities, 

 and its material must be found in the relation of mental states to 

 physiological conditions. Hampered everywhere by contemporary 

 ignorance of nervous anatomy, he still contrived to formulate a vivid 

 and convincing psycho-physiological schema, for which, we may as well 

 confess, due praise has never reached him. Physiology passed to 

 another land, and he fell into an oblivion rather discreditable to the 

 historical insight of those who came to elaborate his anticipations. 



Plainly a physiological psychology can not emerge in absence of a 



8 (Euvres, Vol. III., p. 159. 



