354 THE HISTORY OF BIOLOGY 



entire brain is the "intellectual organ" and maintains, in contrast to the 

 attempts of earlier times to localize the soul, that such a complex phenome- 

 non may very well require a complex organ as its foundation. On the other 

 hand, Rudolphi's attempt at a new systematic grouping of the animal king- 

 dom, into nerveless, single-nerved, and double-nerved, was not very success- 

 ful and was forgotten long ago — a scheme, in fact, which had already been 

 rejected by his contemporaries and which had to give way to Cuvier's better 

 and more natural basis of classification. 



His text-book on physiology 

 Rudolphi's most important work, however, was his Grundriss der Physiologic, 

 which occupied his old age and was still unfinished at his death. This work 

 best displays his great knowledge, founded on his own experiences and his 

 wide reading, as well as his critical faculty and elevated mode of thought. 

 Physiology, he says, is "the doctrine of the human organism." An organism 

 without life is unthinkable; when the one is created, the second must be 

 present; a dead body is not an organism, but only the remains of one. The 

 classifying science of physiology is therefore anthropology: here Rudolphi, 

 like Blumenbach, strongly insists upon man's dissimilarity from the apes, 

 but considers in opposition to the latter that the human genus should be 

 divided into species, not races. In this connexion he declares that human 

 beings cannot have originated from one single pair — a sentiment which, 

 during that reactionary period, it certainly required some courage to express. 

 The chapter on anatomy that follows this section is one of the most brilliant 

 parts of the work; the clear and concise manner in which he expounds the 

 composition of the human body was unrivalled at the time; as compared 

 with Bichat's tissue theory it represents a great advance, on account of both 

 its simple and concise grouping of the tissues and its sound criticism; here we 

 find no fantastic theories of life, no absurd speculations on symmetry, but a 

 clear and sober account of the different parts of the body, which is mostly 

 consistent with modern conceptions. In regard to the essence of life, Rudolphi 

 associates himself most closely with Reil's theory of life as bound up with 

 the form and mixture of matter, while Oken's and Schelling's extravagant 

 ideas are utterly repudiated. Likewise, he rejects Stahl's theory of the soul 

 as a cause of bodily phenomena: "Das Dasein oder das Hinxutreten eines Geistes 

 oder einer Seele xum Korper erkldrt uns das Leben nicht im geringsten. ' ' On the other 

 hand, he strongly emphasizes the importance of the chemical processes for 

 the vital functions, in this associating himself with Berzelius's animal 

 chemistry, which, thanks to his childhood's having been spent in Sweden, 

 Rudolphi was able to read in the original. His account of the functions of 

 the nervous system and the sensory organs is an extremely careful piece of 

 work, which sharply criticizes all the mystical nonsense that was prevalent 

 at that time: animal magnetism, interpretation of dreams, divining-rods, 



