[BRETT] REVOLT AGAINST REASON 13 



muscles. The same writer fell back on the early physiology of the 

 emotions and explained the love of the animals by the temperature 

 of the blood; the presence of the agreeable object causes physiological 

 changes affecting the heart, while danger produces movement through 

 affecting the spleen and the gall. Pardies further quoted the irra- 

 tional fears of human beings, as for example the effect of a mouse on 

 the feelings of a woman. In short, the whole movement, though 

 curious in its focus and interests, produced a considerable amount of 

 able writing which is closely akin in its results to the good and bad 

 points of the later attempts to show how far consciousness is an 

 epiphenomenon. Pardies clearly was not far from the views on 

 emotions afterwards made popular by the Lange-James theory. 



II 



The importance of a scientific theory must be measured in different 

 ways. We may, for example, think primarily of the changes visible 

 in the details of scientific thought and progress; or we may diverge 

 toward the hopes and fears, the latent desires and professed aims 

 which are affected by each new explanation of life. This interaction 

 of scientific thought and public opinion deserves to be studied closely; 

 for it shows that they are organic one to another, and never more so 

 than to-day. The science that neither affects, nor is affected by, the 

 ultimate beliefs and most secret aspirations of mankind is dead; so 

 dead that it can hardly be discovered anywhere in the annals of thought; 

 for what history preserves is what, in its time and day, occupied the 

 minds and busied the tongues of the people. This does not mean 

 that popularity is the test of rightness; nor does it endorse a prag- 

 matistic doctrine by saying that a theory becomes true when it is 

 most widely believed ; but in every age or generation the great truths 

 are the nurture by which that age brings its culture to maturity, and 

 the gradual assimilation of those truths is the unobserved and unin- 

 tended process by which every generation achieves its growth and 

 development. 



The keynote of the late seventeeth century was dualism; a 

 dualism was created by leaving untouched the traditional view of 

 Reason while new emphasis was laid on the body and its functions. 

 The increased weight of learning turned the scales in favour of experi- 

 mental knowledge, till finally intellect and "pure reason" were deemed 

 of no account; thus the eighteenth century passed over from the 

 equilibrium of dualism to a thoroughgoing scepticism. There is no 

 possibility of mistaking the accents of Hume or Voltaire or LaMettrie, 

 or even Cabanis. Hume disputes the power of reason to do anything 



