PROGRESS IN EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY 



The significance of this -wise and humane reform, in 

 the present connection, is the fact that these studies of the 

 insane gave emphasis to the novel idea, which by-and-by 

 became accepted as beyond question, that " demoniacal 

 possession " is in reality no more than the outward ex- 

 pression of a diseased condition of the brain. This real- 

 ization made it clear, as never before, how intimately 

 the mind and the body are linked one to the other. And 

 so it chanced that in striking the shackles from the in- 

 sane, Pinel and his confreres struck a blow also, un- 

 wittingly, at time -honored philosophical traditions. 

 The liberation of the insane from their dungeons was 

 an augury of the liberation of psychology from the 

 musty recesses of metaphysics. Hitherto psychology, 

 in so far as it existed at all, was but the subjective 

 study of individual minds; in future it must become 

 objective as well, taking into account also the relations 

 which the mind bears to the body, and in particular to 

 the brain and nervous system. 



The necessity for this collocation was advocated quite 

 as earnestly, and even more directly, by another worker 

 of this period, whose studies were allied to those of 

 alienists, and who, even more actively than they, focal- 

 ized his attention upon the brain and its functions. This 

 earliest of specialists in brain studies was a German by 

 birth, but Parisian by adoption, Dr. Franz Joseph Gall, 

 originator of the since notorious system of phrenology. 

 The merited disrepute into which this system has fallen 

 through the expositions of peripatetic charlatans should 

 not make us forget that Dr. Gall himself was appar- 

 ently a highly educated physician, a careful student 

 of the brain and mind according to the best light 

 of his time, and, withal, an earnest and honest be- 



399 



