EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY 



Esquirol and others to extend the reform to the prov- 

 inces ; but the epochal turning-point had been reached 

 with Pinel's labors of the closing years of the eighteenth 

 century. 



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 expression of a diseased condition of the brain. 

 This realization made it clear, as never before, how in- 

 timately the mind and the body are linked one to the 

 other. And so it chanced that, in striking the shackles 

 from the insane, Pinel and his confreres struck a blow 

 also, unwittingly, at time -honored philosophical tra- 

 ditions. The liberation of the insane from their dun- 

 geons 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 par- 

 ticular 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, 

 focalized his attention upon the brain and its functions. 

 This earliest of specialists in brain studies was a Ger- 

 man by birth but Parisian by adoption, Dr. Franz 

 Joseph Gall, originator of the since-notorious system 

 of phrenology. The merited disrepute into which this 

 VOL. iv. 17 247 



