A HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



tivities of the central nervous tissues, and that 

 these activities, like all other physical processes, 

 have a time element. To that old school of psy- 

 chologists* who scarcely cared more for the human 

 head than for the heels being interested only in 

 the mind such a linking of mind and body as was 

 thus demonstrated was naturally disquieting. But 

 whatever the inferences, there was no escaping the 

 facts. 



Of course this new movement has not been confined 

 to Germany. Indeed, it had long had exponents else- 

 where. Thus in England, a full century earlier, Dr. 

 Hartley had championed the theory of the close and in- 

 dissoluble dependence of the mind upon the brain, and 

 formulated a famous vibration theory of association 

 that still merits careful consideration. Then, too, in 

 France, at the beginning of the century, there was Dr. 

 Cabanis with his tangible, if crudely phrased, doctrine 

 that the brain digests impressions and secretes thought 

 as the stomach digests food and the liver secretes bile. 

 Moreover, Herbert Spencer's Principles of Psychology, 

 with its avowed co-ordination of mind and body and 

 its vitalizing theory of evolution, appeared in 1855, 

 half a decade before the work of Fechner. But these 

 influences, though of vast educational value, were theo- 

 retical rather than demonstrative, and the fact re- 

 mains that the experimental work which first attempt- 

 ed to gauge mental operations by physical principles 

 was mainly done in Germany. Wundt's Physiological 

 Psychology, with its full preliminary descriptions of the 

 anatomy of the nervous system, gave tangible ex- 

 pression to the growth of the new movement in 



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