PHYSIOLOGY OF THE PASSIONS. 553 



and so losing itself, shall be regulated and coordinated to the attain- 

 ment of one end. 



These reflections are addressed neither to those who imagine that 

 psychology has done all its work already, nor to those who think that 

 work never can be done ; we submit them to those who, following at- 

 tentively the double movement of physiology and of psychology, find 

 that, at least, the progress made by each of these sciences is correla- 

 tive with that made by the other, and inseparable from it. Philoso- 

 phers, whose position and whose previous inquiries seemed very un- 

 likely to invite them to the study of physical man, now devote them- 

 selves to this study with enlightened ardor. Experimenters, whose 

 reputation and whose habits might appear very unapt to incline them 

 toward the study of moral man, now pursue that study with conscien- 

 tious diligence. The result is, a profounder and more precise science 

 of the relations between the physical and the moral — a science that is 

 full of revelations and surprises. 



I. 



The ancients had a theory with regard to the passions which, at 

 bottom, differs not much from that countenanced in these later times, 

 by experimental physiology and pathology. They erred with regard 

 to the role of the humors and the physiological mechanism in the pro- 

 duction of passional phenomena; but they had closely observed, and, 

 with rare precision, defined the influence exerted by these on the vis- 

 cera of the abdominal region. Their poetry and their medical writ- 

 ings are full of expressions which show how ancient is the knowledge 

 of this relation between the soul's sentiments and the movements of 

 heart, lungs, stomach, and liver. 1 The ancients even went so far as 

 to localize the passions in the viscera ; and their theory on this sub- 

 ject is expressed in the aphorism, " Splene vi&Qwt, felle irascunt, jecore 

 amant, pulmone jactantur," where the spleen, the gall-bladder, the 

 liver, and the lungs, are represented as the seat respectively of mirth, 

 anger, love, and vainglory. The physiology of the passions, so far as 

 it could be and was studied by the authors of ancient times, was, from 

 the stand-point of description, a science of such exactitude that there 

 is now little to be added to it. Still, they mistook the real seats of 

 those states of the soul ; and Descartes, in his famous work on the 

 passions, was the first to hold that their seat is in the brain. He lo- 

 calized all passional states in that organ. "The soul," he says, " can 

 suffer directly only through the brain ; " and, in another place, " The 



1 "Keason sits arbitress within the breast ; 

 For there it is our conscious being dwells ; 

 There fear and dread anxiety creep chill, 

 And soothing joys play flattering round the heart, 

 Which shows the soul is there that joys and fears." 



Lucretius, C. F. Johnson's translation. 



