KIDD'S OWN JOURNAL. 



229 



responded to the place where the blow had been 

 received. By degrees her arm became weakened 

 and almost paralysed ; her lower jaw trembled 

 unceasingly ; she was frequently attacked with 

 convulsions. But, as an offset to these misfor- 

 tunes, her intellectual faculties had acquired an 

 uncommon degree of vigor, and though she was 

 only in her eleventh year, the features of her 

 face, and her singularly sedate behavior, would 

 have made her pass for a grown-up woman. 



Gretry, in his memoirs of himself, tells us 

 thai he owed the development of his genius for 

 music, to a violent contusion he received on 

 the head, by the fall of a large log. Haller tells 

 us of an idiot, who, having received a severe 

 wound on the head, exhibited some understand- 

 ing so long as the wound continued open ; but 

 relapsed into imbecility so soon as a cure was 

 effected. The same phenomenon often happens 

 in regard to the other organs. Haller again re- 

 lates, that a person attacked with inflammation of 

 the eye, acquired, in consequence, such energy in 

 the organ of vision, during the course of his 

 disease, that he could see even by night. It is 

 thus with all the inert organs, and those whose 

 development is defective ; irritation developes or 

 greatly augments their faculties. These examples 

 prove, more and more, that the innatcness of the 

 properties of the soul and mind, and their de- 

 pendence on organisation, must pass for demon- 

 strated truths. 



It is true, that in a state of health, man does 

 not feel that he exercises his intellectual faculties 

 by means of material organs ; but he is equally 

 unconscious that digestion, nutrition, and secre- 

 tion are exercised in him by material apparatuses. 

 Inattentive to the nature of his being, to the 

 phenomena which relate to it, and to their 

 causes, he hardly dreams that the difference which 

 shows itself in him, according to the difference of 

 age, in the exercise of his propensities and his 

 faculties, is the result of the change which has 

 taken place in his organisation. " We must, con- 

 sequently," as Herder says, " pardon the error of 

 the people, when, in the midst of the dream 

 of life, they regard the reason with which 

 they are endowed as independent of the senses 

 and the organs, and raise it to the rank of a pri- 

 mordial and pure faculty. The observer of nature, 

 on the contrary, who knows, by experience, the 

 origin and the whole course of human life, and 

 who, by the study of the history of nature, can 

 trace the chain of the gradual perfection of the ani- 

 mal kingdom, up to man, is unceasingly reminded 

 of the influence of organisation. Every thing shows 

 him, that man no more makes himself, as respects 

 the use of his intellectual faculties, than he de- 

 pends on himself for his birth." Malebranche 

 has also said with reason, " that the difference in 

 the tastes of nations and even of individuals, for 

 the various kinds of music, arises in a great mea- 

 sure from differences in organisation ; that, in 

 general, our propensities and our faculties depend 

 on the same cause ; and that, consequently, we 

 cannot better employ our time than in seeking 

 the material causes of the changes which befal 

 us, in order to learn to know ourselves. Let us 

 hope that men will not long defer to acknow- 

 ledge, generally, as Bonnet says, that it is only 

 by the physical, that we can penetrate into the 



moral nature of man, and that, consequently, the 

 basis of all the philosophy of the human mind, is 

 a knowledge of the functions of the brain. 



SECTION IV. 



OF FATALISM, MATERIALISM, AND MORAL LIBERTY. 



_ In the preceding sections, I have proved, by in- 

 disputable facts, that the faculties of the soul and 

 the mind are innate, and that their exercise de- 

 pends on the organisation. I have also shown 

 that the origin of the moral and intellectual 

 faculties, and the different modes in which they 

 are manifested, can be explained in no other 

 way. But, there is a kind of objection, which 

 new truths never escape, especially when they 

 may lead to great results. Ignorance, prejudice, 

 envy, and often bad faith, endeavor to combat 

 these truths. If they cannot attack the principles 

 of a doctrine, they try at least to render it sus- 

 pected, by the dangerous consequences of which 

 they accuse it. Thus, it is reproached to the 

 physiology of the brain, that it overturns the first 

 foundations of morality and religion ; that it 

 eminently favors materialism and fatalism ; and 

 that, consequently, it denies free will. History 

 teaches that the same has always happened to 

 every discovery. 



The followers of the different schools of philo- 

 sophy among the Greeks, mutually accused each 

 other of impiety and of perjury. The people, in 

 turn, detested the philosophers, and accused 

 those who sought to discern the principles of 

 things, of invading, in a presumptuous manner, 

 the rights of the Divinity. The novelty of the 

 opinions of Pythagoras, caused his expulsion from 

 Athens ; those of Anaxagoras threw him into 

 prison. The Abderides treated Democritus as 

 insane, because he wished to discover in dead 

 bodies the cause of insanity ; and Socrates, for 

 having demonstrated the unity of God, was con- 

 demned to drink hemlock. 



The same scandal has been renewed in all 

 ages and among all nations. Many of those who 

 distinguished themselves in the fourteenth cen- 

 tury by their knowledge in the natural sciences, 

 were punished with death, as magicians. Galileo, 

 for having proved the motion of the earth, was 

 imprisoned at the age of seventy years. Those 

 who first maintained that climate influences the 

 intellectual faculties of nations, made themselves 

 suspected of materialism. 



In general, nature sports in a singular manner, 

 and yet always uniformly, with new truths and 

 those who discover them. With what indigna- 

 tion and what animosity have men repulsed the 

 greatest benefits ! For example, the potato, 

 Peruvian bark, vaccination, &c. As soon as 

 Varolius made his anatomical discoveries, he was 

 decried by Silvius as the most ignorant, the most 

 senseless, the most infamous of men : Vesanum, 

 literarum imperitissimum arrogantissimum, ca- 

 lunmiatorem, maledicentissimum, rerum "omnium 

 ignarissimum, transfugam impium, ingratum, 

 monstrum ignoranti?e, impietas exemplar, perni- 

 ciosissimum quod pestilentiali halitu Europam 

 venenat, etc. Varolius was reproached with 

 dazzling his hearers by a captious eloquence, and 

 with producing, artificially, the prolongation of 



