A History of Science-4 [96]
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 insane, Pinel and his confreres struck a blow also, unwittingly, 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, focalized 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 exposition of peripatetic charlatans should not make us forget that Dr. Gall himself was apparently 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 believer in the validity of the system he had originated. The system itself, taken as a whole, was hopelessly faulty, yet it was not without its latent germ of truth, as later studies were to show. How firmly its author himself believed in it is evidenced by the paper which he contributed to the French Academy of Sciences in 1808. The paper itself was referred to a committee of which Pinel and Cuvier were members. The verdict of this committee was adverse, and justly so; yet the system condemned had at least one merit which its detractors failed to realize. It popularized the conception that the brain is the organ of mind. Moreover, by its insistence it rallied about it a band of scientific supporters, chief of whom was Dr. Kaspar Spurzlieim, a man of no mean abilities, who became the propagandist of phrenology in England and in America. Of course such advocacy and popularity stimulated opposition as well, and out of the disputations thus arising there grew presently a general interest in the brain as the organ of mind, quite aside from any preconceptions whatever as to the doctrines of Gall and Spurzheim.
Prominent among the unprejudiced class of workers who now appeared was the brilliant young Frenchman Louis Antoine Desmoulins, who studied first under the tutorage of the famous Magendie, and published jointly with him a classical work on the nervous system of vertebrates in 1825. Desmoulins made at least one discovery of epochal importance. He observed that the brains of persons dying in old age were lighter than the average and gave visible evidence of atrophy, and he reasoned that such decay is a normal accompaniment of senility. No one nowadays would question the accuracy of this observation, but the scientific world was not quite ready for it in 1825; for when Desmoulins announced his discovery to the French Academy, that august and somewhat patriarchal body was moved to quite unscientific wrath, and forbade the young iconoclast the privilege of further hearings. From which it is evident that the partially liberated spirit of the new psychology had by no means freed itself altogether, at the close of the first quarter of the nineteenth century, from the metaphysical cobwebs of its long incarceration.
FUNCTIONS OF THE NERVES
While studies of the brain were thus being inaugurated, the nervous system, which is the channel of communication between the brain and the outside world, was being interrogated with even more tangible results. The inaugural discovery was made in 1811 by Dr. (afterwards Sir Charles) Bell,[1] the famous English surgeon and experimental physiologist. It consisted of the observation that the
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 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 exposition of peripatetic charlatans should not make us forget that Dr. Gall himself was apparently 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 believer in the validity of the system he had originated. The system itself, taken as a whole, was hopelessly faulty, yet it was not without its latent germ of truth, as later studies were to show. How firmly its author himself believed in it is evidenced by the paper which he contributed to the French Academy of Sciences in 1808. The paper itself was referred to a committee of which Pinel and Cuvier were members. The verdict of this committee was adverse, and justly so; yet the system condemned had at least one merit which its detractors failed to realize. It popularized the conception that the brain is the organ of mind. Moreover, by its insistence it rallied about it a band of scientific supporters, chief of whom was Dr. Kaspar Spurzlieim, a man of no mean abilities, who became the propagandist of phrenology in England and in America. Of course such advocacy and popularity stimulated opposition as well, and out of the disputations thus arising there grew presently a general interest in the brain as the organ of mind, quite aside from any preconceptions whatever as to the doctrines of Gall and Spurzheim.
Prominent among the unprejudiced class of workers who now appeared was the brilliant young Frenchman Louis Antoine Desmoulins, who studied first under the tutorage of the famous Magendie, and published jointly with him a classical work on the nervous system of vertebrates in 1825. Desmoulins made at least one discovery of epochal importance. He observed that the brains of persons dying in old age were lighter than the average and gave visible evidence of atrophy, and he reasoned that such decay is a normal accompaniment of senility. No one nowadays would question the accuracy of this observation, but the scientific world was not quite ready for it in 1825; for when Desmoulins announced his discovery to the French Academy, that august and somewhat patriarchal body was moved to quite unscientific wrath, and forbade the young iconoclast the privilege of further hearings. From which it is evident that the partially liberated spirit of the new psychology had by no means freed itself altogether, at the close of the first quarter of the nineteenth century, from the metaphysical cobwebs of its long incarceration.
FUNCTIONS OF THE NERVES
While studies of the brain were thus being inaugurated, the nervous system, which is the channel of communication between the brain and the outside world, was being interrogated with even more tangible results. The inaugural discovery was made in 1811 by Dr. (afterwards Sir Charles) Bell,[1] the famous English surgeon and experimental physiologist. It consisted of the observation that the