Volume 2

A history of psychology / by George Sidney Brett.

  • George Sidney Brett
Date:
1921
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: A history of psychology / by George Sidney Brett. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    382/404 (page 378)
    From this basis Cabanis builds up the whole structure of his teaching about the conscious life of man. We notice at once that he is not primarily concerned with Condillac’s subject, but Condillac was the most prominent psychologist of the day and Cabanis feels that he must define his attitude toward that standard. He does so in clear and precise terms. The chief fault to be found in Condillac is that he will not admit the existence of instincts in the proper sense : he insists that an instinct is a rapid inference. For Cabanis an instinct is thoroughly organic, wholly independent of the central consciousness and therefore wholly independent of the rational activities. Cabanis identifies the central Ega with the brain. He does not mean that the brain is the principal seat and organ of the soul, for he does not propose to assume the existence of an agency behind the visible agent : by the brain he means the supreme nervous mechan¬ ism which is indispensable for the operations called con¬ scious. It was from this point of view that he made his famous statement : “ To form a correct idea of the operations whose result is thought, it is necessary to regard the brain as a special organ whose particular function it is to produce thought just as the stomach and the intestines have the special function of carrying on the w'ork of digestion, the liver that of filtering the bile, etc.” Unscrupulous and perhaps unintelligent persons quoted this afterwards as the crowning proof of the materialism of Cabanis : clearly it is a sufficiently sound analogy which does no more than lay down the fundamental principle of cerebral physiology in its relation to psychology. The spiritualists who misused the passage were quite right in regarding it as the anti¬ thesis of the declaration made by Descartes that some operations of the mind, in fact all the important ones, are carried on without the help of the brain. A very few years after the death of Cabanis men were again discussing the futile question whether ecstasy was a non-corporeal state and whether the ” higher ” operations of the mind were conducted without the brain’s assistance. To return to the question of instinct. The fundamental point against Condillac is that the psychology of the statue excludes all co-operation in the organism, all sympathetic