much better with a little exercise of reason, he is continually relapsing into those freaks of the robber and oppressor, may perhaps be derived from the reaction of his struggle for thousands of years with lions and bears, and earlier still perhaps with anthropoid apes. This by no means excludes the simultaneous development of genuine virtues side by side with intelligence in the circle of the tribal and family community. Let us only think for a moment of the enormous gulf which even in ancient civilisation still prevails between the internal life of the individual states and towns and their often infinitely barbarous behaviour towards defeated foes!

We cannot, therefore, even on psychological grounds, reject the relationship of man with the ape, even though it were on this score, that at least the ourang and the chimpanzee are much too gentle and peaceable for those cavedwellers to have proceeded from them, who conquered the gigantic lions of primeval times and greedily devoured the smoking brains from their shattered skulls.

CHAPTER II.

BRAIN AND SOUL.

WE take up the old and favourite theme of Materialism, which it is indeed no longer so easy to dispose of as in the last century. The first intoxication of great physical and mathematical discoveries is over; and as the world, with each fresh deciphering of a secret, offered yet new riddles, and as it were visibly grew great and wider, so there revealed themselves, too, in organic life abysses of unexplored connexions which as yet had been hardly thought of. An age that could quite seriously believe that in the mechanical masterpieces of Droz and Vaucanson 20 it had come upon the traces of the secrets of life, was hardly capable of measuring the difficulties which have accumulated in the mechanical explanation of psychical phenomena only the higher as we have gone on. Then the childishly naïve conception could still be put forward with the pretension of a scientific hypothesis, that every idea has its particular fibre in the brain, and that the vibration of these fibres constitutes consciousness.

The opponents of Materialism of course easily showed that between consciousness and external motion there is an impassable gulf; but natural feeling made no great matter of this gulf, because we easily see that it is inevitable. In some form or other the opposition of subject and object always recurs, only that in other systems it may be more easily bridged by a phrase.

If in the last century, instead of this metaphysical

20 Vide vol. ii. p. 75.

objection, all the physical experiments had been made which are now at our service, Materialism would perhaps have been defeated with its own weapons. Perhaps, too, not; for the same facts which dispose of the then views. of the nature of the cerebral activity, strike no less heavily perhaps at all the favourite ideas of metaphysics. There could hardly be propounded, in fact, a single proposition as to brain and soul which is not refuted by the facts. There are, of course, excepted partly vague generalities, as, e.g., that the brain is the most important organ for the activities of the soul; partly propositions relating to the connexion of particular parts of the brain with the activity of particular nerves. The unfruitfulness of brain investigations is due, however, only partially to the difficulty of the matter. The main cause seems to be the entire absence of any workable hypothesis, or even of any approximate idea, as to the nature of the cerebral activity. So that even educated men constantly fall back again, as it were from despair, upon the theories, long since refuted by the facts, of a localisation of the cerebral activity according to the various functions of the intellect and the emotions. We have, it is true, repeatedly expressed ourselves against the view that the mere continuance of obsolete opinions is so great a hindrance to science as is commonly supposed; but here it does in fact appear as though the phantom of the soul showing itself on the ruins of Scholasticism continually confuses the whole question. We could easily show that this ghost, if we may so designate the reaction of the obsolete doctrines of the school-psychology, plays a great part amongst the men who consider themselves entirely free from it, amongst our Materialistic leaders; nay, that their whole conception of the way in which we must conceive the cerebral activity is essentially dominated by the popular conceptions which were formerly held as to the mythical faculties of the soul. Yet we believe that these conceptions, if only a rational positive idea appears as to what is

properly to be expected of the functions of the brain, will disappear just as easily as they now stubbornly maintain their ground.

Here we cannot but think above all of the crudest form of this theory of localisation, viz., of Phrenology. It is not only a necessary point for our historical treatment, but at the same time, because of its intelligible working out, a suitable subject for the development of those critical principles which will farther on find an extended application.

When Gall propounded his theory of the composition of the brain from a series of special organs for special mental activities, he started from the entirely correct view that the commonly accepted primary faculties of the soul, such as Attention, Judgment, Will, Memory, &c., are mere abstractions; that they classify the various modes of cerebral activity, without however possessing that elementary significance which is ascribed to them. He was led by observations of the most various kinds to assume a series of primary organs in the brain, whose prominent development was supposed to lend the individual certain permanent qualities, and whose joint action to determine the individual's whole character. The mode in which Gall made his discoveries and ranged his proofs was that he sought for some very striking examples of particular peculiarities, such as may easily be found amongst criminals, lunatics, and men of genius or eccentricity. He looked now on the skull of the individual in question for a particularly prominent spot. If it was found, the organ was provisionally treated as discovered, and next 'experience,' comparative anatomy, animal psychology, and other sources. had to lend their aid to confirm it. Many organs were established merely on observations in the animal world, and then carried farther in the case of man. Of more exact scientific method there is in Gall's procedure not the faintest trace discoverable, a circumstance that was not unfavourable to the spread of his theory. For this kind of inquiry every one has talent and aptitude; its results

VOL. III.

H

are almost always interesting, and 'experience' regularly confirms the doctrines which are built upon such theories. It is the same kind of experience which confirmed Astrology too, which still confirms the healing power of most medicines (not merely the homoeopathic ones), and which daily renders manifest the visible aid of saints and deities in such surprising instances. Phrenology is, therefore, not in bad company; it is not a relapse into some fabulous degree of fantasy, but only a fruit of the common soil of the sham sciences, which even yet form the great mass of the learning on which jurists, doctors, theologians, and philosophers pride themselves. Its position is indeed hazardous, in that it falls within a sphere which very well admits of all the cautions of the exact sciences, and that it is nevertheless carried out without any kind of regard to the requirements of scientific method; yet even this it has at least in common with homoeopathy.

Our present phrenologists defend their opinions, as a rule, by violent tirades against those objections which are often levelled against sham science without much reflection, because no one cares to trouble himself seriously with the matter. Any attempt, on the other hand, at a positive foundation will be sought in vain in the modern treatises on phrenology. While Gall and Spurzheim worked at a time when the methods of investigating such subjects were still quite undeveloped, our modern phrenologists engage in sterile polemics instead of doing even slight justice to the enormous progress of science. It still holds, as Johannes Müller said in his 'Physiology': "With regard to the principle, its possibility cannot a priori be denied; but experience shows that the system of organs proposed by Gall has absolutely no foundation in facts, and the histories of injuries to the head are directly opposed to the existence of special regions of the brain destined for particular mental activities." 21 Some examples may make this 21 Handbuch d. Phys. d. Menschen, 3 Aufl., 1837, i. 855.