Note 222 — Chapter XXI · FREETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

2. From France came likewise the impulse to a naturalistic handling of biology, long before the day of Darwin. The protagonist in this case was the physician P.-J.-G. Cabanis (1737–1808), the colleague of Laplace in the School of Sciences. Growing up in the generation of the Revolution, Cabanis had met, in the salon of Madame Helvétius, d’Holbach, Diderot, D’Alembert, Condorcet, Laplace, Condillac, Volney, Franklin, and Jefferson, and became the physician of Mirabeau. His treatise on the Rapports du physique et du morale de l’homme (1796–1802)222 might be described as the systematic application to psychology of that “positive” method to which all the keenest thought of the eighteenth century had been tending, yet with much of the literary or rhetorical tone by which the French writers of that age had nearly all been characterized. For Cabanis, the psychology of Helvétius and Condillac had been hampered by their ignorance of physiology;223 and he easily put aside the primary errors, such as the “equality of minds” and the entity of “the soul,” which they took over from previous thinkers. His own work is on the whole the most searching and original handling of the main problems of psycho-physiology that had yet been achieved; and to this day its suggestiveness has not been exhausted.