Note 228 — Chapter XXI · FREETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

As for the conception of “vitalism” put forward in the Letter to Fauriel by way of explanation of the phenomena of life, it is but a reversion to the earlier doctrine of Stahl, of which Cabanis had been a partisan in his youth.228 The fact remains that he gave an enduring impulse to positive science,229 his own final vacillation failing to arrest the employment of the method he had inherited and improved. Most people know him solely through one misquotation, the famous phrase that “the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile.” This is not only an imperfect statement of his doctrine: it suppresses precisely the idea by which Cabanis differentiates from pure “sensationalism.” What he taught was that “impressions, reaching the brain, set it in activity, as aliments reaching the stomach excite it to a more abundant secretion of gastric juice.... The function proper to the first is to perceive particular impressions, to attach to them signs, to combine different impressions, to separate them, to draw from them judgments and determinations, as the function of the second is to act on nutritive substances,” etc.230 It is after this statement of the known processus, and after pointing out that there is as much of pure inference in the one case as in the other, that he concludes: “The brain in a manner digests impressions, and makes organically the secretion of thought” and this conclusion, he points out, disposes of the difficulty of those who “cannot conceive how judging, reasoning, imagining, can ever be anything else than feeling. The difficulty ceases when one recognizes, in these different operations, the action of the brain upon the impressions which are passed on to it.” The doctrine is, in short, an elementary truth of psychological science, as distinguished from the pseudo-science of the Ego considered as an entity. To that pseudo-science Cabanis gave a vital wound; and his derided formula is for true science to-day almost a truism. The attacks made upon his doctrine in the next generation only served to emphasize anew the eternal dilemma of theism. On the one hand his final “vitalism” was repugnant to those who, on traditional lines, insisted upon a distinction between “soul” and “vital force”; on the other hand, those who sought to make a philosophic case for theism against him made the usual plunge into pantheism, and were reproached accordingly by the orthodox.231 All that remained was the indisputable “positive” gain.