Note 236 — Chapter XXI · FREETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

This hardy attack was reinforced in 1819 by the publication of Sir T. C. Morgan’s Sketches of the Philosophy of Life, wherein the physiological materialism of Cabanis is quietly but firmly developed, and a typical sentence of his figures as a motto on the title-page. The method is strictly naturalistic, alike on the medical and on the philosophic side; and “vitalism” is argued down as explicitly as is anthropomorphism.236 As a whole the book tells notably of the stimulus of recent French thought upon English.