REVUE PHILOSOPHIQUE.
CONTENTS: March, 1891. No. 183.
POURQUOI MOURONS-NOUS? By J. Delbœuf.
SUR UN CAS D'ABOULIE ET D'IDEES FIXES. By Pierre Janet.
L'ART ET LA LOGIQUE. (Fin.) By G. Tarde.
ANALYSES ET COMPTES RENDUS.
REVUE DES PERIODIQUES ETRANGERS.
CONTENTS: April, 1891. No. 184.
QU'EST-CE QUE LA PHYSIOLOGIE GENERALE? By Ch. Richet.
LA PHILOSOPHIE DE BACON. By Victor Brochard.
SUR UN CAS D'ABOULIE ET D'IDEES FIXES (Fin.) By Pierre Janet.
POURQUOI MOURONS-NOUS? (Fin.) By J. Delbœuf.
NOTES ET DISCUSSIONS.
ANALYSES ET COMPTES RENDUS.
SUR UN OLFACTOMETRE. By Ch. Henry.
M. Delbœuf's article is the complement to his studies on the origin of death, and was inspired by the work of M. Maupas, Recherches expérimentales sur la multiplication des infusoires ciliés, some of the conclusions of which he thinks are not supported by observation and emanate from the sophism, "that which has not been seen does not exist." Nevertheless he accepts the opinion of M. Maupas, as against M. Weismann, that the protozoa as well as the metazoa, are mortal as individuals, although immortal in and by the species. M. Delbœuf accounts for the change from fissiparity to sexuality by reference to mathematical law applicable to the transformation of species, according to which from the moment that a constant cause begins to make a type vary, in however small a degree, the variations will end by victoriously disputing the position with it. The death of the ciliated infusoria is then not due, as supposed by M. Maupas, to the effect of a senile alteration of their elements proceeding from an internal cause,—which would render inexplicable the unaltered maintenance of the species,—but the effect of a disequilibration of their organism due to a sort of mathematically fatal external physical constraint. The two corpuscles in the union of which the conjugation of those infusoria consists are regarded by M. Delbœuf as truly male and female, and he affirms that before uniting they make a choice of individuals apt to rejuvenate. Intelligence is thus the indispensable factor of the perpetuity of races. The answer to the double question, Why is individual matter mortal and specific matter immortal, is reserved for another number.
M. Janet's interesting study is of a subject, a young girl of 22, who, as the title denotes, exhibits an almost total loss of the faculty of will, partly through hereditary causes and partly consequent on a serious attack Of typhoid fever. Marcelle has a singular difficulty of movement, which extends to all the voluntary movements of the arms, the legs, and even the tongue and the lips, and is due to a kind of paralysis. She is, however, extremely suggestible, and very easily hypnotised. By experiment M. Janet found that the difficulty of a movement is in proportion to its novelty. The difficulty consisted in forming the synthesis of ideas and images which constitutes the commencement of the act, but its repetition is easy when the act has been once done. Marcelle sometimes went into a demi-cataleptic state during which she had a crisis of ideas, which she described as a cloud passing. She complained that during the cloud her head spoke constantly. This M. Janet explains by reference to the theory of M. Séglas that there are several kinds of verbal hallucinations as of language, that is hallucinations of hearing, of visual images, and of tactile and muscular sensations attendant on speaking or writing, the last named being the psychic hallucinations or the epigastric voices of the insane. During the lucid intervals Marcelle performed the commands given to her by her hallucinations while under the cloud, like a person who while in a state of somnambulism receives a posthypnotic suggestion.
In this concluding article on "Art and Logic," M. Tarde, after considering the characteristic differences between industry and art, from the point of view of the desires of consumption and production proper to them, deals with the distinctive characters of the work of art considered in itself and the reason of its being. The attribute of the work of art is to be interesting. Art is a game, but a serious and profound game, like love, and it is born of leisure and pleasure. The unity of the work of art consists simply in the coupling of a question and an answer, a problem and a solution, a combat and a victory. Every phrase, musical or spoken, is a wave which rises and descends, and in every art whatever all is phrases and waves, and their combination is itself a complex wave, a period. In the undulating mirror of art we see again social life in action; since esthetics reflect the dynamic, and not the static, social logic. M. Tarde criticises the theory of Spencer that all the arts are derived from architecture, and shows that the first art was speech and that from speech, spoken or written, all art is derived. Narrative poetry, the epic poem, is the complex germ of all artistic development; and as art began in narration, it ends in the drama, because man is above all social. Art, or reflection of man, borrows by turns its dominant inspiration from the passions of life or the inspirations of society.
M. Richet sums up his description of General Physiology in the formula: Life is a chemical function. His most important conclusions are that the general laws of life are chemical laws, and respond to the chemical conditions of hydratation, temperature, electricity and pressure; force is condensed in living beings under the form of chemical energy, and manifests itself outwardly, by movement, by electricity, by light, by heat, or by thought. (We consider this juxtaposition of "electricity, light, heat and thought" as extremely misleading, and so is the definition of life as "a chemical function." It appears, then, that M. Richet considers thought also a chemical process. That physiological actions are processes which have their own conditions and are different from chemical and physical processes, has been explained in The Monist, No. 3. p. 413-414.) M. Richet continues: Living beings are cellular aggregates, but in animals the nervous system forms a centre of unity, from whence proceed motor excitations and where sensible excitations terminate; cellules and beings are organised to live: they are adapted to the ambient medium, and to all the causes of destruction which can reach them. Thus their acts, although often automatic and deprived of all intelligence, appear to us admirably intelligent; the sensations and consciousness of intelligent beings are in agreement with the needs of the organism, and tend to strengthen the automatic mechanisms by means of which beings resist death, whether it be the death of the individual or that of the species.
M. Brochard takes exception to M. Barthélemy Saint-Hilaire's opinion of Bacon as a philosopher, and endorses the views expressed by M. Charles Adam in his Memoir crowned by the Academy. Bacon not only saw what scientific induction should be, but indicated with perfect precision the conditions that it ought to fulfil. Added to the theory of method is the theory of forms, which is the culminating point of Bacon's philosophy. M. Adam shows that the word form is used by Bacon to express the true difference, or that by which a thing is defined; the essence or the thing in its intimate constitution; and a law of pure act, (lex actus puri). M. Brochard adopts M. Adam's explanation, that by this law is to be understood a disposition in space, an arrangement of material parts, in other terms, a mechanical or mathematical relation—and he justifies M. Adam's assertion, and shows that Bacon resembled Galileo and Descartes in divining that physics rested on mathematics, and that the pure act was produced whenever certain arrangements of material molecules are formed according to mechanical conditions. Bacon superposes, in some sort, a philosophy of quality on a philosophy of quantity, and achieves the passage from movement to quality so embarrassing for every doctrine which gives a place to mechanism.
M. Janet concludes his study of the curious case of aboulism presented by Marcelle, giving details of her experiences under the influence of hypnotism and suggestion, which greatly ameliorated her condition, temporarily at least. The nature of her disease approaches much the mental feebleness described elsewhere by M. Janet under the name of "psychological disaggregation with contracting of the field of consciousness," but differs from it in several particulars. It consists essentially in a weakening of the faculty of synthesis which ought, at every moment of life, to co-ordinate afresh our sensations and our images. The study of this enfeeblement shows the importance of the novelty of acts in connection with the will, the rôle of the will in apparently the most simple perceptions, the necessity of voluntary synthesis for originating habits and recollections, the connection between doubt and defective perception, and the development of various hallucinations.
Before answering the question why we die, M. Delbœuf considers the origin of life. He makes a distinction between dead matter and living matter. On this subject he has published a book entitled "La matière brute et la matière vivante." He affirms that life in the universe began with living, sensible atoms, endowed with will and liberty, and having a knowledge of their own movement. This life gradually concentrated itself in germs having the faculty of perpetuating themselves. They remained naked and some of those germs still continue composed almost entirely of reproductive, that is essentially living, substance. The others have gradually become clothed with a body, a kind of protective envelope. The life of this envelope is not inherent; it has been communicated by the germs that it protects, and at the end of a period of a greater or less duration it becomes useless, fades and dies. Life is sustained by nutrition but the assimilating faculty diminishes by degrees, until it ceases, and at last, the reparation of our organs not being equal to their wear, they are not able to fulfil their mission. The decay of living matter is due to the operation of physical and chemical laws. Assimilation is at the base of life, and it is exhibited in inorganic nature as well as in living beings. Living bodies must have some permanent centres of assimilation around which the nutritive elements group. The earliest of these centres was the germ, in which is the supreme or immortal life, and which immortalises that part of the nutriment which becomes incorporated with it. Although the organs of nutrition deteriorate and die, the reproductive organs remain eternally young, in power at least. Nutrition itself is manifested either as alimentation, or as conjugation or fecundation, and is a phenomenon analogous to copulation. M. Delbœuf then proceeds to show the uniformity in the modes of propagation, and gives reasons for believing, contrary to the views of Van Beneden, that the cellule-egg, and not the spermatozoid, is hermaphrodite. The ovary is the true depository of the immortal propagative substance. Woman is the inexhaustible source of life. (Paris: Felix Alcan.)
ZEITSCHRIFT FÜR PSYCHOLOGIE UND PHYSIOLOGIE DER SINNESORGANE. Vol. II.
No. 3.