Finally, he writes the following paragraph, perhaps the most singular one that he ever wrote, for it shows in the clearest manner how little confidence he had in his own psycology.
“If we are materialists because we do not admit the existence of a unit-faculty of the soul, but recognise several primitive faculties, we ask whether the ordinary division of the faculties of the soul into understanding, will, attention, memory, judgment, imagination, and affections and passions, expresses nothing more than a primitive unit-faculty? If it be asserted that all these faculties are merely modifications of a sole and same faculty, what can hinder us from making the same assertion as to the faculties whose existence we do admit.”[85]
To be sure, nothing prevents you. Or rather every thing constrains you to do so. There is therefore one sole faculty, of which all the other faculties are but moods. You return then to the common philosophy, and consequently you no longer possess a peculiar philosophy.
The problem proposed by Gall is at the same time physiological, psycological, and anatomical.
In our first article an account has been given of Gall’s physiology, and it has been shown to be generally disproved by direct experiment. In the present one his psycology has been examined, and it is confuted by the consciousness (le sens intime). It only remains for us now to examine his anatomy.
III.
OF GALL.
THE ORGANS.
Of all Gall’s writings, his anatomy is that which has been most talked of, and yet it is the part least known.
In the year 1808, Gall read to the first class of the Institute a memoir on the anatomy of the brain;[86] and M. Cuvier made a report upon that memoir. But neither in that memoir nor in the report do we find one word of special anatomy, of secret anatomy, of what might be called anatomy of the Doctrine; or, in other terms, and as it would be expressed at the present day, of phrenological anatomy.
The anatomy of Gall’s memoir is nothing but a very ordinary anatomy. He insists that the cerebral nerves, all of them without exception, rise upwards from the medulla oblongata towards the encephalon; that the cineritious matter produces the white matter: he divides the fibres of the brain into divergent and convergent; he supposes that each convolution of this organ, instead of being a full and solid mass, as is generally thought, is merely a fold[87] of nervous or medullary fibres, &c. &c.