“Instinct acts without knowing; understanding knows in order to act; the human understanding alone knows, and knows itself.
“Reflection, closely defined, is the knowledge of thought by thought. And this power of thought over thought gives us a whole order of new relations. As soon as the mind perceives itself it judges itself; as soon as it can act upon itself it is free; as soon as it becomes free it becomes moral.
“Man is only moral because he is free.
“The brute animal follows its body; in the midst of this body, which shrouds it completely in matter, the human mind is free, and so free that it can, whenever it prefers to do so, immolate its very body.
“‘The great power of the will over the body,’ says Bossuet, ‘consists in this prodigious effect, that man is so completely master of his frame, that he can even sacrifice it for the sake of some greater good in view. To rush into the midst of blows, and plunge into a flight of arrows from a blind impetuosity, as happens among brute creatures, shows nothing superior to the body itself; but to resolve to die with understanding, and for reasons, notwithstanding the whole disposition of the body to the contrary, evinces a principle superior to the body; and among all the tribes of animals, man is the only one in whom this principle exists.’”
NOTE III.
Gall, as an Observer.
[Page 93.] He studied them (mankind) in his own way, but he studied them very closely.
Gall was a practical observer. He observed and studied always, and with so much the greater success because “people never suspected that they had to do (these are his own words) with a man who knew perfectly well that the basis of human character continues to be always the same, and that merely the objects that interest us change with the progress of years.”[189]