Cabanis, Pierre-Jean

« causes, in which he made concessions to the religious revival.

The letter was published only in 1824, but we may surmise that Cabanis felt the need to seek some accommodation with the Imperial authority, as did other thinkers in the first decade of nineteenth-century Paris. 2 Thought Cabanis was among those figures of the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment period who believed passionately in the possibility and importance of a 'science of man' .

The systematic understanding of brute matter which the mechanical philosophy had made possible should be matched in our understanding of the human species.

This was not, of course, a new ideal, but what was distinctive in Cabanis' pursuit of it was his view that this understanding must be rooted in medical science, broadly conceived. The memoirs which make up his Relations between the Physical and the Mental in Man , though materialist in cast, are concerned primarily with the special properties of living matter, especially in the human species.

However, this was not necessarily a vitalist position.

Indeed, Cabanis places his study of these properties in the context of a much more general principle, that of attraction , illustrated by gravity in physics, and by 'affinities' in chemistry and biology.

Nevertheless, it is clear that he gives a certain autonomy to our understanding of living matter.

Cabanis began this work by insisting that the moral and medical sciences must deal with human beings as whole creatures. Like Descartes , he insisted on the union of mind and body, but unlike Descartes he was no dualist, adopting a broadly materialist approach, which gave a central role to sensation.

The property of being able to have sensations, though peculiar to living matter, was derived from more general physical laws, and could give rise to unconscious as well as conscious psychological phenomena.

The physiological underlayers of sensation could be seen at work in differences between the sexes, and other mental differences between people arising from their inherited physical constitution in interaction with environmental factors.

Cabanis had no account of how life arose, and thought that we should not speculate about causes whose existence could not (as he thought) be experimentally verified, but he believed that one source of the development of life was the inheritance of acquired characteristics.

This led him to argue for selective breeding of humans. This summary of a diverse and wide-ranging set of memoirs is very incomplete, but it shows how Cabanis held a position which already had a substantial background, for instance, in the work of Boerhaave, Stahl, Bonnet, Haller, La Mettrie and others, authors whose importance he fully acknowledged.

But these thinkers were divided.

Could our understanding of living matter be a simple derivation from our understanding of matter in general? Or were there special types of explanation at play in the case of living matter? Some maintained that a single principle was at work in living matter, others, like Haller, made a radical distinction between a physical property of 'irritability' responsible for lower and unconscious functions not involving sensation, and a sensitive property which was responsible for sensation and other mental functions which were derived from it.. »