Cabanis: Enlightenment and Medical Philosophy in the French Revolution

by Martin S. Staum

Overview

A physician and spokesman for the French Ideologues, Pierre-JeanGeorges Cabanis (1757-1808) stands at the crossroads of several influential developments in modern culture—Enlightenment optimism about human perfectibility, the clinical method in medicine, and the formation and adaptation of liberal social ideals in the French Revolution. This first major study of Cabanis in English traces the influences of these developments on his thought and career.

Originally published in 1980.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691615769
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	07/14/2014
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #607
Pages:	444
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.10(d)

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Cabanis

Enlightenment and Medical Philosophy in the French Revolution

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By Martin S. Staum

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1980 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-05301-1

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CHAPTER 1

The Late Enlightenment: Chain of Being, Chain of Truths

The Unity of Nature

Separating the influence of the philosophes at the Auteuil salon and of physicians in clinical practice on Cabanis's thought is at best an artificial exercise. The Enlightenment and medical components in Cabanis's education were concurrent. In fact, the most complete Enlightenment anticipation of Cabanis's thought, in the works of Diderot, is itself as much the product of medical theories as of Encyclopedist aspirations. Yet, for analytical purposes, I shall structure my discussion around the evident polarities in Cabanis's viewpoint — his scientific and Enlightenment quest for uniformity, theory, and method against his medical concern for individuality, eccentricity, and exceptional case history.

NEWTONIAN FORCES AND NEWTONIAN EXPLANATION

Eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers freshly posed the perennial problem of reconciling unity and diversity in nature. Several principal figures of the Scientific Revolution retained their fascination with the Neoplatonic and mystical search for the One in the All or for the hierarchy of interrelated spheres of beings. But the new philosophy, even in Kepler and Newton, was no latter-day occultism; rather, it was an enshrinement of a new method that found unity through mathematics, observation, and experiment rather than through the symbolic network of correspondences of alchemists, astrologers, and magi.

Since the new laws were universal, accounting for disparate phenomena both in heaven and earth, the Scientific Revolution inspired both a new faith in God's Providence, whether general or special, and a revival of the heretical ancient Epicurean ideas that matter and motion (without the action of capricious spirits) were sufficient to explain phenomena. For Descartes, a mechanism of matter and motion alone explained observable physical processes.

Yet mechanical philosophers, including Descartes and Boyle, safeguarded religious orthodoxy and the dignity of the human soul by postulating an absolute difference between active spirit and inert matter. God endowed matter with its ordinary properties — extension, inertia, and mobility — at the Creation, and conserved motion; matter on its own could not move or act, much less think. For Cartesian-style philosophies, the activation of matter by a willing spirit, especially in living organisms, was still a difficult problem.

By the late seventeenth century, Newton agreed that God was the source of universal motion, but he also speculated that certain "active principles" (a Neoplatonic and perhaps alchemical notion) were the secondary causes of gravity. For theological reasons, Newtonians before the late eighteenth century hesitated to call gravity an inherent property of matter or to explain it by a mechanical hypothesis (despite Newton's invocation of a nonmechanical elastic "aether" after 1707). Any principle of spontaneous activity inherent in matter might give aid and comfort to the Epicurean heresy that the world could arrange itself by chance. Before the time of James Hutton and Joseph Priestley, the view that the ceaseless activity in matter was itself divine was equally unacceptable as a dangerous Spinozist or pantheist heresy. Newton himself therefore stressed that the essence of matter was unknown, while only the phenomenon of gravitational attraction could be observed. God had somehow endowed the smallest particles of matter with dynamic properties. And indeed, the Newtonian term "force," though stripped to stark mathematics, conveyed the analogy of mental activity, of divine or human will. Early disciples of Newton, whether in England or in France (such as the two leading French advocates, the physicist Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis (1698-1759) and the philosophe Voltaire), scrupulously denied that they considered attraction essential to matter.

Newtonian reluctance to assign matter inherent properties of attraction resulted in at least two far-reaching consequences — one about the notion of matter, the other about acceptable explanation. First, matter could have a property inexplicable by mechanics. All kinds of attractive forces might be involved in chemistry and physiology; and Newton's Queries at the end of the Opticks (1704) encouraged further speculation. Whether or not one assumed the necessity of an independent spiritual entity directing these forces depended upon one's beliefs about God's role in the world. The second effect of Newtonian modesty was the acceptance of nonmechanical explanations as legitimate. The "Newtonian paradigm" of explanation in the physical and life sciences justified ignorance of mechanisms because Newton had found rigorous mathematical description sufficient for useful knowledge.

From the late seventeenth century until the mid-eighteenth century, philosophers turned Newton's caution into heresy. Locke argued quite safely that, given the powers of God and the forces of matter, it was not inconceivable that God could have endowed matter with thought. The deist Voltaire gleefully seized this remark out of context to defend skepticism on the soul, but more radical critics concluded that matter itself, with dynamic properties, could form the rational soul.

THE GREAT CHAIN OF BEING

The followers of Newton had helped envisage a new unity of nature through the measurable yet mysterious capacities of matter. They thus unwittingly blurred the traditional divisions of the Great Chain of Being, an ancient conception of natural unity. The Great Chain was a fixed hierarchy of beings based on continuity — no gaps in forms — and plenitude — a niche for all possible creatures encompassing mineral, vegetable, and animal worlds. Physical and spiritual man was at the midpoint, while spiritual creatures occupied all links of the chain between the human and the divine. Plato and Aristotle had first expressed a notion like the Great Chain; Neoplatonists, Locke, and Leibniz perpetuated it; and eighteenth-century naturalists such as Charles Bonnet elaborately embellished it. For Christian thought, the Great Chain illustrated design in Creation, enshrined the immutability of living species, and appropriately separated material and spiritual beings. Cartesians also found the radical dualism of the chain congenial, even if they did not believe in angels. Newtonians certainly did not incorporate the Great Chain as a scientific assumption, but their belief in non-gravitational attractive forces, electrical or physiological, acted to link ever more tightly all beings. Yet the very Newtonian concept of universal attractive forces could lead the imprudent to ask if there might not be just one force diversely manifested and acting in one homogeneous substance. Thus, the crucial links in the chain between nonliving and living, mineral and vegetable, and vegetable and animal, animal and man, might not be inflexible barriers. The Enlightenment philosophy of metaphysical monism became plausible.

Eighteenth-century naturalists also explored the possibility that allegedly fixed species might vary or that both systematic breeding and reproductive accidents might create new species. Not until 1800, in the work of Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck (1744-1829), was there a true hypothesis of "transformism" — transformation of one species into another from common ancestry. Yet the widespread acceptance of the Chain of Being suggested to some eighteenth-century thinkers the hypothesis that each link in the chain might change over time. Thus, a dualist and fixed version of the Chain of Being could become the starting point not only for monism but for Enlightenment transformism. Both monism and transformism were essential ingredients in Cabanis's thought.

There were many efforts to introduce dynamism into the Great Chain. In 1744 the Genevan naturalist Abraham Trembley (1700-1784) questioned plant-animal differences. About the same time, Maupertuis, an amateur naturalist as well as Newtonian physicist, speculated about embryo formation and, later, about "accidental" variations among organisms. In 1748 the English Catholic priest John Turbervill Needham (1713-1781) reaffirmed the once refuted hypothesis of spontaneous generation of living creatures. The next year the great naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buff on (1707-1788) published the first section of the multivolume Histoire naturelle questioning the fruitfulness of the idea of species. From 1749 to 1754 Denis Diderot (1713-1784) and Maupertuis both extended their hypotheses to a quasi-transformist view. Meanwhile, against clandestine and public advocates of materialism, Buffon, the Swiss naturalist Charles Bonnet (1720-1793), and the philosopher Etienne Bonnot de Condillac (1714-1780) defended the traditional dualist body-soul relationship.

The diversity of religious views among these men shows how investigation of the phenomena in itself did not lead either to orthodoxy or to heresy. Trembley and Bonnet wished to remain orthodox Calvinists, while Needham wished to remain in good standing as a Catholic cleric. Buffon was at least privately a deist, though he maintained appearances by retracting objectionable passages from his published works. And Maupertuis retained a strong conviction in divine Providence. Diderot, however, interpreted the same scientific evidence to justify a monist and transformist philosophy.

Cabanis could have drawn on many works in developing his ideas on the unity of nature, but we shall discuss only works he cited or could not have ignored. Cabanis's citation practices are indeed mysterious. He mentioned Maupertuis only once, and then as a mathematician; he cited Diderot only as an art critic; and he never mentioned the baron d'Holbach (1723-1789) — even though the latter two appeared in or hosted salons that Cabanis attended. Certainly by 1802, the publication date of the full text of the Rapports, Bonaparte's Concordat with the Vatican had made materialism distinctly unfashionable. Cabanis simply may have wished then to avoid provocative references to notorious materialists. But this hypothesis cannot explain his silence during the freer atmosphere from 1789 to 1799 — nor is any explanation as yet readily apparent.

THE NATURALISTS: NEEDHAM AND BUFFON

To Cabanis, the naturalists' investigation of special regenerative forces was a consistently fascinating project. Diderot and the physician Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751) had given special attention to Trembley's 1744 memoir on the fresh-water polyp, which challenged plant-animal division and demonstrated a regenerative force manifest in many species. Cabanis himself was certainly aware of Needham's 1748 memoir to the Royal Society of London on the spontaneous generation of "animalcules" from sealed, heated beef broth. Needham thought this "vegetative force" could be the "principle of all physical or chemical metamorphosis" and that it "vivifies organized bodies, is irritated in their limbs," and "furnishes the soul material for thought." Thus, Needham speculated on the existence of a single active force without threatening the existence of God or of the independent rational soul. Despite the naturalist Lazzaro Spallanzani's refutations of spontaneous generation from 1756 to 1776, the baron d'Holbach quoted Needham for his own materialist purpose in 1770. In 1802-1805 Cabanis attempted unsuccessfully to confirm the generation of life from organic matter (heterogenesis) as well as from inorganic matter (abiogenesis).

Cabanis also read closely Buffon's comments on universal forces as well as his challenges to the notion of species and fixed species. In 1749 Buffon spoke of embryo formation caused by "penetrating forces" arranging molecules, each with an appropriate imprint. In each species, these forces operated according to a characteristic "internal mold," a power analogous to gravity. In 1765 Buffon speculated that the law of gravitational attraction encompassed all short-range forces among inorganic particles, including chemical affinities. This inorganic affinity was analogous to the penetrating forces of nutrition and reproduction.

Clearly Buffon remained cautious about tightening crucial links in the Great Chain. He never claimed that the forces of affinity were inherent in living matter. He never surrendered the distinction between living organic molecules, for which Needham's animalcules were apparent evidence, and inanimate matter. By 1778 he admitted that organic molecules could have been spontaneously generated, though only at an earlier stage in the history of the earth. While preserving boundaries between the nonliving and the living, Buffon vigorously maintained the existence of an immaterial soul to distinguish animals and men. More complex animals were not automata but had the same sensations, feelings, and "material pleasures" as human beings. Yet, like the Cartesians, he asserted, "The internal man is dual; he is composed of two principles different by nature and opposed in their action."

For all his belief in universal forces, Buffon was no monist. Yet he strengthened the plausibility of variation within living species. From 1753 he recognized that cross-breeding could produce new species and that fertile hybrids might exist. He noted that variations in species might be induced by diet, climate, epidemics, and habits, and that as long as the environmental cause persisted, these variations could be transmissible to descendants. In 1766 he attributed "degeneration of animals," without a true change in species, to diet or other environmental causes. Thus, Buffon contributed several important concepts to Cabanis's thoughts on the unity of nature — the speculation that all material forces were more or less complex affinities, that the possibility of spontaneous generation did exist, and that environment could induce variation in living species. Cabanis's discussion of the influence of climate called this last opinion of Buffon "eminently philosophical."

TOWARD A MONIST PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE: MAUPERTUIS, DIDEROT, D'HOLBACH

While Buffon at the Jardin du Roi and Maupertuis at the Academy of Berlin both held prestigious positions, Maupertuis's ideas in the life sciences were the contributions of an amateur, which were more widely diffused because Buffon found them interesting. Cabanis's views on the relationship between sensitivity and matter and his beliefs on change in species bear the unmistakable influence of Maupertuis. Mathematical proof of the nonrandom inheritance of physical deformity or irregularity led Maupertuis to reason that in embryo formation there may be excesses or deficiencies in the forces of affinity that arranged the particles of male and female seminal fluids. By 1751 he was ready to change the traditional notion of matter to explain this phenomenon. Recalling the Newtonian explanation paradigm, Maupertuis wrote: "the more phenomena one had to explain, the more properties one had to assign to matter." Since blind attraction was not a subtle enough principle for embryology, "some principle of intelligence — something resembling what we call desire, aversion, memory" — might exist in the "smallest particles of matter." These principles would exist in inorganic matter as well and would not be distinct spiritual entities, like Leibnizian monads. In embryo formation, each particle would have a memory of its own original organ and its situation in the parent and would re-form the embryo on the parental model. A memory failure might result in a monstrosity or a throwback to a characteristic of previous generations. Climate and diet might influence traits of descendants (as torrid zone heat on blackness of skin) or produce deviations (albinism in blacks) that later would revert to primitive form.

Dissimilar species could form from the union of two individuals because of:

a few fortuitous productions, in which the elementary particles would not have retained the order they kept in the parent animals; each degree of error would have made a new species; and the infinite diversity of animals we observe today would have occurred by repeated deviations; in time, in the course of centuries, this deviation might, by imperceptible movements, increase.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Cabanis by Martin S. Staum. Copyright © 1980 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• Contents, pg. vii
• Preface, pg. ix
• Introduction, pg. 1
• CHAPTER I. The Late Enlightenment: Chain of Being, Chain of Truths, pg. 20
• CHAPTER II. The Body as Mechanism, pg. 49
• CHAPTER III. The Soul and the Vital Principle in Physiology, pg. 72
• CHAPTER IV. Methodical Medicine in the Service of Humanity, pg. 94
• CHAPTER V. The Natural and Artificial in Society, pg. 122
• CHAPTER VI. The Perils of Revolution and the Rational Organization of Medical Experience, pg. 147
• CHAPTER VII. Sensitivity: Source of 'Physique' and 'Moral, pg. 166
• CHAPTER VIII. The Perfectibility of Temperament, pg. 207
• CHAPTER IX. Approaches to Psychophysiology, pg. 244
• CHAPTER X. In the Public Arena: Healing, Schooling, Governing, pg. 266
• CHAPTER XI. The Metaphysical Twilight, pg. 298
• Notes, pg. 315
• Appendix A, pg. 371
• Appendix B, pg. 373
• Appendix C, pg. 375
• Appendix D. “Cabanis” Manuscripts of the Museum National D'Histoire Naturelle, pg. 377
• Appendix E. Condensed Outline of Hygiene of J.-N. Hallé, pg. 381
• Bibliography, pg. 383
• Index, pg. 419