2. Vital Fluids, Darwin and Mechanical Men
It is easy to underestimate the long-term consequences of the Cartesian split between mind and matter, and many of the debates of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries can really only be understood with reference to this divide. Two debates should be highlighted here. The first is between mechanists and vitalists, and the second is over the place of specifically human minds in nature. The first debate was between those who accepted Descartes’ assertion that non-human living things were pure mechanism and those who viewed organisms as mechanisms who also possessed an insubstantial but essential vital force or soul. The second focused mainly on the place of the human mind in nature. As Wozniak states, ‘the history of philosophizing about the relation of body and mind since Descartes is the history of attempts to escape the Cartesian impasse’,[1] and the various nineteenth-century approaches to the mind/body dilemma were attempts to deal with this impasse. The key point is that both sides in these debates tacitly accepted the fundamental Cartesian type-difference between mechanisms and qualities like mental states, intentions and purposiveness.
These debates became more complex and involved as studies by physiologists began to demonstrate apparently close connections between the mind and the brain. Some even thought that precise mental attributes could be localized at very specific points in the brain. At the same time, the mechanical understanding of matter seemed to preclude the possibility of purposive, intentional behaviour being ‘real’.
First, we need to understand some changes in scientific culture that occurred between the time of Descartes and the ‘second’ scientific age of the early nineteenth century. The Enlightenment had conceived of the universe as a system that could be entirely and explicitly understood by rational means. By the early nineteenth century, the mysterious and obscure side of nature had been rediscovered. One particular obscurity was the inner nature of human beings. Another was the basic nature of life itself.
Romanticism, the Vitalism Debate and the Growing Diversity of Science
The popular stereotype of Romanticism is of a movement that was opposed to science and reason; thus Keats’ lament that to unweave, or understand rationally, a rainbow, is to ‘clip an angel’s wings’. But consider this quote:
Though we can perceive, develop, and even produce by means of our instruments of experiment, an almost infinite variety of minute phenomena, yet we are incapable of determining the general laws by which they are governed; and in attempting to define them, we are lost through sublime imaginings concerning unknown agencies.[2]
Although this invocation of the sublime or mysterious in science can be seen as essentially Romantic, the speaker is not a scientific ‘nay-sayer’, but Sir Humphrey Davy (1778–1829), one of the foremost scientists of his time.
The relationship between Romanticism, science and the Enlightenment is far more complex than commonly supposed. By the time Romanticism emerged, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the world had seen the French Revolution, where many had been guillotined in the name of a new world dominated by the Goddess Reason. To the Romantics, it was unclear whether this revolution exemplified or parodied Enlightenment ideals.[3]
Romanticism is better seen as an encompassing movement that, whilst criticizing the excesses of Enlightenment thought, nevertheless remained in uneasy agreement with the liberating ideals of progress through rationalism, equality and learning. It is thus quite possible to conceive of a Romantic sort of science, and in fact the first person to refer to a ‘second scientific revolution’ was the poet Coleridge in his Philosophical Lectures of 1819.[4] So the stereotype of Romantics as ‘anti-science’ is not really fair.[5] It would be fair to say that the vision of some of the more Romantically inclined scientists differed from their fellows. These differences become clear when one examines the debates over putative life forces.
In this period, the nature of life—or the difference between living and dead matter—was a cause of continuing speculation. The experiments of Luigi Galvini (1737–1798) provide an example of this. Galvini had noticed that the shock from an electric ray fish was similar to that from a Leyden jar, and between 1780 and 1786 he experimented on frogs’ legs, which would jerk when the nerves and muscles were brought into contact with two types of metal. Thus were born speculations that the ‘vital fluids’ were related to electricity.[6]
These theories spread to fiction, including Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein (1818), where the monster is brought to life by electricity. Mary Shelley was inspired to write the novel after discussions with Lord Byron and the poet Shelley concerning galvanism. That night, she had a dream in which she saw ‘a pale student of the unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing that he had put together’. She saw ‘the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life …’[7] In the novel, the young Frankenstein is first inspired by lightning striking a tree, so the association of vital forces and electricity—at the time commonly characterized as a fluid—seem clear.
Mesmeric Influences
A similar sort of fluidic metaphor inspired the activities of the controversial Viennese physician, Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815). Mesmer is today widely regarded as a crank, and yet the craze he inspired can also be seen as part of the prehistory of analytical psychology.
Mesmer believed that he had found a fundamental type of fluidic energy that was subtle enough to have previously escaped detection. In 1779, Mesmer speculated that this fluid pervaded the cosmos, Earth and all life. It was ‘so continuous as not to admit of a vacuum, and incomparably subtle’.[8] In proposing this fluid, Mesmer was putting forward a specifically physical theory, compatible with the physics of the time, and was actually suspicious of what he saw as occult or magical elements creeping into the Mesmeric movement.[9] He thought that ‘animal magnetism’ governed the health and well-being of every individual.
At first, Mesmer used magnets to affect his patients’ inner force, but eventually he discovered that he could affect cures by stroking or making hand-passes across the patients’ body.[10] The Mesmerists can claim a remarkable number of cures, no matter how these were achieved, and many of these cures were worked upon patients who had proven unresponsive to more conventional treatments.
Mesmerism entered a new phase with the discovery that the treatment could induce a trance-like state not unlike somnambulism or sleep-walking. Those in this state were often insensible to pain, even during surgical operations. In 1784 the Marquis de Puységur, a disciple of Mesmer’s, was treating a 23-year-old peasant by the name of Victor Race, who suffered from an inflammation of the lungs. Victor responded by entering a trance, during which time his personality significantly changed from a dull-witted peasant to a fluent and articulate individual who even took over the management of his own case.[11] In this state, he even advised on Puységur’s other cases and exhibited apparent clairvoyance during his trances.
In 1784, Puységur published Memoire pour servir à l’histoire et à l’établissement du magnétisme animal, in which he detailed his researches. In this, he described five characteristics of ‘magnetic sleep’:[12]
• Sleep-walking consciousness: Victor’s magnetically induced conditions seemed very similar to sleep-walking, or a state that was neither sleep nor waking.
• Rapport and suggestibility: the state allowed a close rapport between subject and magnetizer; it was as if their will became one.
• Lack of memory and divided consciousness: the subject rarely remembered what had occurred during the sessions, but there was continuity of memory in that the somnambulist would remember waking states and during the magnetic states. So the sleep-walker’s memory chain is separate from the memory chain of the waking person. The personality also altered significantly during the magnetic states.
• Paranormal phenomena: Victor exhibited many examples of apparent clairvoyance.
• Healing effects: Puységur used the state psychotherapeutically and for providing relief during the healing process.
Crabtree notes that unlike Mesmer, Puységur emphasized the psychological aspects of the ‘magnetic sleep’, and Puységur’s writings show that he was equivocal about the existence of the fluid. We may also note the occurrence of many features of hypnotism, a term coined by James Braid (1795–1860) who had observed Mesmerism in 1841, but was sceptical of the fluid theory. He sought instead to explain magnetic sleep as a psychologically induced psycho-physiological state.[13]
Although it might seem strange today, Mesmerism was more than a fringe medicine fad, and in some ways was a forerunner of dynamic psychiatry.[14] However, it retains a poor reputation in part because of the conclusions of a Royal Commission of 1784, led by Benjamin Franklin, who conducted some experiments and concluded that the Mesmeric effect was probably due to the ‘power of the imagination’.[15]
However, Gauld argues that this cannot be the whole answer. Many of Mesmerism’s patients were rejects from a medical profession who could do nothing for them. If the credentials and status of the doctors did not work on these patients, then why were the Mesmerists successful?[16] Gauld’s speculation is that maybe the ‘stroking’ movement triggered the release of the brain’s natural opiates and so calmed the patients. And the commission’s conclusions do not explain the numerous reported instances of clairvoyance and other apparently paranormal abilities.
Abernathy the Vitalist
The story of Mesmerism and its handling by the scientific authorities of its day is a curious one that finds a parallel with the vitalism debate. This was sparked by a series of lectures by John Abernathy (1764–1831). Abernathy was a physician and surgeon at Bart’s hospital in London, and he proposed a theory of human life based upon an unseen life force. This ‘Vitality’ was a ‘subtle, mobile, invisible substance, super-added to the evident structure of muscles’.[17] He compared this substance to the magnetism exhibited by iron, and suggested that this force must have been added by a power outside man.
Abernathy’s ideas were denounced by one of his pupils, William Lawrence. Lawrence attacked his former master on the grounds that science must avoid ‘clouds of fears and hopes, desires and aversions’, that it should ‘discern objects clearly’, and dispel myth and ‘absurd fables’. He further asserted that ‘The theological doctrine of the soul … has nothing to do with the physiological question …’[18]
Lawrence was attempting to remove any question of a soul—something that he identified with religion—from the realm of science. So the vitalism debate should be seen as far more than a debate over technical details; the fight was over the fundamental nature of human beings. It was also a conflict over the blurry divide between religion and science. Abernathy’s ideas were seen as an attempt to bring the soul into the scientific arena, something that Lawrence fiercely resisted. But once more, the lines of battle were drawn on thoroughly Cartesian lines. Questions of physiology, which were essentially mechanical questions, were perceived as ‘scientific’, whereas questions of animation and vitality (beyond mechanical movements) were seen as attributes of another realm.
Vitalism did not die after 1820. The chemist Liebig made a vitalist statement in 1844, and a form of vitalism was championed by Hans Dreisch at the beginning of the twentieth century.[19] Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of morphic resonance, propounded in 1981, can also be characterized as a sort of vitalistic theory.[20] However, debates of this sort were increasingly to become a leitmotif as nineteenth-century materialism grew in strength and sought to exclude such speculations. Instead of accommodating the purposive aspects of organisms, some believed that it might be possible to eliminate purpose altogether.
Machine-Men
One attempt to do without a ‘vital spark’ can be seen in La Mettrie’s L’Homme Machine (1747), which expounded the idea that humans were nothing but mechanisms. This basic idea is actually a very old one; the first author to come up with the idea of robots was Homer.[21] Like Lawrence, La Mettrie also aimed to exclude theological discussions of the soul and redefine the mind in a way that could be handled by physicians and surgeons.
Although he saw man as mechanical, La Mettrie did not deny conscious experience. He also believed that given sufficient training, apes and maybe other animals could learn human traits like language.[22] This idea might in part be derived from the ideas of the Enlightenment philosopher John Locke (1632–1704), who believed that the human being entered the world as a tabula rasa, or blank slate, and if humans were a blank slate, who was to say that other animals were not? Those opposing such a doctrine were known as nativists, who believed that humans were born with many or most of their faculties in-built.
Investigating the Brain
La Mettrie’s basic conclusion that the mind was a side-effect or product of brute matter came to seem more plausible as physiological experiments on the nervous system advanced. In 1812, Jean Cesar Legallis identified the region of the medulla essential for respiration, and Marie-Jean Pierre Flourens (1794–1867) performed a number of experiments on animals that showed that behaviour was tied to a functioning nervous system.
Flourens gave the following account of a pigeon with no cerebral lobes: ‘It held itself upright very well; it flew when it was thrown into the air, it walked when it pushed; the iris of its eye was very mobile but nevertheless it did not see; it did not hear, it never moved spontaneously, it nearly always assumed the appearance of a sleeping or drowsy animal …’[23] From experiments like this, Flourens concluded that the cerebral lobes were not only the seat of perception but also the area of will and memory.[24]
Flourens’ conclusions were shown to apply to human beings by an accident on a railroad construction site. On September 13th 1848, near Cavendish in Vermont, Phineas P. Gage was the victim of a terrible accident where a tamping iron was blown through his skull by gunpowder. Although the local doctors found the story initially hard to believe, Gage had an entry and exit wound to match the story witnesses told, and the iron was found, complete with brain-matter.[25]
Gage not only survived this accident, but also was conscious and began to talk only a few minutes afterwards. But the accident had a terrible, dramatic effect on his personality. Before, he had been described as hardworking, pleasant, and shrewd. Afterwards he became fitful, irreverent and indulged in ‘gross profanities’. He lost his regard for his fellows, and often devised plans which were quickly abandoned. His friends came to see him as a different person. Hothersall notes that these characteristics are typical in people with frontal lobe damage; such people lack foresight, are highly distractible, frivolous and unreliable. But Gage’s unfortunate accident cemented Flourens’ conclusion that the brain was the organ of the mind.[26]
Bumps on Heads
Two German physicians, Franz Gall (1758–1828) and Johann Spurzheim (1776–1832) had anticipated Flourens’ conclusion in the previous generation by inventing the ‘science’ of phrenology. If the brain was the organ of the mind, with different faculties located in different areas on its surface, then surely the relative strength of such faculties would be reflected in the skull that overlaid it? These faculties included cleverness, educability, sense of purpose, vanity, tendency to steal, instinct for murder, numeracy, poetry, amativeness, and so on.[27]
Phrenology is today regarded as pseudoscience, but it was very popular in its day and also spurred some neurophysiological experiments. At the time phrenology was popular, there was little practical need for medicine and surgery to examine the brain’s function and structure, but the phrenologists’ claims focused attention these areas. This attention led to the discovery of Broca’s and Wernike’s areas on the surface of the brain, areas that are associated with language production and comprehension.[28]
Neurologist Pierre-Paul Broca (1824–1880) made his discovery in 1861. One of his patients had lost his speech and, after his death, Broca performed an autopsy that showed a cavity the size of a small egg on the side of his brain. A second patient with the same symptoms showed damage to the same area. The conclusion that Broca came to was that speech production was linked to this specific part of the brain.[29]
This conclusion was itself controversial, in part because of the association of localization with phrenology, and it was at first rejected by the more conservative researchers who thought the brain always acted as a whole. Points were scored on both sides, and the controversy over language localization continues to this day.
Evolution
In the second half of the nineteenth century the quest for naturalistic accounts of mental functioning took on a new urgency because of the rise of evolutionary theory. Darwin’s theory of natural selection was foreshadowed in a number of places, including by his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, in a poem of 1803. Erasmus had written how ‘organic life beneath the shoreless waves/Was born and nurs’d in ocean’s pearly caves’, and how ‘as successive generations bloom/New powers and larger limbs assume’.[30] The idea that life changes over time, first proposed by the Ancient Greeks, had re-emerged.
It is worth mentioning the quasi-theological idea of progressivism because it was remarkably close to later, teleological evolutionary theories, including those of Frederick Myers, Henri Bergson and Tielhard de Chardin. Progressivism was based upon the observation of the ‘progress’ in the fossil record from simple invertebrates early on to more complex animals later.[31] Everything in existence had developed from inferior forms—life from a protoplasmic globule to coral, fish, reptiles, mammals, to man, and then maybe on to something superior. Robert Chambers’ book The Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, which promoted progressivism, was a bestseller when it was published in 1844, fifteen years before Darwin.[32]
Darwin’s theory had significance because it provided a mechanism for evolution that seemed to preclude the need for divine intervention or an ordering, progressive force. Darwin’s theory was described in his 1859 book, The Origin of Species, and utilized an idea put forth by Thomas Malthus in the 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population. In this gloomy essay, Malthus argued that population would always overrun food supply because of the way in which humans reproduced, and that famine was inevitable.
Darwin’s theory follows from Malthus’s observation that population will always grow geometrically and inevitably outstrip its food supply. At this point, many of the organisms will die. But ‘how will [this] struggle for existence’, Darwin asked, ‘act in regard to variation?’[33] His conclusion was that in the struggle for resources, any individuals with an advantage, however slight, would tend to survive and reproduce. ‘This preservation of favourable variations and the rejection of injurious variations’, he wrote, ‘I call natural selection.’[34]
Darwin’s discovery/invention of natural selection had serious implications for those of religious faith, because it eliminated the need for a ‘designer’ of organisms. Darwin suggested that natural selection could account for much of the variation that could be seen in that natural world. It could also account for the progression in the fossil record, where simple animals were found in ancient rocks and more complex ones in newer rocks.
There was also mounting evidence of the great antiquity of man, which contradicted the Biblical account of creation. Shortly before, human remains of great antiquity had been discovered in a cave near Dusseldorf, which had been named ‘Neanderthal’ after the valley in which they had been found.[35] The implications were clear: human beings were not part of a special creation, but had evolved as part of nature.
Many religious people reacted to the theory in horror. For example, the 1871 Family Herald stated that ‘Society must fall to pieces if Darwinism is true’.[36] In the States, the theory triggered a surge of fundamentalism and public baptisms. Outside the sphere of religion, Darwinism inspired numerous political and social movements; George Bernard Shaw commented that ‘Darwin had the luck to please anybody with an axe to grind …’[37]—a statement that remains true to this day.
X-club Legacy
One of those with an ‘axe to grind’ was Thomas Henry Huxley. Huxley was known as ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’, and had defended evolution against religion at the great debate in Oxford in 1860. Huxley’s ambitions went beyond the defence of science against religion. Along with eight others, he formed the ‘X-club’ (one of the members of which was Herbert Spencer, the social Darwinian who coined the term ‘survival of the fittest’). The X-club promoted science as superior to any other way of knowing the universe. And Huxley claimed that science could achieve ‘dominion over the whole realm of the intellect’.[38] This group even advocated a ‘Church of Science’ that might take over the functions of religion.
These extreme views were not the orthodox view of science, and were contested by a number of Huxley’s peers.[39] However, the Huxleyan idea that mental phenomena were causally ineffectual epiphenomena, like the sound from a steam-whistle, was to become very influential in scientific thought.
The Mind as Steam-Whistle
If humans had evolved by natural selection within a mechanical universe, then it followed that their minds were a product of mechanism only. Allied to this problem was the continued headache of mental causation, still unresolved from Descartes’ day. How could something as insubstantial as thought possibly move or influence matter?[40]
Huxley’s response to this question was that it didn’t. In 1874, he advanced the idea that mental events are caused by brain events, but are themselves incapable of causing anything: ‘Consciousness … would appear to be related to the mechanism of [the] body, simply as a … [side] product of its working as the [sound of a] steam-whistle which accompanies the work of a locomotive … is without influence upon its machinery.’[41] Just as a steam-whistle is an effect of the steam locomotive’s operations and lacks any causal influence on it, so mental events are mere side-effects of the brain mechanisms underlying behaviour.
The problem with Huxley’s solution was that the view of the mind as causally ineffective or even non-existent clashes violently with everyday experience. Human beings seem purposive and wilful, and we at least appear to make decisions that directly affect the world all the time. But this language implies that mental phenomena are themselves causal factors in a universe.
This sort of thinking was for Huxley just wrong: ‘If anybody says that the will influences matter, the statement is not untrue, but it is nonsense …’[42] In fact, by the late nineteenth century, it was quite possible to construct an unremittingly gloomy cosmology where humans were the helpless product of chance in a cold, mechanical universe. William James summarized (whilst not endorsing) this pessimistic viewpoint thus:
Science … has ended by utterly repudiating the personal view … Our Solar System with its harmonies, is seen now as but one passing case of a certain sort of moving equilibrium in the heavens, realized by a local accident in an appalling wilderness of worlds here no life can exist … The Darwinian notion of chance production, and subsequent destruction, speedy or deferred, applies to the largest as well as smallest facts … Our private selves are like those bubbles,—epiphenomena … their destinies weigh nothing and determine nothing in the world’s irremediable current of events.[43]
Conclusions like these would be contested in a number of different ways by several important thinkers in psychology. The alternative world-views that they formed in opposition would include some of the richest psychologies in the history of science.
Descartes’ Boundary
The boundary that Descartes erected between the world of mind and matter may have been expedient in terms of the creation of a mechanistic theory of everything, but it had the result of effectively excluding mental, and a good portion of biological, phenomena from science. This dilemma became ever more acute as science became increasingly committed to the mechanistic view. Rosen, whose work we will encounter later, observed that this commitment to a basically Newtonian epistemology ran so deep that it remains closely identified with science to this day.[44] Indeed, to many, a Newtonian kind of epistemology is the only possible science.[45]
The price was that this created a dilemma concerning anything that did not fit neatly into such a restricted universe. We have seen that some suggested nineteenth-century solutions were a reduction of said problematic phenomena to mechanism, the addition of a different kind of ‘stuff’ to life that contained the excluded phenomena, or, as in Huxley’s solution, the rendering of the problematic phenomena to acausal by-products of the primary mechanism. But however this dilemma was resolved, each party tacitly accepted the sharp divide between phenomena that could be accounted of in mechanical terms and those that could not. This dilemma, with accompanying tacit acceptance, would continue to play out as psychology came into its own in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
1 Wozniak, 1995.
2 Sir Humphrey Davy, quoted in Heath & Boreham, 1999, p. 19.
3 Heath & Boreham, 1999.
4 Quoted in Holmes, 2008.
5 See Dawkins, 1998, for a recent characterization of Romantic poets in this way.
6 Burke, 1985.
7 From the Introduction to the 1818 edition of Frankenstein.
8 Quoted in Inglis, 1992, p. 142.
9 Crabtree, 1993.
10 Gauld, 1992.
11 Gauld, 1992.
12 Detailed in Crabtree, 1993, chapter three.
13 Crabtree, 1993; Gauld, 1992.
14 Ellenburger, 1970/1994; Crabtree, 1993.
15 Quoted in Beloff, 1993, p. 35.
16 Beloff, 1993; Gauld, 1992.
17 Quoted in Holmes, 2008, p. 309.
18 Quoted in Holmes, 2008, p. 313.
19 Sheldrake, 1981/2009.
20 Sheldrake, 1981/2009; 1988. Although Sheldrake terms his theory organismic rather than vitalist.
21 Popper & Eccles, 1977.
22 Hothersall, 2004.
23 Quoted in Hothersall, 2004, p. 97.
24 Hothersall, 2004.
25 Hothersall, 2004.
26 Hothersall, 2004.
27 Burke, 1985. It’s quite striking to compare the phrenological faculties with those supposedly determined by our genes, which include homosexuality, alcoholism, criminality, and even homelessness! (Rose, 1997.) One suspects that similar conceptual assumptions are being applied in both cases.
28 Burke, 1985; see also Hothersall, 2004.
29 Hothersall, 2004.
30 Quoted in Elsdon-Baker, 2009, p. 25.
31 Elsdon-Baker, 2009.
32 Elsdon-Baker, 2009.
33 Darwin, 1859, p. 63.
34 Darwin, 1859, p. 64.
35 Burke, 1985.
36 Quoted in Burke, 1985, p. 260.
37 Quoted in Burke, 1985, p. 261.
38 Quoted in Wallace & Hodel, 2008.
39 Noakes, 2007.
40 Emily Williams Kelly, in Kelly et al., 2007, chapter two.
41 Huxley, 1901, p. 240. Quoted in Popper & Eccles, 1977, p. 72.
42 Huxley, 1887/1892. Quoted in Kelly et al., 2007, p. 53.
43 James, 1902/1985, p. 491.
44 Rosen, 1991.
45 See Metzinger, 2009, for a statement along these lines. See also the discussion in chapter fourteen.