CABANIS, PIERRE-JEAN GEORGES
(1757–1808)

Pierre-Jean Georges Cabanis was, with Comte Antoine Louis Claude Destutt de Tracy, the leader of the Idéologues. A precocious student of philosophy and of the classics, he chose medicine as a career, but he never practiced. As a protégé of Claude-Adrien Helvétius's widow, he frequented the company of Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, Baron d'Holbach, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson. When Voltaire disparaged his poetry in 1778, Cabanis turned to physiology and philosophy. During the Revolution, he collaborated with Mirabeau on public education and was an intimate of Marquis de Condorcet. Later, he backed the Directory and Napoleon Bonaparte's coup d'état of 18 Brumaire. Although Napoleon made him a senator, Cabanis opposed his tyrannical policies. Bitter and scornful, Napoleon dubbed Cabanis's group "Idéologues." Cabanis wrote on medical practice and teaching, but his fame and influence derive from one book, Rapports du physique et du moral de l'homme (12 memoirs written between 1796 and 1802, published in 1802).

The Idéologues (who also included Constantin Volney, Condorcet, Antoine Lavoisier, and Pierre de Laplace) were often scorned in their time, and later, as belated philosophes and purveyors of visionary speculations. In the rising tide of metaphysical idealism, their positivistic approach was held in disfavor. They suffered from the influence of the religious revival and the spell exercised by François René de Chateaubriand's Le génie du Christianisme, as well as from the popularity of "Illuminist" fads derived from Masonic practices. Their political activity during the Revolution also worked against them, and Napoleon's suppression of their movement left them without an outlet for publication.

Cabanis, like the others, sought a mechanistic explanation of the universe, nature, and human behavior—an approach later continued by Auguste Comte and Hippolyte-Adolphe Taine. Matter alone is real and eternal in its many transitory forms. As Lavoisier had applied analysis to chemistry, so—Cabanis declared—it could be applied to ideas, which could thereby be reduced to the original sensations whence they spring. Self-interest, the pursuit of happiness and pleasure, and self-preservation are the only motives of action. These notions, already advanced by the eighteenth-century materialists, were systematically developed by Cabanis and Destutt de Tracy. The study of man, they held, must be reduced to physics and physiology. Man must be observed and analyzed like any mineral or vegetable. The medical expert, said Cabanis, should play the part formerly taken by the moralist (an idea that harks back to René Descartes and Julien Offray de La Mettrie). "Physiology, analysis of ideas, and morals are three branches of one science which may be called the science of man." Consequently, Cabanis and his fellow theorists refused to recognize notions not based on phenomena or sensations, that is, not susceptible of exact knowledge and (ultimately, at least) of mathematical notation. An understanding of the "mechanism of language" was considered essential to the understanding of the "mechanism of the intellect" and to the meaning of ideas. Language itself, however, had to be illumined by analysis of the sensations which constitute an idea an by the functioning of the intellect.

In his preface to the Rapports du physique et du moral de l'homme, Cabanis insisted that both the moralist and the physician are interested in the whole man; that is, in the physical and the moral, which are inseparable, and incomprehensible taken separately. The moral sciences must be placed on a physical basis. The union of mind and body is the theme of the first "Mémoire." Sensation is the necessary cause of our ideas, feelings, needs, and will. Since sensitivity is the connection between biological life and mind, the mental is only the physical considered from a certain point of view. Cabanis makes a famous comparison between the brain and the stomach: As the latter is a machine for digesting food, so the former is a machine for digesting impressions, by "the secretion of thought." He then develops a genetic analysis of sensations and ideas. There are no causes except those which can act on our senses, no truths except in relation to "the general way of feeling" of human nature, which varies with such positive factors as age, sex, disposition, health, climate, and so on. Thus the state of the abdominal viscera may influence the formation of ideas.

The second "Mémoire" is a "physiological history of sensations." Cabanis defines life as feeling and, following the work of Albrecht von Haller and La Mettrie, discusses the difference between sensitivity and irritability. The latter, he maintains, is only a result of the former, which is the basic biological phenomenon; since both depend on the nerves, they are essentially the same. Voluntary movements come from perceptions, which arise from sensations. Involuntary movements are caused by the organs' sensitivity, which produces the unconscious (autonomic) impressions that determine many of our ideas and decisions. The action of the nervous system, moreover, is only a specialized application of the laws of physical motion, which are the source of all phenomena. The third "Mémoire" develops a theory of the unconscious. The nervous system is affected by internal changes, that is, by memory and imagination; thus within man exists "another internal man" in constant action, the effects of which are noticeable in dreams. The fourth "Mémoire" explores the influence of age on ideas and "moral affections." The organs, like all else in nature, are in constant motion, and are therefore involved in decomposition and recomposition. Consequently, variations in the cellular tissue produce physical and psychic changes due to chemical action. The fifth "Mémoire" takes up sexual differences. The generative organs are essentially glandular, and their secretions influence the brain and the whole body. Unknown primitive "dispositions" (structures), which cause the embryo to be male or female, are also the cause of sexual differences, both physical and psychic. The fact that women can be forced to reproduction and men only excited to it produces vast differences in habits and mental outlook. What the sexes have in common constitutes human nature.

The sixth "Mémoire" treats the influence of "temperament," that is, the determining effects of the inherited physical constitution. Thus a large heart and lungs produce an energetic character, small ones an intellectual character. Because of heredity, the human race could be improved by hygienic methods. Believing in the inheritance of acquired characteristics and in improvement of species through crossbreeding, Cabanis pleads for a program of eugenics that will do for the human species what human beings have done for dogs and horses. In the seventh "Mémoire" Cabanis explores emotional and mental perturbations caused by diseases. For instance, weakness and irritability of the stomach produce muscular enervation and rapid alternations between excitement and depression. The eighth "Mémoire" discusses such effects of diet, air pressure, humidity and temperature, as excitation and sedation. Cabanis analyzes the effects of different foods and drinks, but his information and conclusions are rather fantastic.

Climate is the subject of the ninth "Mémoire." Man, the most modifiable animal, responds to heat and cold with differences in sexual and physical activity, and consequently in mental and moral habits. The tenth "Mémoire" is the longest. It explores the phenomena of animal life, including sensitivity, instinct, sympathy, sleep, dreams, and delirium. The forces that cause matter to organize (a natural tendency) are unknown, and will always remain so. Nevertheless these forces are only physical, and life is only organization. Cabanis believed in spontaneous generation. Species have evolved through chance mutations ("fortuitous changes") and planned mutation ("man's experimental attempts"), which change the structures of heredity. Cabanis does not, however, develop a general theory of evolution. The eleventh "Mémoire" concerns the influence of the "moral" (mental) on the physical, which is merely the action of the brain on the body. The last "Mémoire," on "acquired dispositions," treats the influence of habituation and experience in general.

As a positivist, Cabanis was willing to renounce ultimate explanations. He was interested only in cause and effect on the level of phenomena. Unlike the other Idéologues, he was much influenced by La Mettrie and the man-machine school. He opposed the psychological method of Condillac and the sensationists, which was limited to external sensations. He preferred the physiological approach, which emphasized hereditary dispositions, the state of the organs, dreams, and automatic or unconscious impulses. These factors were more significant for him than experience (sensation) in determining the individual's behavior; for the tabula rasa concept ignored what the child or adult brings to experience. For the same reason, Condillac's statue is only an unreal abstraction from the reality of the unified, total, active organism. Cabanis was interested in the moral and social improvement of humankind, which he considered possible through an understanding of physiology—a science that he thought would eventually influence even positive law.

Cabanis and the Idéologues were one moment of a tradition that extends from Epicurus to the contemporary logical positivists (whose interest in linguistic analysis was prefigured by the Idéologues). Cabanis, like the others, has frequently been accused of impoverishing human experience by reducing it to the physical and mechanical level, and by denying the possibility of transcending internal and external sensations. On the other hand, the Idéologues considered man to be his own justification and the master of his own destiny. They had faith in his capacity to progress indefinitely by means of his own resources.

Bibliography

works by cabanis

The Oeuvres complètes (Paris, 1823–1825) of Cabanis was edited by P. J. G. Thurot.

Cabanis, Pierre-Jean Georges. On the Relations between the Physical and Moral Aspects of Man, edited by George Mora. Translated by Margaret Duggan Saidi. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1981.

works on cabanis

The best study of the Idéologues (although it ignores Cabanis's connection with La Mettrie and the man-machine outlook) is Emile Cailliet, La tradition littéraire des Idéologues (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1943). See also Charles H. Van Duzer, The Contribution of the Idéologues to French Revolutionary Thought (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1935), and the more apologetic F. Picavet, Les idéologues (Paris: Alcan, 1891).

Moravia, Sergio. "From 'Homme Machine' to 'Homme Sensible': Changing Eighteenth-Century Models of Man's Image." Journal of the History of Ideas 39 (1978): 45–60.

Other Recommended Titles

Richards, Robert J. "Influence of Sensationalist Tradition on Early Theories of the Evolution of Behavior." Journal of the History of Ideas 40 (1979): 85–105.

Staum, Martin S. Cabanis: Enlightenment and Medical Philosophy in the French Revolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980.

Wright, John P., and Paul Potter, eds. Psyche and Soma: Physicians and Metaphysicians on the Mind Body Problem from Antiquity to Enlightenment. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000.

L. G. Crocker (1967)

Bibliography updated by Tamra Frei (2005)