5 The Relationship

between the Physical

and the Moral in
Man: Copenhagen
Treatise 1811
Maine de Biran

Programme
(Extract from Moniteur français, 14 May 1810)

Some still deny the utility of physical doctrines and experiments in

explaining the phenomena of the mind and of internal sense. Others on
the contrary disdainfully reject psychological observations and reasons
in investigations whose object is the body, or restrict their application
to certain illnesses. It would be useful to discuss these two sentiments,
to show and to determine more carefully to what extent psychology
and physics may be linked to one another, and to demonstrate by historical
proofs what each of these two sciences has done for the advancement of
the other.

47
Introduction
‘Corporeae machinae mentibus serviunt, et quod in mente est providentia,
in corpore est fatum.’1

To observe or to collect phenomena, to classify them, to posit laws, to seek

out causes – such are the regular procedures that alone can lead to truth in
the sciences of fact.
It is by following this path traced by Bacon, and never allowing
themselves to invert its order, that the promoters of the natural sciences
managed to erect, in the interval of one century, an edifice as imposing by
the solidity of its mass as by the beauty and regularity of its proportions.
The first step, which consists in observing and collecting the facts of
nature, is founded upon the regular exercise of the first and simplest
faculties of the human mind – the senses; it thus supposes the reality of
an ancient and famous maxim, nihil ist in intellectu quod non prius fuerit
in sensu,2 a controversial maxim, so often contested in the theory or the
science of principles, and so obviously justified in practice, or in the science
of results. The action of walking thus serves to refute those who deny the
existence of movement.
But this word ‘sense’, as simple as it at first seems, has itself a rather wide
latitude of meaning: beyond the external senses, whose number, functions
and range are rather well determined, there is one or several internal senses,
whose nature and derivative faculties are not equally nor as unanimously
recognized.
Sight and touch, which put man in direct communication with external
nature, are the truly predominate senses in the human organism
(l’organisation humaine), and since we attach a far greater importance to
studying and knowing things than to knowing ourselves and to studying
ourselves, so it is upon the relationship between these first senses that our
attention first fixes – it is under their tutelage that the observer is trained.
The most extensive, the most influential branch of his education, consists
in clarifying, comparing and rectifying their testimony; and all the ideas
to which he attains while raising himself up to the highest degrees of the

1
‘The bodily machines are at the service of the minds, and what in the mind is providence,
in the body is fate.’ Leibniz, Epistola ad Hanschium de Philosophia Platonic sive de
Enthusiasmo Plantonico (1707).
2
‘Nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses.’ Leibniz, New Essays on Human
Understanding, II , I, §2.

48 THE PHYSICAL AND THE MORAL IN MAN

intellectual scale, all the abstractions that his practised mind can grasp or
create, always conserve some imprint of this origin.
As for the internal sense that is hidden within us, whose development is
most belated, whose cultivation most rare and difficult, it emerges only in
the silence of all the others. It is appropriate only for a unique and simple
subject, whose study at first offers nothing attractive, and which most men
seem more disposed to flee that to investigate. It is, however, through the
cultivation of this internal sense that man enables himself to satisfy the
oracle’s precept, nosce te ipsum [know thyself].
Internal observation is nothing other than the present application of this
sense to that which is in us, or which properly belongs to us, and whatever
idealism may say, it is by focusing upon its testimony, and not by raising
ourselves up to the heavens or by descending into the abyss, on the wings of
the senses or of imagination, that we may contemplate our thought and
know our nature.
Here, right from our first step, as from the first advancement of the
sciences of fact, we encounter two orders of phenomena that are distinct
and even opposed, and hence two kinds of observation, which have nothing
in common as to their means, or their object, or their aim – and even seem
most often mutually to contradict themselves, one tending to take flight far
away from us, the other staying as closely as possible to the self, seeking only
to penetrate into its depths.
It is perhaps by paying heed to this conflict between the two sciences’
tendencies and means that Newton, hitting upon the core of the question
with which we are occupied, cried out, ‘O physics! Preserve thee from
metaphysics!’ It is also by heeding the necessarily double observation of two
classes of phenomena, which when mixed up and conflated produce so
many errors and illusions and misunderstandings, that we may cry out in
turn: ‘O psychology! Preserve thee from physics!’
Let us recognize at present, pending further developments that constitute
the object of this treatise, that it is not possible for the two sciences in question
to have more necessary ties with one another than the external senses of
touch and sight have with a sense that is wholly internal, or that the object of
an external representation, variable and multiple, has with the subject one,
simple and identical, that represents itself. Let us add that the way one
observes or collects external and internal phenomena differs for the two cases
as much as the imagination or intuition of outside things differs from
concentrated reflection – a first result that would seem to remove any idea of
utility or propriety from applying the facts of physics to those of psychology.
The object of the first part of the proposed question, it seems to me,
turns mainly upon the last two methods of science, the positing of laws

RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PHYSICAL AND MORAL IN MAN 49

(which does not essentially differ, as we shall see, from the regular
classification of phenomena) and the search for causes, and upon the
application that is permitted or possible to make, in these two respects, of
the physical sciences to psychology . . . Below we present the layout and
division of our work:

False application of the relation of causality;

subject of discussion and misunderstanding in the application of physics
to psychology.

‘How,’ says Mr Dégerando quite rightfully, ‘could physiology, which

cannot explain physical life itself, explain feeling and thought?’

An impatience and a precipitation all too natural to the human mind cause
it almost inevitably to seek out causes or to establish general laws for
phenomena that it did not take the time to observe or to verify; and
imagination, the first faculty to be exercised, takes hold of these phenomena
even before the senses are accurately applied to them. If this is true for a
science whose object is palpable or immediately accessible to the senses,
how much more so shall it be for one in which the external senses have no
use, or for which one has long believed that any direct observation is
impossible!
It must therefore have happened that after imagining causes ex
abrupto, or feigning explicative hypotheses within a wholly corpuscular
philosophy – one extended these same explanations, these hypotheses, to
the most obscure phenomena of the mind and the soul, whose nature one
did not yet know how to evaluate, nor whose succession how to observe.
Here we encounter all the hypotheses that align with the atomists’ most
ancient systems, from Democritus, Leucippus and Epicurus, to Descartes and
Gassendi, hypotheses with which they claimed to explain the workings of the
senses and imagination through impressional species (espèces impressionnelles)
that emanate from objects themselves – tenuia rerum simulacra [thin images
of things]; animal spirits; vibrations or vibrationcules produced in infinitesimal
nerve fibrils, etc.: all explicative hypotheses created before the nature of each
type of sensation or idea was investigated, and before their similarities and
their differences were established.
The philosophers of antiquity, following a path contrary to that of
induction, which modern physicists since Newton have so successfully
practised, put themselves at the source of everything, and imagined general
causes to explain everything; their method, which had created nothing but
vain systems, did not have more success in Descartes’ hands. In Newton’s

50 THE PHYSICAL AND THE MORAL IN MAN

time, Leibniz, Malebranche and other philosophers used it to as little
advantage – ultimately, the useless hypotheses that were thought up on
account of this method, and the progress that the sciences owe to the
contrary method of induction, have brought back around all right-thinking
minds.
The physics of Descartes, not very rich and especially not very solid as
regards details, is scarcely anything other than a collection of hypotheses
used to explain poorly observed or unverified facts.
The constant aim of this philosophy is not only to establish the existence
of a cause, of a general law experienced in its applications to particular facts
falling within its domain, but to state or imagine how such and such a
simple nature, such and such a supposed impulsive force acts upon matter
to produce such and such effects.
‘Give me matter and movement, and I shall create the world.’ Such is the
spirit of Descartes’ philosophy: with certain principles or simple natures
that he draws from the depths of his thought, he will indeed create a living
nature, as well as an inert nature, while believing he is explaining its laws; he
will state how the various whirls of subtle matter are formed, how each of
them circulates by flushing towards its centre all the bodies that are placed
in its sphere of activity and that rotate with it; he will explain magnetic
attraction and all the phenomena of elective affinities as another interplay
of subtle matter that penetrates into the pores of certain bodies, always
travels through them in a certain direction, enters and exits in a certain
direction, etc.
Likewise he will explain how the animal spirits, set in motion in different
parts of the body, come and agitate the pineal gland, and awaken certain
sensations or material images, or determine certain muscular movements
by the reaction of this gland, etc. Thus, nature will have no more impenetrable
mysteries; there shall exist no phenomena for which the human mind
cannot only designate the general cause or the individual productive force,
but also know how they are produced.
These illusions, too flattering, too seductive for the imagination that
conceived them, dissipate like vain shadows before the torch of reason, or
rather the true spirit of the physical sciences, which was reignited by Bacon,
and in whose glow a multitude of bright minds are paving the way, and
marching with assurance on a course to which the spirit of observation not
only opened the way, but also for which it traced the line of circumvallation
and set the limits. They return to the study and simple analysis of the
phenomena of nature, which alone should serve as a foundation to science.
They advance prudently, using induction and analogy, in the classification
of these phenomena, which are carefully verified in their details by

RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PHYSICAL AND MORAL IN MAN 51

observation and by the experience of the senses or of the instruments that
extend their scope. They strive to posit general laws, whose reality, on the
one hand, is established by experiments repeated a thousand times over,
and whose value and limits, on the other, are established by the perfected
methods of calculation that are brought into harmonious accord with the
phenomena observed. Lastly, they abandon the how of things, whose secret
the great architect of the universe has reserved for himself, to dedicate their
efforts to the how much, which falls within the province of man, and is the
end point of his efforts, in the science of fact, of external nature.
Such was the spirit of this wise and luminous method, worthy to serve as
the interpreter and support of Newton’s genius. Thus did this audacious
search for causes find itself confined within the most narrow limits;
Cartesianism’s vain hypotheses had already themselves contributed to
discrediting this search to so great an extent as to exclude it from the realm
of philosophy, and if it was able thereafter to find a place within this realm,
it did so under another name or by following a wholly opposite tendency or
direction.
Let us dwell a moment upon the foundation of this reflection on the
search for causes or the explanation of effects, such as our modern physics
may have conceived or practised them.
We have already noted that the explanation of a physical phenomenon
in the Cartesian doctrine consisted not only in determining the
natural cause on which this phenomenon depends, but furthermore in
demonstrating or imagining in detail how this cause acted to produce the
effect in question; suppose, for instance, we wish to explain the interplay of
affinities or the phenomena of electricity, of magnetism, etc., a Cartesian
would feel compelled to indicate the figure or form of the fluid molecules
that are considered to be the immediate or occasional cause, or of the pores
of the body in which it penetrates or circulates, the movement or the
direction that it takes on there, etc., all things that the imagination can
conceive but that neither the senses nor experience can verify.
A physicist of Bacon or Newton’s school, on the contrary, will first
attempt to analyse all the phenomenon’s sensory circumstances; he will try
various experiments to ascertain whether it has some analogy with other
facts whose laws are known: and if he succeeds in placing them under these
laws, and in showing by observation or by calculation that it depends on
them or that it is a particular function of the same cause (x), whatever may
be the nature of this cause, he will feel he has given all the explanation
desirable of the particular phenomenon at issue. It is thus that instead
of imagining hypotheses to explain the phenomena of magnetism, of
electricity, of galvanism, today we put our efforts into verifying the analogies

52 THE PHYSICAL AND THE MORAL IN MAN

that these three orders of phenomena may present between one other,
into demonstrating experimentally the laws governing their action by
moving further from the centre point (as the physicist Coulomb did). It
is thus that Franklin explains the phenomenon of thunder, by establishing
all the sensorial analogies that exist between this phenomenon such as
it appears in a storm cloud, and such as it appears in the apparatus of our
electric batteries. It is thus, lastly, that we would feel we had sufficiently
explained the chemical affinities if we succeeded in verifying Buffon’s
conjecture that the laws governing these particular phenomena and the
more general laws of the attraction of masses are identical, by placing in
the expression of these first laws, as an infinitesimal function, the figure
of the chemical molecules brought together until they are in immediate
contact.
We can thereby see how our modern physics, which has become more
modest, more reserved and more circumspect, perhaps excessively so in
certain respects, aspires to understand the system of nature without
attempting to explain it, and even dispensing with imagining explicative
hypotheses to account for the facts . . . hypotheses non fingo, said the
great Newton; and, indeed, attraction was never anything other for him
than a general fact with which a series of analogies successively came to
align; never did he pretend to turn it into a real explicative principle of
phenomena.
We can also see how this latest intellectual development in the sciences
of fact, which we characterize under the heading search for causes, does not
prevail, strictly speaking, in the current method of our physicists. Indeed,
this search reduces to a simple generalization or classification of natural
phenomena, that is, to moving from effect to effect until it reaches the most
general effect from which the particular ones derive and in which they are
assumed to be contained. But, in this ascending scale of effects, the mind’s
whole task consists in perceiving the ever more extensive relations between
the phenomena that it is comparing and whose ideas or signs it links
together in accordance with the real order of the successions or of the
analogies it succeeds in discovering; as the number of these perceived
analogies increases, that of the formerly separate categories diminishes; the
various series diverge and tend to meet up at their summit. It is thus that the
real causes, the true productive forces, withdraw to the rear of our minds and
are said to be simplified possibly even to the point of systematic unity. But
the secret return of the mind towards some absolutely unknown, efficient
cause (x,y), which we no longer even attempt to determine in itself, is not
less compelled by the nature of our minds; and whatever care is taken to
remove the unknown, or to conceal its name or distinctive functions, still

RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PHYSICAL AND MORAL IN MAN 53

it subsists in the secret confines (dans l’intimité) of thought, which pursues
it and vainly seeks to grasp it externally.
Such a method seems quite conducive to cutting out from the root all
the systematic illusions of which the imprudent investigations on the nature
of forces, and the modes of their action, or on what we can truly call
explicative hypotheses of phenomena, are so often at risk; this method,
however, has its own illusions and chimeras, if not in its way of observing
the various orders of phenomena, at least in its way of classifying and
generalizing them according to feigned or assumed analogies, which it
often seeks to establish between facts that by their nature are entirely
heterogeneous.
This last reflection brings us back to the more precise object of the
proposed question, which consists in examining first to what extent the
opinion of those who currently deny the utility of physical doctrines or
experiments to explain the phenomena of the mind or of internal sense, can
be justified.
Whereupon I shall observe, without further delay, and in accordance
with all that precedes, that the type of explanation discussed here can be
taken in three main different senses, namely:

(1) the sense in which the physics of the ancients and of Descartes
explained phenomena through their causes by seeking to determine
how a given cause, whether material or immaterial, acted to
produce these phenomena – the question here is to what extent any
given physical explanation of the facts of internal sense or of the
workings of the mind can be useful or justified;
(2) the type of explanation that consists in reducing to one and the
same class both the phenomena that reveal themselves (se
découvrent) only to internal sense, and the strictly physical facts,
such as they might appear (se représentent) to the external senses or
to the imagination; this reduction or assimilation being founded
upon analogies or identities believed to be observed between the
two types of facts in question, considered in their order of
succession, subordination or reciprocal dependence – this mode of
explanation would seem to be the only one in keeping with our
current mode of philosophizing in the positing of laws and the
search for causes;
(3) in the sense in which the word explain means simply to make
clearer things or ideas that are obscure by their nature, by
comparing them to other tangible (sensible) things or ideas that are
as it were their illustration (figures). One could thus seek to

54 THE PHYSICAL AND THE MORAL IN MAN

represent the internal phenomena in question by certain external
or physical movements that are produced in the body
(l’organisation), and that, presumed to correspond to the sensations
or ideas produced in the mind, may serve as their symbols or
natural signs, without at all being connected to them by any
relation of identity or even of resemblance, it not being necessary
for signs to have any resemblance with the things or the
phenomena signified, in order to express or represent them to the
mind as regards their real properties, their succession, etc. The
explanation in question would thus be purely symbolic.

An analytic examination of these three systems or modes of explanation

will be the object of the first part of this treatise.

Part one
Of the misuse and futility of physical doctrines and experiments in explaining
the phenomena of the mind and of internal sense. Analysis of the various
systems of explanation.

First article
Of physical and physiological methods of explanation.

In returning all the way back to ancient philosophy, one finds these
purported physical explanations of the senses and of the mind’s ideas first
introduced by the Eleatic physicists, and then more or less accredited by the
various Greek and Latin schools . . . Or better put, these first philosophers,
having not yet risen to a clear distinction between the two orders of
phenomena or operations, one of which relates to the properties of matter
and the other to the functions of the mind and of the soul, were not
yet really concerned with determining what their mutual relations, their
means of correspondence, and the ties that unite them, may consist in.
They could even less consider explaining the phenomena of the mind or
of internal sense with physical doctrines in that these phenomena
themselves were mixed up in the physical systems of those times and were
presumed to be part of them. Who indeed could recognize today the
makings of an explanation, however probable or specious, in these
thoughtless doctrines that took the ideas of the mind for the shadows or

RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PHYSICAL AND MORAL IN MAN 55

faint images of objects – tenuia rerum simulacra? – or that believed that
these simulacra detached from objects at various points, readily penetrating
the pores of coarse bodies by their tenuousness and coming and striking
the mind, which itself was but a more thinned out body, over whose
composition and form solemn discussions would arise, to determine
whether it was made of fire, of air, of water, or whether it did not participate
in the nature of all the elements and contained in its composition something
similar to what we perceive in each of them; if its form wasn’t spherical, the
most perfect of forms, or a composite of all the forms, which makes us able
to perceive and imagine all those that are outside of us, etc., etc.?
We do not think it necessary to insist further on these first illusions of
the childhood of philosophy, where metaphysics, yet to be born, found itself
confused and identified with the most crass physics, a physics abundant in
explanations as haphazard or ridiculous in their means, as they were
audacious in their objects, or their goal.
To find some regular theory on the respective functions of the soul
and the body, and on the relations of causality or dependence, of analogy
or dissimilarity, which may exist between the phenomena of the mind
and those of matter, it is necessary to traverse the various eras of
philosophy successively occupied by the doctrines of Plato, Aristotle,
Epicurus and the Peripaticians, before arriving at Descartes, who was the
first to deal a fatal blow to ancient philosophy, in a manner that we must
now consider.
Descartes must be considered the true father of metaphysics. He is the
first philosopher who established an exact dividing line between the
functions that belong only to the soul, and the properties or qualities that can
be ascribed only to bodies. He was the first, as observes a profound and
eminently judicious writer,3 to employ the only appropriate method for
precisely studying the operations of the mind, that is, proceeding by way of
reflection, and not by way of external or tangible (sensible) analogy; an
example that no philosopher had given before, and that very few followed
after him. In this way, he realized and established that thought, will,
remembrance and all the other attributes of the mind having no resemblance
with extension and figure and all the other qualities of bodies, knowledge of
them can only emerge from reflection or from intimate sense properly
consulted, and that the exact notions that can be formed about them can
never be gleaned from external objects, the existence of these objects and
that of our body being liable to doubt, whereas we have the immediate

3
Thomas Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind. (Note from the author.)

56 THE PHYSICAL AND THE MORAL IN MAN

certainty or positive evidence of the existence of the soul, or of the thinking
self, even in our very doubt of all the rest.
By starting from this principle, and proceeding by way of reflection to
investigate the phenomena of internal sense, one could not imagine – I
shan’t say the utility, but even the possibility of adapting any physical
doctrine or experiment whatsoever to the explanation of phenomena so
conceived. Nor is this all: from the point of view centred on the intimate
reflection of the self, it appears just as difficult to grasp the object of a
physical science, to lay its base, as it was from the external or material point
of view of the imagination to arrive at the subject of a purely psychological
science and to lay its foundations.
But doubt about the existence of the body is just as impossible for the
very fact of consciousness as doubt about the existence of the soul or of the
thinking self. By returning to this first truth by another indirect route, by
seeking to found it upon vain artificial or logical methods, or upon the
intervention of God himself (tamquam deus ex machina), Descartes’ system
seemed to open up two opposite routes, one of which led directly to a true
idealism where the mind draws everything from within itself, and applies
its laws and forms to external nature, and the other of which tended to lead,
by another order of considerations, to a kind of speculative materialism,
where purely mechanical laws, used first to explain all the phenomena of
organized, living and perceptive nature, as well as of dead matter, are later
illegitimately extended, to the point of invading the very domain of the soul,
which was initially circumscribed within very narrow limits, so it could
preserve its independence, and remain in an isolation equally forced,
equally contrary to the testimony of intimate sense.
Nothing, indeed, is closer to the soul than the particular intimate
modifications that stem directly from the dynamics of life (jeu de la vie),
those appetites, those affections4 or determinations of an instinct wholly
blind in its principle, which Descartes’ system claimed to explain in detail,
by the laws of a true mechanism. If a multitude of organized, living beings,
to whom we are naturally inclined to attribute the faculty of feeling,
of spontaneously moving and of imagining, can exercise these faculties
according to purely automatic laws, why, putting feeling and thought aside,
or even placing them under mechanical or organic laws, does one not seek

4
Biran uses the word ‘affection’ – which in French has a somewhat broader range of
meaning than in English – to refer to the various impressions and modifications of
sensory experience. For lack of a satisfactory equivalent in English, I have opted to
translate the word directly as ‘affection’, with the caveat that this word is used here as a
term of art rather than in its ordinary sense. (Note from the translator.)

RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PHYSICAL AND MORAL IN MAN 57

to explain, by the action of matter or the interplay of certain spirits, all those
particular operations Descartes attributes exclusively to the soul, of which a
number of philosophers deny, moreover, that any idea can be formed, only
recognizing as idea the image depicted in the imagination (fantaisie)? I
indeed know not whether these supposed mechanical explanations such as
are found in the volumes of Descartes or of Malebranche on the passions
and imagination have not contributed more to confirm certain rather
unreflective minds in the standpoint of materialism, than to extend, accredit
or justify the contrary opinion.
What is certain is that by claiming to reduce the explanation of the
phenomena of organization and of life to the ordinary mechanics of brute
bodies, and by confusing two types of laws kept quite separate by nature,
Descartes’ doctrine, in addition to holding up the progress of physiological
science and falsifying its theory, also did harm in certain respects to the
philosophy of the human mind, which its method of reflection otherwise
tended to direct in such a fine and useful direction.
If indeed everything operates in living bodies by the mere laws of
mechanics, there is no admissible intermediary between pure automatism
and pure intelligence; nor as a result is there any tie, any natural means of
correspondence between thought and extension, between the soul and the
body. A relation, a reciprocal action of one upon the other could only take
place by a perpetual miracle, or the intervention of the supreme force,
which alone is truly productive, the unique and exclusively efficient cause.
The material impressions of bodies being nothing but occasional causes,
will nonetheless be necessary occasions or conditions for the affections or
representations of the soul, since these will occasionally and necessarily
determine the consecutive and automatic movements of the body; whence
it follows:

(1) that intimate sentiment or fact of consciousness, which constitutes

the self (as) real cause, or immediate productive force of the
movements brought about by the will, is but a mere illusion, and
that the criterion for truth no longer being in this internal
testimony upon which all science is founded, can no longer be
anywhere . . .
(2) that there being no intermediary between thought proper and the
blindest mechanism, we must choose one or the other, or fit into
thought’s domain a multitude of affective impressions, of
penchants, of appetites, of obscure sensations, which, though never
appearing to the consciousness of the self, nonetheless affect a
being in its purely sensorial capacity, by becoming the basis of the

58 THE PHYSICAL AND THE MORAL IN MAN

immediate and unreflecting sentiment of existence; or again mix
up all those functions of life and of physical sensitivity among the
properties and movements of brute matter; in both cases, alter the
nature of the most well established phenomena, assimilate the most
obviously opposed classes, close our eyes on an entire class of facts
that are an essential part of the complete knowledge of man, to
which one perhaps cannot attain except by raising oneself up
through the numerous degrees of the animal scale, from the most
obscure nuance of a sensitivity that is not yet thought, to that
elevation that is the station of the reflective and enlightened
contemplator of the works of creation.

The doctrine of Descartes immediately produced the sect of mechanical

physiologists, who by working with mechanical explanations and with the
laws of organization and of life, end up failing to recognize the fundamental
principle of the mother doctrine and the great distinction established
between extension, figure and movement, which can be represented,
and the indivisible subject (le sujet un) of sensation, which can only reflect
on itself. Once this dividing line was removed, the explicative physical
hypotheses of the senses and of ideas could henceforth go unchecked.
One thus ends up asserting that the efficient cause (and no longer just
the occasion, or the necessary condition of sensation) is none other than the
object that presses upon the organ. This pressure penetrates all the way to
the centre of the brain by way of the nerves. The brain then reacts outside
itself upon these nerves and thereby upon the representations or images of
external things, or upon the heart and muscular organs, and thereby upon
affective sensations, movements, animal attractions or repulsions, etc.
Such is the substance of all those physical explanations that various
authors since Hobbes have modified and developed in an infinity of ways,
but that on the whole are summed up in these few words.
These physical explanations share with Descartes’ physical hypotheses
the common vice of being purely gratuitous products of the imagination,
impossible to justify by any kind of external or internal observation, and
even of being in opposition to the facts of intimate sense, which they
pretend to explain. But they have in addition a character of absurdity that is
quite particular to them. It is by excluding any participation, even passive,
of a feeling subject, or of a hyper-physical substance, superior to material
organization (such as Descartes conceived the soul, and which the authors
of these hypotheses persist in disregarding or expressly denying) that they
posit a relationship of hypothetical resemblance first between external
mechanical movements and purely organic impressions, and a still more

RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PHYSICAL AND MORAL IN MAN 59

illusory and obviously absurd identity between the same movements or
impressions and the feelings, perceptions, ideas or operations that the self, the
indivisible and simple subject of thought, perceives in itself and attributes
to itself in the ineffable fact of consciousness.
Whence a revolting opinion that was suggested by Hobbes and that
certain physicists have since not feared to profess expressly: that all matter
essentially and in its nature has the faculty to feel, as well as that to attract or
to move – that all it needs are organs and a memory like animals in order to
manifest its obscure affections, etc.
It is useless to insist upon such opinions, as well as upon the physical
explanations of the senses and of ideas that pure materialism has claimed to
deduce from them; we only needed to mention them in order to foreshadow
the illusions and dangers attached to such explanations, even when (like
Descartes and Malebranche) one wishes to reconcile them with the
metaphysical theories most solidly established upon the facts of intimate
sense.

Second article
Of the systems of physiology, and of their use in the explanation of the
phenomena of internal sense.

The real test of a hypothesis lies in the details of the phenomena they are
used to explain. It was by pushing to the limit the supposed explanations of
the physiological mechanists, who saw in the body a mere hydraulic
machine, or a composite of levers, cords and instruments intended to
transmit and carry on the movements of fluids or solids, etc., that
philosophers finally realized, owing to the incompatibility of the results,
both with each other and with nature, that it was necessary to give up
hypotheses that the imagination alone could still foster, but that experience
and reason repelled at each turn.
If the goal of such haphazard hypotheses had not first been to explain
the senses and the imagination, which by their nature are inaccessible to all
observation or experiment, perhaps their reign might have been longer. But
as soon as one tried to adapt these hypotheses to the laws of organization
and of life, there was a kind of experimental criterion to which to compare
them. To demonstrate that they could not be reconciled with the facts of
physiology was to lessen and annihilate their value with respect to another
order of much more obscure and much more uncertain explanations. It
cannot be disputed that, in this respect at least, the better-conducted

60 THE PHYSICAL AND THE MORAL IN MAN