Mind, Brain and Adaptation in the Nineteenth 
        Century: Cerebral Localization and Its Biological Context from Gall to Ferrier
      by 
      
       
      [ Contents | Preface | Introduction | 
        Chapter: | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | Bibliography ]
      NEW PREFACE
      The history of the localization of functions in the 
        brain in the nineteenth century must seem a truly obscure topic. In some ways it 
        is, but I would maintain that it is of fundamental importance to the 
        understanding of human nature. I am inclined to say this with greater force two 
        decades after this monograph first appeared and more than thirty years after I 
        began the research upon which it is based.
      Cerebral localization is the most accessible and clear 
        point where the understanding of human nature connects with the methods and 
        assumptions of natural science. Put philosophically, it is the empirical and 
        conceptual domain within which the mind-body problem was-and continues to 
        be-investigated. It is the space in the history of culture where the limits and 
        aspirations of human nature have been brought into relation with naturalistic 
        observation, correlative studies, and experimental research.
      What do we mean, in particular, when we say that "the 
        brain is the organ of mind?" Rather less than we might anticipate, and certainly 
        less than I thought when I began to study the topic. That is, the more closely I 
        looked at the history of cerebral localization, the more it became apparent that 
        it was not the empirical findings that mattered. Indeed, there are really only 
        three fairly unambiguous scientific discoveries of significance to my argument 
        that were made during the period covered in this study: the sensory and motor 
        functions, respectively, of the posterior and anterior spinal nerve roots; the 
        role of the third frontal convolution in motor aphasia; the role of the cerebral 
        cortex in sensory and motor functions. What emerged as of far greater interest 
        was a network of closely intertwined conceptual issues: the rise of functional 
        thinking that developed from the organ-function model as applied, first, to the 
        brain, and then to psychology and other disciplines in the human sciences; the 
        history of ideas about normative concepts of mind-reason, memory, imagination, 
        and so on-versus the sorts of concepts that are determinate for character and 
        personality; the progressive reduction of both of these sorts of conceptions to 
        sensory-motor functions; the role of the association of ideas-in both its mental 
        and reflex forms-in the history of nineteenth-century psychology; the hugely 
        important impact of comparative and then evolutionary perspectives on how mind 
        came to be viewed.
      Compared to these basic issues, cerebral localization 
        itself was merely the loom upon which these conceptual threads were interwoven. 
        I shall
       
      viii
      say more about some of these issues, but I want to say 
        here that the deeper I went into this, as into subsequent issues, the more 
        broadly my enquiries took me. The readers of this monograph may not wish to 
        follow me in these directions, but I think it worth issuing the invitation. 
        Oversimplifying what was itself a multilayered and multicausal set of 
        determinations, the question of the history of concepts of function led me to 
        spend the 1960s on Darwin and biological explanation. The factors at work in the 
        history of the Darwinian debate on "man's place in nature" led me to spend the 
        1970s on Marx and the sociology of knowledge. The failure of biological 
        explanation and the study of the ideological critique of scientific knowledge 
        led me, both personally and conceptually, to become preoccupied during the 1980s 
        with Freud and psychoanalysis, i.e., the inner world-the other half of the 
        psychophysical parallelism that was shared by Spencer, Hughlings Jackson, and 
        Freud. 
      Freud's first book, On Aphasia, was concerned 
        with cerebral localization, and his argument was profoundly influenced by the 
        functional, evolutionary, and parallelist assumptions described herein. Indeed, 
        it was psychoanalysis that first led me to cerebral localization-to a possible 
        natural science testing ground for analytic concepts. I now feel, as Freud came 
        to feel, that the study of the inner world must proceed on its own grounds and 
        maintain its own clinical evidential criteria. I have listed the publications 
        that correspond to the three phases of my subsequent research-Darwin, Marx, and 
        Freud-and wish to maintain that this trajectory is an appropriate development of 
        the study of mind, brain, and adaptation in the nineteenth century.
      In emphasizing that this book is about the history of 
        terms of reference, assumptions, and frameworks, I am stressing that it is a 
        philosophical book and is only incidentally about the history of science in the 
        positivist sense. I tried to emphasize this throughout the book by my choice of 
        epigraphs to each of the chapters. Each says, "Don’t forget: we are doing 
        philosophy here. How is it appropriate to think about human nature?"
      Now to some self-critical reflection. First, the book 
        does seem a bit pat. It was a neat project to move from the first empirical to 
        the first experimental work in a distinct domain in science. On re-reading the 
        text, I feel ambivalent. Sometimes it strikes me as a well-constructed and 
        finely woven tapestry; sometimes it seems too much so-like a Meccano or Erector 
        Set construction. This influence and that give (presto!) the next chapter-a sort 
        of associationist connectionism in the history of ideas. Then I noticed that 
        there are those deeper layers as well-ones that I have continued to mine in 
        subsequent research and writing.
      One of my mentors, Irwin C. Lieb, once told me to read 
        someone very carefully while I was still an undergraduate. I tried it twice-with 
        Plato and Ernest Cassirer. The first always led me to the deepest assumptions 
        (see the epigraph opposite the Preface), while the other provided a postKantian 
        caveat: the conceptual without the empirical is empty, while the empirical 
        without the conceptual is blind. In my subsequent research, I took Arthur O. 
        Lovejoy's advice and explored as closely as I could two of the "lesser thinkers" 
        whose ideas could be counted on to display the spirit of an age more accessibly 
        than could more subtle writers. The specific concepts of Franz Joseph Gall and 
        Herbert Spencer are now almost wholly discredited, yet their ways of thinking 
        have shaped quite profoundly how we see ourselves in the twentieth century. I 
        have no regrets. The American functionalist sociologist, Talcott Parsons, began 
        his magnum opus, The Social System, with the following question, "Who now 
        reads Herbert Spencer?" I do, and, by the way, who now reads Talcott Parsons? 
        The vicissitudes of phrenology in the nineteenth century provided a conceptual 
        laboratory for thinking about the sorts of variables that are appropriate for 
        pondering human nature. My exploration of the strange origins and fates of 
        theories in the nineteenth century has emboldened me to find good ideas wherever 
        they turn up, without trying to be overly systematic. It seems to me that the 
        understanding of human nature has suffered mightily from "system."
      In the book-which remains unaltered from the first 
        edition-I now feel I came near to a deep positivism. I privileged the category 
        of biology as relatively unproblematic and, in spite of my own views on the 
        history of ideas, I tended to denigrate philosophy as passé. In this vein, I 
        also seemed enthralled by animal behavior or ethology (see, for example, p. 
        186), apparently forgetting my own strictures about carefully 
        scrutinising where questions come from. I suspect that in both of these matters 
        I was seeking the approval of my supervisor and mentor, Oliver Zangwill, 
        professor of experimental psychology at Cambridge, a life-long proponent of 
        psychology as a biological science. His views were certainly an important reason 
        why I kept quiet about the psychoanalytic origins of my enquiries and relegated 
        Freud to footnotes (pp. x, 196).
      I also kept quiet about my views on the role of 
        purposive thinking in science, though I slipped in a quotation to signal this 
        interest at the head of the Index (p. 273) and spoke of the need for ontological 
        reform in science at the beginning and end of the book (pp. viii, 252). I  have subsequently taken this idea much further in various of my writings, 
        especially "Science is social relations" and "Parsons, organisms and . . 
        . primary qualities."
       
      x
      Where I emphasized biological categories in the text, I 
        would now wish to stress moral, social, and political ones. I stand by the 
        quotation from Zangwill with which I concluded, "I am convinced that we must 
        limit ourselves to the study of biologically significant behaviour patterns, no 
        matter how complex their underlying physiology may be" (p. 252), but I would now 
        wish to recast the injunction in much broader, humanistic terms. This has led 
        me, of late, to the study of concepts of mental space and to pondering the genre 
        of biography.
      I stand by the story of the progressive reductionism of 
        mind to physiology to which my account leads: "It must follow from the 
        experimental data that mental operations in the last analysis must be merely the 
        subjective side of sensory and motor substrata" (p. 241). My point in bringing 
        up humanism is that I now wish to emphasize how important it is, when looking at 
        mechanisms, to hold the line against reductionism. Sensory-motor 
        psychophysiology was a complete colonization of conceptions of human nature and 
        thoroughly confused means with ends. Jackson's emphasis-as a neurologist-on the sensory and motor basis of ideational phenomena had a baleful influence 
        in psychology. His insistence that one cannot cross over from impressions and 
        movements to mental states made it easy for people to ignore the other half of 
        the parallelism. Indeed, it became easy to forget the phrase, "so far as 
        clinical medicine is concerned" in the following sentence: "That along with 
        excitations or discharges of nervous arrangements in the cerebrum, mental states 
        occur, I, of course, admit; but how this I do not inquire; indeed, so far as 
        clinical medicine is concerned, I do not care" (p. 208). As I said (p. 209), in a period of half a century cerebral localization had moved from a 
        physiology dominated by psychological faculties, but without any knowledge of 
        the underlying physiology, to a physiology of sensory-motor processes that 
        dominated psychological functions and impoverished conceptions of mental life.
      I would not now change my account, but I would be more 
        stern in my critique-hence my own turning to the study of the sociology of 
        knowledge and psychoanalysis. Another way of saying this is to look at the 
        subsequent history of functional thinking, as I and others have done. It has 
        produced too much adaptation in the human sciences. The concept of function 
        comes into the human sciences via phrenology (p. 250) and gets fully developed 
        by merging the influence of the Idéologues with the ideas of Spencer. Spencer's 
        fundamental claim: "A function to each organ, and to each organ its own 
        function, is the law of all organization" (p. 159) became an all-embracing 
        explanatory principle in the human sciences. As I have shown elsewhere, this has 
        led to a shoddy, palliative view of human
       
      xi
      nature across the board, including psychology, 
        sociology, the division of labor, anthropology, systems theory, Taylorism, and 
        those aspects of psychoanalysis that are called "ego psychology" and strive to 
        represent human nature as a metaphorical physiology. The same kind of thinking 
        has also been applied in some aspects of work on group relations.
      The criticism that has been most often and most 
        legitimately levelled at this book is that it is woefully weak with respect to 
        German sources. Indeed, the eminent historian of medicine, Erwin H. Ackerknecht, 
        said:
      This is undoubtedly a very important story, and the 
        book an important and well written contribution to its history. Unfortunately it 
        is a torso. Apparently the author is not familiar with the German language 
        (German authors are consulted only in translations), and probably for this 
        reason he does not discuss, e.g. Herbart (in spite of Herbart's enormous 
        influence on Johannes Mueller, whom Young does analyse), Fries, Beneke, Lotze, 
        Moleschott and other materialists, E. H. Weber, Helmholtz, Fechner, Romberg, 
        Griesinger, Wundt, Ziehen, Flechsig, Wernicke, Edinger, Benedikt, Exner and 
        Mach. He also disregards important secondary work like that of Max Neuberger, 
        while he quotes a simple hack like J. Thorwald. But all this is understandable. 
        The omission of Marshall Hall is not.[1]
      This last point leads to a second common criticism that 
        I accept: that I have underplayed the role of the reflex concept in the history 
        of studies of the central nervous system. Alas, I am now in no better position 
        to put this right than I am with respect to the role of German sources. I got 
        along with translations and with help from friends, but I still do not read any 
        European language well enough to do scholarly research with untranslated 
        sources. The book was written from a British or Anglo-American point of view, 
        and its strengths and weaknesses are those of a person trapped in the English 
        language. Nor can I, at the distance of thirty years, bring it up to date. 
        Tampering with a closely woven tapestry would produce shoddy work. I have, as 
        the appended bibliography shows, gone to other-closely related-fields of 
        enquiry. I have sought lots of advice from friends and colleagues and have 
        included the references to which they have pointed me. This book was a 
        distillation of a set of conceptual issues. They ought to be recontextualized in 
        the light of my and others' subsequent work, but I am not the person to do it.
      I shall close by saying that I am terribly flattered 
        that this monograph is being reprinted in the History of Neuroscience Series. It 
        may be of some use to neophyte scholars to report something of the history of 
        its publication. When the thesis of which it is an unaltered version was first
      1 Medical History, July 1971, p. 311.
       
      xii
      examined, I was approached by a fine man, J. C. 
        Crowther, who asked if Oxford University Press could consider it for 
        publication. I said no, but he persuaded me that one of my examiners, R. C. 
        Oldfield, had spoken well enough of it, so that it was an appropriate thing to 
        do. Some months later, as I was rushing to a lecture, my doorbell rang. I opened 
        it, and a man saying he was from Oxford University Press held out a package. I 
        snatched it, thanked him and sheepishly closed the door. I intended to wait a 
        decent interval for him to walk away, but the doorbell rang again, and he said 
        that he was the science editor of Oxford University Press, and that they wanted 
        to publish it. I was genuinely astonished and sat on it for five years in the 
        forlorn hope that I would get a lectureship before the book was judged by its 
        peers. I finally had to get it out as part of a (still forlorn) effort to get 
        tenure.
      I hope that this background makes it not too immodest 
        to reproduce some of the comments made on the book.
       
      ."......this volume is of unusual excellence-read it"
      Mary A. B. Brazier
       
      His subtitle 'Cerebral localization and its biological 
        context from Gall to Ferrier' is enough to stimulate anyone to read this book, 
        but it gives little idea of its astonishing content and scope. It must be the 
        most important work upon the evolution of thought upon the results of cerebral 
        function written in the decade now ending.
      Denis Williams
       
      His book as a whole seems a model for the writing of 
        the history of science. As, perhaps, a good historian of science must be, he is 
        much more than a historian. Of the continuing and current conceptual problems of psychology he shows an awareness which neuro-physiologists who write 
        on mind and brain might be encouraged, by reading his book, to share. As regards 
        the relation of human behaviour to the physiology of the organism he is surely 
        not overstating the case when he writes in conclusion that, 'historical, 
        philosophical and conceptual studies in the interpretation of man's place in 
        nature have a more important part to play than has hitherto been assumed'.
      P. F. Strawson
      Pleased as I am by these accolades I am most happy to have received one from a former student, Roger Smith, who has gone on 
        to become a distinguished historian of ideas of mind and brain. When I 
        approached him about the reprinting of this volume, he was kind enough to offer 
        a great deal of advice, including the following assessment:
       
      xiii
      ’The book has an organic unity and I strongly agree 
        with the proposal to reprint it unaltered. The scientific/philosophical 
        questions that led you to the thesis remain, though Artificial Intelligence and 
        the cognitive revolution have shifted some attention from a neuroscience of 
        behaviour to other formulations of the aims of psychology. The strengths of the 
        book are surely that: it gave historical recognition to phrenology; it described 
        the historical development of the idea of function in relation to both 
        physiological and evolutionary theory; and it exemplified the need to understand 
        conceptual and historical issues in considering the scope and limitations of 
        scientific knowledge (very characteristic of Cambridge History and Philosophy of 
        Science in the 1960s). Further, as always, you had the intellectual energy to 
        shape diverse and often unknown sources into a firm historical structure. As the 
        request to reprint confirms, everyone recognizes your book as a reference point 
        and it is always cited in histories of brain.
      ’Yet you intended, and I think would still argue, that 
        the book is more than that: that it is not just an account of 
        nineteenth-century brain theories but uncovers the central arguments in 
        the attempt to construct a science of mind. As you say, 'The history of various 
        concepts of function is the history of psychology' (p. xxxii), or "the 
        study of the functions of the brain-what is now called psychology" (p. 16). The 
        concept of function does a tremendous amount of work, and I suspect many readers 
        have not grasped the abstract (and perhaps overly tacit) normative drive behind 
        this. Your historiography reflects an early 1960s preoccupation with 
        localization as (a) the key scientific investment in the attempt to overcome 
        dualism, and (b) the concept making possible psychology's shift from 
        epistemological to biological inquiry (and again you assume this shift is the 
        history of the subject). You then wish this discussion to contribute to 
        rethinking modern neuroscience/psychology. I do not think these grand claims 
        have ever really been taken up (though of course I am not familiar with the work 
        of neuroscientists). As you know, the whole direction of work in the history of 
        science has been to break down such claims into academic-sized portions and to 
        make the historical questions independent of present science. Thus I think 
        citation of your book reflects its perceived value as a contribution to the 
        history of particular nineteenth-century developments.’
      I want to thank Roger Smith, Chris Lawrence, Roger 
        Cooter, and Michael Clark for advice and support during the preparation of this 
        preface and to express my admiration for the standards of scholarship that they 
        maintain in their own research.
      Nearly two decades after the book was published, I was 
        sunbathing on a beach in Crete, reading Peter Gay's magisterial Freud: A Life 
          for Our Time. Something familiar led me to turn to the notes, where I found 
        this book described as "a minor modern classic." My immediate feeling was to 
        deeply miss my mother, who had recently died and whose mental infirmity had been 
        an important influence on my scholarly interest in the limits and prospects of 
        human nature. I wanted to be able to say to her
       
      xiv
      that she had always hoped that I might accomplish 
        something and that it now appeared that I had, nearly half a lifetime ago. I 
        subsequently learned that efforts had been made by Professor James Schwartz of 
        the Columbia Medical School to get it reprinted, but to no avail. I gathered 
        that Professor Larry Weizkrantz at Oxford has also been a supporter of this 
        idea. Then Professor Pietro Corsi at Florence suggested including it in the 
        Oxford University Press History of Neuroscience Series. I am grateful to these 
        people and to others who have written about it appreciatively, with judgements 
        extending from heavily qualified praise to a pleasing number of references to it 
        as a "classic." In my own mind I had relegated the book to a period before my 
        own thinking broadened and deepened from the history of ideas to social, 
        intellectual, and ideological dimensions of knowledge. On reflection, however, 
        it was wrong of me not to realize that our lives and works are more of a piece 
        than we sometimes like to think.
      R.M.Y.
      Islington, London
      March 1990
       
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        M. Young, eds., Science, Technology and the Labour Process: Marxist Studies, Vol. 2 (Free Association Books, London, 1985), pp. 206-32.
      ______Freud: scientist and/or "humanist," Free 
        Associations 6 (1986), 7-35.
      ______Introduction, in L. Levidow, ed., Radical 
        Science Essays (Free Association Books, London, 1986), pp. 1-15.
       
      xviii
      ______Life among the mediations: labour, groups, 
        breasts, paper delivered to Department of History and Philosophy of Science, 
        University of Cambridge, 1986.
      ______Darwin and the genre of biography, in G. Levine, 
        ed., One Culture: Essays in Science and Literature (Wisconsin, 
        Madison, 1987), pp. 203-24.
      ______Racism and psychoanalysis: a loud silence,  Free Associations, in press.
      ______Racist society, racist science, in D. Gill and L. 
        Levidow, eds., Anti-Racist Science Teaching (Free Association 
        Books, London, 1987), pp. 16-42.
      ______Biography: the basic discipline for human 
        science, Free Associations 11 (1988), 108-30.
      ______Darwin, in D. Herman, ed., Late Great Britons: 
        A Series of Six Historical Reappraisals (BBC/Brook Productions, London, 
        1988), pp. 71-86; reprinted in Science as Culture 5 (1989), 71-86.
      ______Darwin, Marx, Freud and the foundations of the 
        human sciences, Cheiron Newsletter, Spring, (1988), 7-12.
      ______Psychoanalysis, values and politics, talk 
        delivered to Psychotherapists Against Nuclear Disaster, 1988.
      ______Persons, organisms....and primary qualities 
        (1969), in J. R. Moore, ed., History, Humanity and Evolution: Essays for John 
          C. Greene (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1989), pp. 375-401.
      ______Post-modernism and the subject: pessimism of the 
        will, Free Associations 16 (1989), 81-96.
      ______The role of psychoanalysis and psychology in the 
        human sciences, paper delivered to the Zangwill Club, Department of Experimental 
        Psychology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, 1989.
      ______Second nature: the historicity of the 
        unconscious, paper delivered to Psychoanalytic Studies Seminar, University of 
        Kent, Canterbury, 1989.
      ______Transitional phenomena: production and 
        consumption, in B. Richards, ed. 'Crises of the Self: Further Essays on 
          Psychoanalysis and Politics (Free Association Books, London, 1989), pp. 57-72.
      ______Concepts of mental space, six lectures to 
        Psychoanalytic Studies Programme, University of Canterbury, Canterbury, 1990.
      ______ Darwinism and the division of labour, The 
        Listener 88 (17 August 1972), 202-5; reprinted in Science as Culture  9 (1990), l05-18.
      ______Marxism and the history of science, in R. C. Olby 
        et al., eds., Companion to the History of Modern Science  (Routledge, London, 1990), pp. 77-86.
      ______The mind-body problem, in R. C. Olby et al., 
        eds., Companion to the History of Modern Science (Routledge, 
        London, 1990), pp. 702-11.
      ______Scientism in the history of management theory,  Science as Culture 8 (1990), 116-41.
      ______Psychoanalytic teaching and research: knowing and 
        knowing about, Free Associations (forthcoming, 1991).
       
      PREFACE
      But though the history of ideas is a history of 
        trial-and-error, even the errors illuminate the peculiar nature, the cravings, 
        the endowments, and the limitations of the creature that falls into them, as 
        well as the logic of the problems in reflection upon which they have arisen; and 
        they may further serve to remind us that the ruling modes of thought of our own 
        age, which some among us are prone to regard as clear and coherent and firmly 
        grounded and final, are unlikely to appear in the eyes of posterity to have any 
        of those attributes. The adequate record of even the confusions of our forebears 
        may help, not only to clarify those confusions, but to engender a salutary doubt 
        whether we are wholly immune from different but equally great confusions. For 
        though we have more empirical information at our disposal, we have not different 
        or better minds; and it is, after all, the action of the mind upon facts that 
        makes both philosophy and science-and, indeed, largely makes the 'facts'.
      Arthur O. Lovejoy, 1936.
       
      This question of origins is more than an abstract 
        discussion of historical justice or truth. Modern psychology (physiological, 
        experimental psychology) is faced by the same problems as all other scientific 
        disciplines. In order not to go astray, in order to find new, safer and more 
        direct paths, she must continuously re-examine her premises. In such 
        re-examinations, it is not sufficient to analyse some recent work; one must go 
        back to the real sources because they are the ones to reveal most clearly the 
        virtues and the vices of a method.
      Ackernecht and Vallois, 1956.
       
      In calling this work a study in the history of biology, 
        I am assuming the truth of what I have set out to show: that the history of 
        research in psychology should be viewed as a development away from philosophy 
        and toward general biology. The methods, concepts, and major assumptions which I 
        have chosen to examine are those which I believe have played the most important 
        role in psychology's movement in the nineteenth century from an epistemological 
        enquiry to a study of the adaptations of organisms to their environments. The 
        domain of psychology is bounded by the common-sense experience of the everyday 
        lives of men and other organisms on the one hand and by physiology on the other. 
        More than any other science, psychology is obliged to make sense to the layman, 
        for its explanatory task is to make sense of the behaviour of the layman. 
        Similarly, if it is to be a science it must
       
      xx
      demonstrate the relations between its phenomena and 
        those of the traditional science to which they are most closely related, the 
        physico-chemical science of physiology. Its task has been to develop categories 
        of analysis which satisfy both the common man and the physiologist. It has very 
        rarely succeeded in doing either of these. In fact, the most fundamental and 
        perplexing problem in psychology has been, and remains, the lack of an agreed 
        set of units for analysis comparable to the elementary particles in physics and 
        the periodic table of elements in chemistry.
      Since the nervous system, in conjunction with the 
        musculo-skeletal and endocrine systems, mediates all aspects of experience and 
        behaviour, it must, in principle, serve multiple functions. A number of these 
        functions are discretely, and more or less uniquely, localized, in such centres 
        as the somato-motor cortex and primary sensory projection areas. However, these 
        same structures can be subjected to functional analyses beyond that of simple 
        sensation and movement. For example, they are involved in the functions of 
        contraction of the triceps, extension of the arm, striking an object, boxing, 
        aggressiveness, self-preservation, and seeking acclaim-all at the same time. The 
        problem for brain and behaviour research is whether or not there is anything to 
        choose among these alternative analyses. If not, then there can be no 
        straightforward 'natural classification' of functions and thus no unique basis 
        for a system of analytic units in psychology. Psychology will thereby have 
        nothing analogous to the chemists' periodic table of elements. Rather, there 
        will be a number of alternative tables, and the one that is used in a given 
        situation will depend on the nature and the level of the functional analysis 
        being conducted. In raising this issue here, I want to allude to a theme 
        implicit in my argument: the problem of providing functional or purposive 
        explanations within the context of Cartesian mind-body dualism set constraints 
        on the study of cerebral localization which were not overcome within the period 
        which is treated here; and, it seems to me, the problem is no less acute today.
      Until the last decades of the eighteenth century, 
        psychologists adopted their categories of analysis from philosophy. These were 
        the attributes of mind in general: memory, reasoning, intelligence, imagination, 
        and so on. The present study is designed to show that after psychologists began 
        to attempt to determine a set of categories, they moved from the extreme 
        of allowing the terms of everyday experience to dictate how the nervous system 
        must be organized and must function, to that of allowing the categories of 
        physiological analysis to dictate
       
      xxi
      the elements from which the phenomena of everyday life 
        would have to be synthesized.
      The major ideas involved in this history were:
      1. cerebral localization as an assumption about the 
        functional organization of the brain,
      2. sensation and motion as categories for the 
        physiological analysis of the nervous system,
      3. the principle of the association of ideas as the 
        fundamental law of mental activity,
      4. a changing context for psychology and physiology, 
        from a primarily philosophical approach within the static framework of the 
        'great chain of being' to a biological approach based on the dynamic of 
        evolutionary change.
      This work is an attempt to show the relations between 
        these ideas and the various categories of function derived from philosophical 
        speculation and naturalistic observation in the nineteenth century, beginning 
        with the work of Franz Joseph Gall and culminating in that of Sir David Ferrier. 
        The result is a history of the ways in which psychologists related various sets 
        of explanatory elements to the phenomena which they felt psychology should 
        explain, and to the functions of the nervous system. This story is closely 
        linked with the development of methods in psychology, from speculation to 
        naturalistic observation and to experiment, and I have attempted to show these. 
        By the end of the nineteenth century, psychologists had provided themselves with 
        the elements of an adequate methodology and an apparently adequate set of 
        explanatory terms in the physiological aspect of their subject They had also 
        grasped that their field of enquiry was not merely (or, perhaps even primarily) 
        the life of the mind but rather the life of organisms, including men, and their 
        adaptations to their respective environments. What needed explanation was not 
        the representation of reality by the substance mind, but the adjustment to 
        reality by organisms which think, feel, and behave. My narrative ends just at 
        the point at which psychologists were beginning to realize that their methods, 
        their new approach to the subject, and their impressive findings relating 
        feeling and movement to the brain, still did not provide them with an adequate 
        set of elements for resynthesizing the phenomena of everyday life. Consequently, 
        in the last decade of the nineteenth century a number of new approaches-some 
        extending, some complementing, and some rejecting the views of their 
        teachers-branched off
       
      xxii
      from the parent tradition. At the present time vigorous 
        attempts are being made to relate the results of this divergence: reflexology, 
        behaviourism, psychoanalysis, brain and behaviour, factor analysis, and 
        ethology. It is hoped that the present study can be of use in recalling the 
        development of some of the issues which led these movements to take their 
        separate ways; that it might also encourage the recall of the basic questions, 
        thus prompting a re-assessment of whether or not we are-or should be-still 
        addressing ourselves to them. I hope that I have made a case for the use of 
        historical method in the analysis of current problems in science.
      I became an historian of science as a result of my 
        inability to derive a coherent picture of experience and behaviour from the 
        findings of current psychology. I had studied philosophy and psychology as an 
        undergraduate in preparation for a career in psychiatry. While at medical school 
        I was overwhelmed by the confusion in current attempts to relate the concepts 
        used in the explanation of normal and abnormal behaviour to the physiology of 
        the organisms. I devoted some time during my medical course to an attempt to 
        discover some of the basic issues which were causing confusion. A review of 
        current literature led further and further into the history of neurology and 
        psychology until I felt I had identified two crucial concepts: brain 
        localization, and the functions which various investigators had attempted to 
        localize. Localization has been the reigning assumption in brain research, and 
        the history of various concepts of function is the history of psychology. 
        It can be argued that the mind-body problem finds its most precise scientific 
        expression in the related problems of classifying and localizing the functions 
        of the brain.
      A regressive study of the literature led back to the 
        inception of empirical localization research in the work of Franz Joseph Gall. I 
        then left medical school in order to work as an historian and trace the 
        development of concepts of localization and of function since 1798.
      I have acknowledged all the sources which I have used, 
        and cited the ideas and specific quotations I have drawn from them, but the 
        conception, development, and results of the study are the products of my own 
        independent research. My treatment of Gall, the development of sensory-motor 
        physiology, Bain, Spencer, Jackson, Carpenter, and Ferrier are wholly original, 
        except for the specific information which I cite in the text. It will be seen 
        that my treatment of Magendie, Mueller, the early history of associationism, 
        Broca, and Fritsch and Hitzig, consists of straightforward exegesis and draws 
        heavily on
       
      xxiii
      secondary sources. The assessment of the place of their 
        work in the history of cerebral localization and psychophysiology is my own. 
        Finally, the importance of phrenology in many aspects of the histories of 
        psychology and biology has come as a complete surprise to me. I originally 
        studied Gall because his work was the starting point of empirical localization, 
        and I planned to spend only a few weeks on phrenology. It will be seen that the 
        result is quite far from what I anticipated. In a sense, then, I should 
        acknowledge an important debt to Gall. The perspective on later work which his 
        writings has provided has done more than any other single factor to shape my own 
        view of the domain and aims of biological psychology.
      My field of interest has received scant attention from 
        professional historians of science and medicine. Therefore it has not been 
        possible in most cases to extend or qualify the findings of other scholars. 
        There are a few notable exceptions to this generally bleak situation: A. O. 
        Lovejoy, Owsei Temkin, Erwin H. Ackerknecht, Elie Halévy, Richard Hofstadter, 
        Ralph B. Perry, G. S. Brett, Jürgen Thorwald, Sir Henry Head, Sir Geoffrey 
        Jefferson, Sir Michael Foster, A. Macalister, J. M. D. Olmsted, and L. S. 
        Hearnshaw.
      Professor O. L. Zangwill has shown a very gratifying 
        interest in the progress of my work. His initial encouragement and continuing 
        support made it possible for me to extend a one-year visit into a four-year 
        course of research. Mr John Dunn is responsible for any sense of sharpened 
        criticism and historical judgement that may be evident in this work. Mr Jeremy 
        Mulford is responsible for the language of those parts of the chapter on Gall 
        which are in English. Gerd Buchdahl, Mary Hesse, and Rita van der Straeten of 
        the Whipple Science Museum, Cambridge, have helped and encouraged me in 
        innumerable ways, as have Sydney Smith, Joseph Needham, and Ruth Schwartz-Cowan. 
        The cooperation of the (now disbanded) British Phrenological Society, and 
        especially the enlightened approach of its former President and Hon. Secretary, 
        Miss Frances Hedderly, F.B.P.S., enabled me to have access to phrenological 
        works not readily available in libraries. Though we cannot agree in our 
        conclusions, I hope that their interests may have paralleled my own in 
        indicating the debt which modern biology, psychology, and brain research owe to 
        Gall. I should like to thank the staff of the following libraries for their 
        cooperation in making manuscripts and books available to me, often for extended 
        periods: the departments of Anatomy, Physiology, Pathology, and Psychology of 
        the University of Cambridge, the British Museum, the Royal Society,
       
      xxiv
      the National Central Library, the University of 
        Edinburgh, and the National Library of Scotland. Sheila Young has provided both 
        home that allowed me to pursue my research and many helpful comments. Lady 
        Rosemary Fitzgerald has done an excellent job in checking the manuscript, Mrs 
        Verna Cole has done the typing, and Mrs Marilyn Pole has been indispensable in 
        proof reading and preparing the index. At various stages my research has been 
        supported by grants from the United States Public Health Service, the Wellcome 
        Foundation (U.S.A.), and King's College, Cambridge.
      R.M.Y.
      Cambridge 1969