Beyond the Brain: Sceptical and Satirical Responses to Gall’s Organology

Abstract

In the final decade of the eighteenth century, the Viennese physician Franz Joseph Gall (1758–1828) introduced a new natural-scientific theory that set out to explain the functions of the mind on a material basis. Gall’s proposed physical account of the mind marked a radical methodological and theoretical reappraisal of the traditional dualism between mind and body. Earlier approaches, even those that sought a material contact-point between the body and the soul, began by positing an independent soul and then turned to the question of how this immaterial soul interacted with the material body. In The Passions of the Soul, for instance, Descartes proposed that the pineal gland served as the passive “seat of the soul” (352–3), which operated as a node that allowed the mind to both control cerebral and bodily activity and acquire sensory information. Gall’s approach, on the other hand, bracketed the non-empirical substrate of the soul. His new psychophysiological science, which he termed both the ‘doctrine of the skull’ (Schädellehre) and the ‘organology’, argued that the diverse human faculties and inclinations are localizable in the discrete organs of the brain. Through empirical investigation he accounted for 27 such organs that corresponded to faculties as diverse as love of offspring, sense of pride, sense of colour and sound, poetical talent and the inclination to commit murder and thievery.1 Based solely on the size of cerebral organs, reflected by the elevations or depressions on the skull, he claimed to be able to determine the strength of an individual’s various faculties and inclinations. Thus, in opposition to the Cartesian dualist split, Gall provided a materialist-monistic account of mental activity that did not require a speculative leap into an immaterial realm.