Page:The World as Will and Idea - Schopenhauer, tr. Haldane and Kemp - Volume 2.djvu/505

Rh therefore the passions have their seat (siège) in the heart, which is altered by them, yet their place (place) in the brain. Thus, really thus, speaks the oracle of M. Flourens, who is so much edified by it, that he even utters it twice after him (i. 33 and ii. 135), for the unfailing conquest of the ignorant Bichat, who knows neither soul nor body, but merely an animal and an organic life, and whom he then here condescendingly informs that we must thoroughly distinguish the parts where the passions have their seat (siègent) from those which they affect. According to this, then, the passions act in one place while they are in another. Corporeal things are wont to act only where they are, but with an immaterial soul the case may be different. But what in general may he and his oracle really have thought in this distinction of place and siège, of sièger and affecter? The fundamental error of M. Flourens and Descartes springs really from the fact that they confound the motives or occasions of the passions, which, as ideas, certainly lie in the intellect, i.e., in the brain, with the passions themselves, which, as movements of the will, lie in the whole body, which (as we know) is the perceived will itself. M. Flourens' second authority is, as we have said, Gall. I certainly have said, at the beginning of this twentieth chapter (and already in the earlier edition): "The greatest error in Gall's phrenology is, that he makes the brain the organ of moral qualities also." But what I censure and reject is precisely what M. Flourens praises and admires, for he bears in his heart the doctrine of Descartes: "Les volontés sont des pensées." Accordingly he says, p. 144: "Le premier service que Gall a rendu à la physiologie (?) a été de rammener le moral à l'intellectuel, et de faire voir que les facultés morales et les facultés intellectuelles sont du même ordre, et de les placer toutes, autant les unes que les autres, uniquement et exclusivement dans le cerveau." To a certain extent my whole philosophy, but especially the nineteenth chapter of this volume, consists of the refutation of this fundamental error. M. Flourens, on the contrary, is never tired of extolling this as a great truth and Gall as its discoverer; for example, p. 147: "Si j'en étais à classer les services que nous a rendu Gall, je dirais que le premier a été de rammener les qualités morales au cerveau;" – p. 153: "Le cerveau seul est l'organe de l'âme, et de l'âme dans toute la plénitude de ses fonctions" (we see the simple soul of Descartes still always lurks in the background, as the kernel of the matter); "il est le siège de toutes les facultés intellectuelles. ... Gall a rammené, il a rammené les qualités morales au même siège, au même organe, que les facultés intellectuelles." Oh how must Bichat and I be ashamed of ourselves in the presence of such wisdom! But, to speak seriously, what can be more disheartening, or rather more shocking, than to see the true and profound rejected and the false