Letter. 4 - What is the Brain?

Summary

H. G. A. to H. M.

I am glad to find that we agree so far. I will not make any comment on your last note, because I see you wish to proceed, at once, into the heart of the subject. Nor will I now detain you with observations on the nature of knowledge,—or the facts of organic chemistry, and some other matters which appear to me to be fundamental to the subject. Exactness of method does not greatly signify, in a matter so interlaced; where it is impossible to speak on any one point without, in some measure, assuming an acquaintance with some other department of the subject, or with some general notions only to be abstracted from the whole.

What I wish to indicate in the first place, then, is this:—that Man has his place in natural history: that his nature does not essentially differ from that of the lower animals: that he is but a fuller development and varied condition of the same fundamental nature or cause; of that which we contemplate as Matter, and its changes, relations, and properties. Mind is the consequence or product of the material man, its existence depending on the action of the brain. Mental Philosophy is, therefore, the physiology of the brain, as Gall termed it. Spurzheim called it Phrenology. Perhaps I might suggest Phreno-physiology, as a more comprehensive term.