Descartes' Bones (23 page)

Berzelius wrote back thanking him for the information and then launching into a lengthy discussion of his work with alkaline sulfur and whether “in alkaline sulfur liquids the sulfuric acid forms before or after the addition of water.” In his reply, Berthollet noted that at a follow-up meeting of the academy, Delambre had done his best to discredit the skull as being that of Descartes. But “his observations seemed not well founded,” Berthollet observed.

The world's greatest assembly of scientists had reached a conclusion, one that rested not on an ideal of certainty but on the modern notion of probability. They had applied their doubts to the very head that had introduced doubt as a tool for advancing knowledge. And in the end they gave the head a nod.

Cranial Capacity

OMEWHERE AROUND 1767, A BOY IN THE VILLAGE
of Tiefenbronn in the German state of Baden observed that, among his classmates, those who had the best verbal memories—those who were most able to learn and recall lengthy passages of the Bible, for instance—tended to have bulging eyes. Franz Joseph Gall was nothing if not consistent throughout his life, and twenty years later, now a physician in Vienna, he began holding public lectures on what he called “organology.” He had developed a new technique for dissecting the brain—not by slicing into it like a ham, as scientists had been doing previously, but by teasing apart and analyzing its separate structures—and based on this work he formed the idea that different parts of the brain controlled different types of mental activity. Had he stopped at that, Gall would have merited a noble spot in the canon of scientific pioneers, for the field of neuroscience is built upon the localization of brain functions, but he went further. He posited that the regions of the brain worked like the muscles of the body, so that those that were more highly evolved were more developed physically. That is to say, they bulged. By knowing the various regions of the brain and what mental faculties were located there, he reasoned, one could “read” someone's skull and determine his or her natural propensities.

It was one of Gall's acolytes who coined the term
phrenology.
Gall himself didn't like it, nor did he agree with many of the tenets of this new science of the mind as it was developed by others, but his is the name most associated with it. One reason is the aggressiveness with which he promoted it. His public talks and demonstrations in Vienna became wildly popular, as people grabbed on to this new, “modern” way to understand the human being in general and themselves in particular. Gall promised specificity: there were no fewer than twenty-seven brain regions in which individual functions or propensities—guile, courage, tendency to commit murder, sense of proportion, architectural talent, sense of satire, benevolence, obstinance, language ability (which indeed Gall situated behind the eyes)—were localized. One hundred and sixty years earlier, Descartes had all but proclaimed that science would unlock the mysteries of the human being; Gall was declaring that he had done it.

And, just as had happened with Descartes, Gall found himself opposed by the highest authorities in the land for promoting a philosophy that would undercut the established order. “This doctrine concerning the head, which is talked about with enthusiasm,” wrote Francis, the emperor of Austria, in an edict forbidding Gall to continue expounding organology, “will perhaps cause a few to lose their heads and it leads to materialism, therefore is opposed to the first principles of morals and religion.” The reasoning was much the same as what Regius encountered when he gave the first public lectures on Cartesianism in Utrecht in the 1630s. “Materialism” described a philosophy in which everything that goes to make up a human being is accounted for by material forces, thus leaving no room for theology. If goodness and a tendency to evil were somehow preprogrammed into the brain, what role was there for the church in governing human behavior? And since church and state were bound so closely in most of Europe (Francis had sent forces to oppose the French revolutionary government), such a categorical threat to religion was equally a threat to political power.

Like all good self-promoters, Gall made use of the controversy: he and his colleague Johann Spurzheim left Vienna and took their cranial road show on a thirty-city tour, becoming famous throughout Europe. When Gall arrived in Paris in 1807, crowds greeted him; the “head science” was caricatured in the press, and at parties young people began a semicomic fad of fingering one another's heads. Gall wanted to have it both ways: he relished the popular attention but he craved legitimacy, and the Academy of Sciences was indubitably the bestower of scientific legitimacy. He put an overview of his work before the academy in 1808. Its initial response was careful and mixed: in a tightly written fifteen-page report, the committee found Gall's anatomical work impressive but remained judiciously reticent on the subject of reading bumps.

Gall settled in Paris. He was determined to win official approval, and he continued to develop his ideas. The flaw in his organology theory was that it had little connection to his brain dissections. Then again, he relied heavily on a principle that ought to have endeared him to Georges Cuvier, who, as permanent secretary of the academy, was in a position to grant legitimacy to Gall's work. Cuvier was one of the founders of comparative anatomy, and this was the basis of Gall's argument. In Vienna, Gall had glimpsed the outlines of his localization idea while working at a mental hospital with patients suffering from one or another form of monomania; he reasoned that obsessive fixation on a certain subject or type of behavior might relate to a particular area of the brain. Later, working at a prison, he studied the heads of inmates and decided that he had discovered a common skull abnormality in most. This spot (just above the ear), he concluded, reflected a tendency toward criminality or antisocial behavior.

Comparing anatomical features would be the foundation on which Gall's theory would rest. In Vienna he made arrangements to have the police and the mental asylum provide him with the skulls of deceased murderers and “lunatics” so that he could analyze and compare them. Just as important, he believed, was to examine the skulls of people of worthy and notable achievement. Obtaining the heads of great thinkers, artists, and statesmen was not a simple matter, but Gall was persistent and over time he built a collection of three hundred skulls and plaster casts of skulls. The case of Goethe in particular highlights Gall's tactics and zeal in pursuing choice skulls, for Goethe was still alive at the time that Gall pursued him. Gall was so eager to have the skull of this particular genius that, not content with Goethe's graciously agreeing to have his head cast, he wrote to the sculptor who made the bust imploring him, in the event of the poet's death, “to bribe the relatives” to get them to give over the head for his collection.

Gall was obliged to leave most of his skulls behind in Vienna, but in Paris he promptly began a new collection, avidly pursuing notable examples. Events thus coalesced in a curious way in 1821. The same year that Gall decided he had amassed enough evidence and an impressive enough body of work to make his play for admission to the hallowed ranks of the Academy of Sciences, the skull of one of the most renowned of great thinkers—an object Gall would very much have liked to get his hands on—arrived at the academy.

Gall's chances of achieving the first objective were not good. The members were nearly unanimous in looking down on organology and “cranioscopy” (the palpating of the skull to assess a person's aptitudes and deficiencies). Cuvier in particular found that Gall's philosophy was speculative rather than based on clinical work; more importantly, as with evolution, he felt organology, with its assigning of so much of human intellect and emotion and predilection to biology, was an affront to what was to him the core, unimpeachable notion of an intelligent creator who bequeathed free will to his creations.

And indeed, when the question of his membership came up, Gall received only one vote, that of his friend the naturalist Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. Bitterness did not, however, prevent him from continuing to beseech the academy. He had submitted the work on the basis of which his candidacy was to be judged on October 15, 1821, just one week after Delambre issued his final report on the skull of Descartes. Gall had probably been aware of the arrival of the skull five months earlier, in the package from Berzelius; he asked to be allowed to make a plaster cast of it. Cuvier granted the request, and Descartes thus became part of the Gall collection, alongside Voltaire and Goethe.

Gall died seven years later (of a cerebral hemorrhage, no less), having stipulated in his will that his own skull be added to the collection. It may seem curious, considering Cuvier's decisive rejection of the work with which the collection was associated, that after Gall's death Cuvier purchased the collection for the Museum of Natural History, but at the time even those who were opposed to the particular arguments of phrenology believed the comparative study of brains and skulls was worthwhile and could advance knowledge of the brain. It was in this same museum that the members of the academy had decided to place the skull of Descartes once they had satisfied themselves as to its authenticity, so that the plaster cast of his skull now joined his actual skull as well as that of Gall, together with the museum's collection of bones of assorted primates and early homonids.

In 1821, while Cuvier was serving on the committee that reviewed Gall's membership, he had also been on a committee examining the scientific submissions of a rising young star in the field of brain research named Jean-Pierre Flourens. Flourens had started by following Gall but shifted decisively away, so much so that his career would involve a sustained attack on Gall and phrenology. Thus as Gall himself faded from the scene, his very head being tossed onto the data pile in the increasingly combative field of brain studies, a successor arose. Flourens was convinced that Gall had erred in a basic way by not grounding his theory in experimentation. Far from denying this charge, Gall had actually believed that the experimental method, because of its invasiveness, led to false conclusions. The hallmark of Gall's approach was observation. He sat and studied the labyrinthine structures of the brain, and he compared skulls. Flourens, by contrast, believed that scientists needed to be active in their efforts to unlock the secrets of the brain. He performed huge numbers of experiments on the brains of a variety of living animals (ducks, pigeons, frogs, cats, dogs), systematically identified their parts (cerebrum, cerebellum, medulla oblongata, and so on), then either removed the part whose purpose he wanted to understand or probed into the brain to stimulate the specific region (along the way, he also pioneered the use of chloroform as anesthesia), and finally studied the change in behavior of the animal. Antivivisectionism aside, such an approach would seem today to be a logical way for scientific research to be carried out, but Flourens had to defend the experimental method, and in particular he contrasted his approach with that of Gall. Observation alone, he said, was “too limited to be truthful.” He acknowledged that experimentation could lead to false conclusions, but that only meant the experimenter had to be very sure of his method and be willing to revise his conclusions based on follow-up experimentation.

What is notable about Flourens's work—besides the pioneering study he made of the functions of the basic parts of the brain and his contribution to recognizing the importance of the experimental method itself—is the philosophical foundation from which he operated. For Flourens was something of a throwback among nineteenth-century scientists—a complete, unrepentant Cartesian. His many books are replete with references to Descartes, and he wrote, “I frequently quote Descartes; I even go further; for I dedicate my work to his memory. I am writing in opposition to a bad philosophy, while I am endeavoring to recall a sound one.”

The bad philosophy Flourens had in mind was Gall's, and he meant not merely Gall's preoccupation with cranial bumps but what organology implied. If all the categories of human behavior and thought and aptitude corresponded, as Gall claimed, with particular corners of the brain, then the brain must be the mind. This may seem a not terribly notable distinction, but it turns out to be one of the thornier questions of modernity, right down to our day. As the Austrian emperor had feared, such a philosophy would seem to imply that the whole sphere of human action is reducible to the physical level, to bits of matter inside the skull. Humans, then, must be something like elaborate machines, whose functioning can in principle be completely understood and mapped out. Having taken up this view, one can relatively easily dismiss—or devalue or otherwise recategorize—not only the soul but much of human culture and civilization: art, religion, love, marriage and family ties, political and social relationships. Ascribing thought and behavior to the level of biology seemed to take away the foundation from these things, making them mere ad hoc tools for dealing with life, which could be changed or discarded based on other criteria, such as what was most convenient for the individual. The possibility of undercutting social foundations caused alarm, so that there was—in the nineteenth century, as there had been in the seventeenth century with the first airing of modern philosophies—a quake or tremor in society.