Do brains think? Comparative anatomy and the end of the Great Chain of Being in 19th-century Britain

Abstract

The nature of the relationship between mind and body is one of the greatest remaining mysteries. As such, the historical origin of the current dominant belief that mind is a function of the brain takes on especial significance. In this article I aim to explore and explain how and why this belief emerged in early 19th-century Britain. Between 1815 and 1819 two brain-based physiologies of mind were the subject of controversy and debate in Britain: the system of phrenology devised by Franz Joseph Gall, and William Lawrence’s lectures at the Royal College of Surgeons. Both owed a profound intellectual debt to continental comparative anatomy. In the final quarter of the 18th-century, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, Petrus Camper and Johann Gottfried von Herder had broken away from the traditional doctrine of the Great Chain of Being by allowing for a clear anatomical distinction between ‘man’ and beast based on the morphology of the skull. This reconceptualization of man as an anatomically distinct being gave Gall and Lawrence grounds to propose that the peculiarities of the human mind were dependent on mankind’s unique cerebral size and structure.

Mind over matter? On decentring the human in Human Geography

“…36 It is, then, far from clear that comparative anatomists like Cuvier simply drew on and extended the hierarchical principle of a divinely bestowed order of life expressed by the great chain. Indeed, the claim here, as recently supported in other assessments of the fate of great chain thought, 37 is that it was precisely with the demise of this belief system that human distinctiveness came to be understood in new, and specifically modern, terms.…”

From phrenology to the laboratory

“…Carpenter’s Principles insists on a need to conceive of human organs not as distinct elements of an individual human whole, but as entities that have developed from ‘simpler’ zoological manifestations. Though comparative anatomy did inform phrenological thinking (Price, 2012), Carpenter complains that phrenologists had ignored studies relating to ‘lower’ forms of life (Carpenter, 1842: 203–11). Regarding the cerebellum, they had, he suggests, ignored physiological experiments conducted on such animals as rabbits and chickens by the French physiologists François Magendie and Marie Jean Pierre Flourens (ibid.…”