Chapter XIX: Part 19

To use the expression "elements of feeling" is no more or less allowable than to speak of the stored up energy from which electricity is produced, as elements of electricity. The latter expression is inappropriate, because we are in possession of better terms, because our range of experience in the subject is wider. But suppose that among all molar and molecular motions we were only acquainted with electricity and knew nothing of potential energy, could we not for want of a better word form the term "elements of electricity"?

#What the elements of feeling are not.#

The elements of feeling should not be supposed to be feelings on a very small scale. The elements of feeling may be and for aught we know are as much unlike actual feelings as mechanical motion, or chemical dissolution is unlike electricity. The essential features of feeling may be, and I believe they are, produced through the form in which their elements co-operate. Similarly the different pieces of a clock and the atoms of which it consists contain nothing of the clock; and if we should call the heaviness of a weight, the swinging property of the pendulum, the tension of the spring, etc., etc., elements of chronometry, it might appear ridiculous, because we know so many other processes, viz. all different ways of performing work, for which these qualities can be used. The action of a spring, of a suspended weight, of a mere pendulum are not by themselves elements of chronometry; they become a chronometrical arrangement only by their proper combination with a dial and hands attached, and by being correctly regulated in adaptation to temperature and many other conditions.

* * * * *

It is not plausible that the earth, when in its gaseous state, was the habitation of any feeling beings, and it is actually impossible that it harbored feeling beings as they exist now. Feeling accordingly must have originated, and the question how feeling originates is a problem that suggests itself naturally to the psychologist as well as the philosopher.

#Vital energy a unique form of energy.#

The kinetic energy liberated in our actions, in brain-activity as well as muscular motions, is produced from the potential energy stored up in our tissues. This energy, _qua_ energy, is the same energy which we meet everywhere in nature. All kinds of energy are interconvertible. Yet we must bear in mind that the vital energy displayed in animal organisms is a special and indeed a unique form of energy. It is as different from other forms of energy as is, for instance, electricity from molar motion.

#Physiology and psychology not applied mechanics.#

In former times physics and chemistry were considered as applied mechanics, and physiology as applied chemistry. This position, however, is wrong and had to be abandoned. Mechanical, chemical, physiological, and psychical processes exhibit radically different conditions. The student of mechanics, the chemist, the physiologist, the psychologist, each one of them attempts to solve a different problem. They accordingly deal with different sets of abstractions. The processes which constitute the subject-matter of the physiologist's and psychologist's work are different from those of the mechanical philosopher and of the chemist. The abstraction of the so-called purely mechanical excludes such processes as chemical combinations; it is limited to molar mechanics only. The term molecular mechanics is an attempt at widening the domain of mechanics. But the terms of neither molecular nor molar mechanics contain anything of the properly physiological nature observed in vegetal and animal life. The latter is a very complicated process which may briefly be described as assimilation of living forms. The laws of molar and molecular motions are not annulled, yet they are superseded; they remain, yet some additional important traits appear. Different conditions and complications show different features and the characteristics of organised life are not the molar or molecular mechanics of their motions but their properly physiological features.

Mechanical laws accordingly cannot explain physiological action, and still less have they anything in common with ideas, or thoughts, or feelings. Accordingly, the attempt to apply mechanics to any other than mechanical considerations is _prima facie_ to be rejected. We must never forget that all our scientific inquiries deal with certain sides of reality only.

#The higher view of the whole.#

The abstractions of the mechanical philosopher as well as those of the physiologist and psychologist are one-sided aspects only of reality. Yet it is quite legitimate to take a higher standpoint in order to classify our notions so that the general views comprise the special views and to determine the relations among the several in their kind most general views. In this way we can shape our entire knowledge into an harmonious world-conception representing the whole as a whole. This I tried to do when, following the precedent of Fechner and Clifford, I proposed the problem of the origin of actual feelings from the non-feeling elements-of-feeling, the former depending upon a special combination or form of action of the latter, and the latter being a universal feature of reality.

#The additional feature in a stone's fall.#

When we observe some very simple process in nature, e. g. the fall of a stone, we represent it as a motion. We formulate the operation of the stone's fall into a law, describing its mode of action as it holds good in all cases of the same kind. But the motion observable and representable in our mind is not all that takes place. There must be some additional feature which in a further development will appear as man's consciousness.

To regard the fall of a stone as only a very simple instance of essentially the same process that takes place when a man does an act, i. e. performs a motion accompanied with consciousness, appears at first sight strange or even absurd. But we cannot escape the assumption that in a certain respect it is the same thing. We are inevitably driven to adopt this monistic conception of things by inexorable logical arguments; and we are supported in it by the observation of natural processes.

#Human activity and energy.#

Human action develops by degrees out of other natural processes, and we have sufficient evidence to believe that humanity with its civilisation, science, art, and all its ideals—so far as the energy alone, spent in human activity, is considered—is but a differentiation of natural forces that has come to pass on the cooled off surface of the earth under the influence of solar heat. Man is transformed solar heat. All the forces animating the planetary system are differentiations from the heat of which our solar system was possessed when in a nebular state. And what is the heat of which nebular masses are possessed? It is the motion of celestial bodies, of comets, or of so called world-dust, changed by collision into molecular motion.

But in human activity there is some additional element, that of purely subjective awareness, which is neither energy in itself nor can have been transformed from energy; it must have existed potentially. Accordingly we assume that also in the more primitive processes of nature there is some additional element which in its full development appears as feeling and reaches its highest stage known to us, in the consciousness of man.

IV. THE ORIGIN OF ORGANISED LIFE.

#Organised life and feeling.#

There is a very original view concerning the origin of life advocated in this number of _The Monist_ by Dr. George M. Gould in his article on "Immortality."[84] The problem of the origin of life (namely, of organised life) is so closely connected with the problem of the origin of feeling, that the one cannot be solved without solving the other. Feeling such as we are familiar with is an exclusive property of organised life and a few incidental remarks on Dr. Gould's proposition will therefore not be out of place.

[84] It cannot be denied that many ideas set forth by Dr.
Gould in his presentation of the problem of immortality
contain a deep truth. The brilliant and forcible language in
which the author treats his subject is admirable. But the
passages on the externality of life present a conception
which stands in direct opposition to the views that have been
editorially upheld in _The Open Court_ as well as the _Monist_.

#Dr. Gould's dualism.#

In introducing here the views of Dr. Gould in a discussion with Professor Mach, I am fully aware of the great difference that obtains between the two. While Professor Mach's thought moves in an outspoken monistic direction, Dr. Gould presents a bold dualism, attributing to all life, to the lichen on the withered rock no less than to the human soul, an extramundane origin. Why should we not then rather adopt the more consistent theological supernaturalism which attributes to inorganic nature also an extramundane origin, thus to realise by a short cut a complete unitary world-conception?

Dr. Gould's proposition is contained in the following:

"Certain confused and confusion-breeding philosophers, in
the interests of a theoretical monism or pantheism pretend
to find, or to believe, that the organic is born out of
the inorganic, that the physical world shows evidence of
design, that life and mentality were implicate and latent in
pre-existent matter. Yet they will accept the evidence against
spontaneous generation derived from the fact that if you kill
all organic life by intense heat and then exclude life from
without you will never find life to arise. But it is plain
that in the condensation of the dust of space into suns and
planets, all organic life was killed in the hottest of all
conceivable heat. But as the planets cool, life appears. It
must have come from without, and must therefore be a universal
self-existent power."

#What can externality of life mean?#

The idea that "life must have come from without" is not quite clear. Does Dr. Gould mean "from without our planetary system, out of other planetary systems"? If so, the same objection holds good: In other planetary systems also when they were in a nebular state "all organic[85] life was killed in the hottest of all conceivable heat." Shall we perhaps consider the cold interstellar regions as the place whence life does come? And if "from without" means "from without the whole universe," we should be driven back to the old supernaturalistic dualism which regards nature as dead and life as a foreign element that has been blown into the nostrils of material forms so as to animate them.

[85] Dr. Gould does not seem to make a distinction between
"organic" and "organised." We should here prefer the
expression "organised life." Carbon is an "organic substance"
but not an "organised substance." A cell and its protoplasm,
however, are "organised substance."

#A modern thinker on the externality of life.#

Dr. Gould proposes his theory of the external origin of life, with great confidence, in the name of modern science. Must we add that modern science is very far from sustaining his view? Professor Clifford touches the subject of spontaneous generation in his article "Virchow on the Teaching of Science." He says:

"Why do the experiments all 'go against' spontaneous
generation? What the experiments really prove is that the
coincidence which would form a _Bacterium_—already a definite
structure reproducing its like—does not occur in a test-tube
during the periods yet observed.... The experiments have
nothing whatever to say to the production of enormously
simpler forms, in the vast range of the ocean, during the ages
of the earth's existence.... We know from physical reasons
that the earth was once in a liquid state from excessive heat.
Then there could have been no living matter upon it. Now
there is. Consequently non-living matter has been turned into
living matter _somehow_. We can only get out of spontaneous
generation by the supposition made by Sir W. Thompson, in jest
or earnest, that some piece of living matter came to the earth
from outside, perhaps with a meteorite. I wish to treat all
hypotheses with respect, and to have no preferences which are
not entirely founded on reason; and yet whenever I contemplate
this

simpler protoplasmic shape
Which came down in a fire-escape,

an internal monitor, of which I can give no rational account,
invariably whispers 'Fiddlesticks!'"

#Difficulties of Dr. Gould's position.#

Suppose, however, Dr. Gould's assumption were accepted, suppose that life had come from without, matter were of itself lifeless, and life, the "self-existent power," had ensouled some dead organic substances so as to cause their organisation, would we be any wiser through this hypothesis? The assumption instead of diminishing the difficulties in the problem of life, would increase them. New questions arise: What must this "self-existent power" be conceived to be? Does it exist without a physical basis (to use Professor Huxley's phrase)? How does it differ from energy? Is not all power energy of some kind? And are not all kinds of energy interconvertible? Has this self-existent power the faculty of changing other energy into itself, into life, or is it only supposed to utilise it? In the latter case it would be a _Ding an sich_, not in but behind the functions of organisms; and in both cases it would form an exception to the law of the conservation of energy, for "the self-existent power of life" would be an ever-increasing power. One life-germ only may have come from spheres unknown into the universe, and by utilising the mechanical energy of the material world has animated at least our earth, and may animate in a similar way all the globes in the milky way. That life-germ, however,—if it was anything like a real life-germ, such as our naturalists know of,—must have consisted of organic substance. What a strange coincidence, that outside of the world also organic substances are found! Life-germs are not simple substance, but highly complex organisms. Accordingly, the question presents itself, How has this life-germ been formed? What conditions in another world radically different from ours have moulded it and combined its parts into this special life-germ so extraordinarily adaptable to our material universe? Or must we suppose that the first life-germ was formed out of the cosmic substance of our universe by a non-material spark of life, (whatever life may mean,) that had dropped in somehow into the material world from without?

If life is a self-existent power, why does it always appear dependent upon and vary with the organisation, which it is supposed to have formed? Why has life never been observed in its self-existence? So far as we have ever been able to observe life, it is matter organised and organising more matter. All the difficulties disappear if we say, Life does not produce organisation, it is organisation.

* * * * *

#Organisms nor aggregates of cells.#

Dr. Gould, in appealing to the latest scientific researches as proving "the dependence of all organisation upon life," especially mentions his friend Dr. Edmund Montgomery and also Professor Frommen's article "Zelle" (Eulenburg's "Realencyclopädie der gesammten Heilkunde," 1890). Now it is true, as Dr. Gould says, that "the body of animals is not an aggregate of cells." It is as little a mere aggregate of cells as a watch is a mere aggregate of metal, or as a hexagon a mere aggregate of lines. The body of animals is an organism; which means, it is an interacting whole of a special form built of irritable substance. A highly complex organism is not and cannot be considered as a compound of its diverse organs, but as a differentiation. Its unity is preserved in the differentiation, yet this unity does not exist outside of or apart from the differentiated parts.

#Disparity of life and matter.#

I fully assent to Professor Huxley's proposition, approvingly quoted by Dr. Gould, that "materialism is the most baseless of all dogmas." I also believe in the _omne vivum ex vivo_; but I do not consider it with Dr. Gould as an axiom, nor can I accept the consequence which Dr. Gould derives from it, "that life [viz. organised life] is more certain and enduring than matter, soul than sense." It is true that "matter and life" are "as far apart as heaven and earth." Farther indeed, for they are two abstractions of an entirely disparate character. No passage through spatial distance, be it ever so large, could bring both concepts together. They are and remain as different, as is for instance the idea expressed in a sentence from the ink with which it is written. Ideas contain no ink and ink contains no ideas. Yet this does not prove that ideas exist by themselves in a ghostlike abstractness apart not only from ink, but also from feeling brain-substance. Nor does the disparity of the terms life and matter prove the abstract or independent existence of life outside of matter.

If life for some such reasons as hold good only in so far as they refute the old-style materialism, could or should be considered as being some self-existent power having come into the world "to bite" at matter, we might also consider the hexagon as a something that came into the mathematical world from without. The hexagon cannot be explained as a mere aggregate of lines, accordingly hexagoneity must be a self-existent power; it must have come from without, utilising lines for its hexagonic existence.

Organised life must have originated from non-organised elements by organisation, and thus a new sphere is created which introduces new conditions. The laws of organised life are not purely mechanical laws, nor physical laws, nor chemical laws, but they are a peculiar kind of laws; just as different as chemical laws are from purely mechanical laws (the latter not including such phenomena as are generally called chemical affinity).

#Natural laws and monism.#

Natural laws are formulas describing facts as they take place under certain conditions. Accordingly if special conditions arise we shall have a special set of laws. Monism assumes that all the laws of nature agree among themselves; there is no contradiction among them possible. Yet there may be an infinite variety of applications. The processes of organised life are not mere mechanical processes. The abstractions which we comprise under our mechanical terms do not cover certain features of vital activity and cannot explain them. Physiology is not merely applied physics; it is a province of natural processes that has conditions of its own and the physiological conditions are different from physical conditions. This however does not overthrow monism. We believe none the less in the unity of all natural laws and trust that if the constitution of the cosmos were transparent in its minutest details to our inquiring mind, we should see the same law operating in all the different provinces; we should see in all instances a difference of conditions and consequent thereupon a difference of results that can be formulated in different natural laws, among which there is none contradictory to any other.

EDITOR.

LITERARY CORRESPONDENCE.

I.

FRENCH PUBLICATIONS.

Why do we sleep? Some have said, through cerebral congestion; others, through cerebral anæmia. In reality the question remains undecided. M. S. SERGUEYEFF has attempted to resolve it in his scholarly lectures published under the title of _Le Sommeil et le Système nerveux, Physiologie de la Veille et du Sommeil_.[86] He considers it under a new and very general point of view.

[86] In two thick octavo volumes. Alcan, publisher.

According to him, wake and sleep would be the two alternating phases of one and the same function, necessarily vegetative, and absolutely indispensable to life. Sleep would respond to an assimilation; wake to a dis-assimilation.

To this vegetative function, nevertheless, it is necessary to assign an aliment, an organ, a mechanism. Now as yet we know of only two material forms of assimilative activity, the one semi-liquid for digestion, the other gaseous for respiration. The aliment of sleep would be, as opposed to this, an ethereal matter, or, if we wish, a dynamic form, susceptible of being accumulated and of being transformed in various ways. At first sight, no doubt, it seems difficult to accept a sthenic aliment, without a ponderable substratum, and it sounds a little strange to seek in the phenomena of wake and sleep "an assimilative group the object of which belongs to the ambient dynamism," in other terms, "a functional activity," which should be influenced by the condition of the alimentary source—that which would give at the same time the explication of the fact, that, in a general way, the two phases of wake and sleep are related to the planetary periodicity of day and night, summer and winter. Let us, however, follow M. Sergueyeff in his interesting researches, where the scientific spirit does not cease, at any rate, to sustain him.

In his theory the cerebro-spinal system is no longer the organ, as it is in the theories of congestion and anæmia; but it is rather the so-called sympathetic elements, the ganglio-epidermic system, of which the imperfectly known functions rightly require to be explained. Struck with the insufficient reasons given of the phenomenon of caloricity resulting from the section of a sympathetic nerve, or from the obstruction of a ganglion, M. Sergueyeff has been led to assume an action of the great sympathetic, different from the vaso-motor action. He does not hesitate, in order to explain the caloricity, to admit into physiology the principle of the mechanical equivalence of heat. He endeavors to prove, by an ingenious argument, that the heat which is produced after the section of the sympathetic nerves, finds its immediate origin in the arrest of a nervous centripetal movement; that this arrested movement owes its existence to dynamic condensations, to which certain organs of the ganglionic system are adapted, being endowed with a condensatory capacity; and finally that in the normal state the movement represents, not an expenditure of energy, but a contribution, that is to say, it is a movement of a trophical character.

The sanguineous condition of the brain remains to be considered; but the difference in this respect between wake and sleep, would be purely distributive instead of being quantitative. Schiff has remarked that white rats deprived of their cerebral lobes and corpora striata sleep and wake; which leads us to think that the phenomena of cerebral irrigation are consequentials, and not essentials, of wake and sleep. In short, these two alternating phases serve in turns as chief moving causes for the vaso-motor excitation which differences, in one or the other period, the sanguineous condition of this or that medullar locality.

We cannot follow the author in the special study he makes, first of the sensitive nerves and the motor nerves, then of the "cerebral activities" in the conditions of wake and sleep. It would be laborious to disengage his psychological doctrine from the long discussions which envelop it, and which, well carried out as they may be, do not always allow it to appear with as much distinctness as could be wished. We will note only the care that he takes to restore the _psychic initiative_, contrary to the theories most in favor to-day. He supposes a prefunctional movement of the sensitive nerves, in order to determine the sensorial impression; "attentive volitions" in order to explain attention, voluntary or involuntary. According to him, the physiological phenomenon which necessarily corresponds to sufficient attention, that is to say to the laying hold of an object by consciousness, can only be a volitional nervous movement. He remains convinced that "the cells of the brain must project incessantly in certain of their afferent fibres centrifugal influxes which tend to meet with perceptive images"; and feeble and involuntary as these influxes may be, he ranks them nevertheless in the somewhat mysterious category of so-called attentive volitions. These are not reflexes, but automatic movements. And definitively, every act of attention belongs to the category of volitional movement, be it involuntary or voluntary; or in short, "attentive volition exists prior to its voluntary strengthening."

As to the revival of images, it is necessary to admit the intervention of a previous tendency to association. The difficulty remains then to know how we are to be able to keep these images before the consciousness, in order to apply our attention to them, and what secret cause has power to arouse the signals, the nervous movements, which present them to it. The author resolves the difficulty by accepting, for cases of intentional reviviscence, _ideo-motor_ volitions, to which he attributes a considerable rôle; their intervention distinguishes precisely, says he, the active memory from the passive memory.

In reality, for M. Sergueyeff the consciousness is not, as we have said, a simple result of the image, an epiphenomenon; it is permanent (thus he affirms that we always think, that we always dream); the _Ego_, the _We_ is for him an irreducible factor. This way of looking at things has evidently influenced the choice of his terminology, more than it has vitiated his analysis, and its conclusions, moreover, he has not put down to the credit of any system of metaphysics whatever. Far from having exhausted the matter of his book, which is replete with criticisms and facts, I have hardly sketched its outlines, and I should be his false interpreter if I did not recall, in conclusion, the hope strongly expressed by himself, that the great assimilative work of an imponderable aliment reserves for us many other solutions beyond that of the phenomena of wake and sleep. "Though it may be," says he to his hearers, "that in all the recent words I have uttered, the truth shines only by a spark, do not disdain this spark, gentlemen. May one of you receive it within him, for it can, I have the confidence, by a more powerful breath than mine suddenly increase, like a polar aurora, and illuminate unbounded horizons."

* * * * *

We now come to a book of less scope, rudely constructed perhaps, but very instructive. As indicated by the title chosen by him, _La Psychologie de l'Idiot et de l'Imbècile_,[87] Dr. PAUL SOLLIER has attempted to draw the portrait of the idiot and the imbecile _in general_; which I sincerely approve of persuaded as I am that we shall find profit in sketching generic types and in tracing the composite photographs of social individuals grouped in various ways, in order to establish on solid basis a "natural history" of societies. The novelists have approached this difficult enterprise at random; it is for the psychologists to direct it with a method more sure and a tact not less delicate.

[87] Alcan, publisher.

Idiocy is not always congenital; the lesions which produce it are extremely varied and do not consist by any means in a simple arrest of development. In short, idiots form a very diversified clinical group; and here was the first difficulty necessary to overcome in order to write their psychology. Profiting by the insufficient definitions that authors have given of idiocy, M. Sollier thinks he is able in his turn to define it as "a chronic cerebral affection with varied lesions, characterised by troubles of the intellectual, sensitive, and motory functions, going possibly as far as their almost complete abolition, and which assumes its special character, particularly in what concerns intellectual troubles, only in the youthful age of the subjects it strikes." Then, discussing the proposed classification, he stops to form three categories, which he connects with the intellectual development, for which attention serves him as the touch-stone. They are: (1) absolute idiocy—complete absence and impossibility of attention; (2) simple idiocy—feebleness and difficulty of attention; (3) imbecility—instability of attention. These differences in the state of attention (we recognise the fruit of the excellent teaching of M. Ribot) separate with sufficient clearness the imbecile from the idiot: the latter remains extra-social, the former becomes anti-social. M. Sollier, for whom the imbecile, let us say in passing, is an exceedingly disagreeable personage, follows out throughout the whole of his book this distinction, which seems to us one of the most curious and the most piquant aspects of it. How many people in the world border on imbecility, without belonging clinically to this type, and maintain the mischievous rôle of destroyers and marplots!

Readers familiar with the study of mental maladies will not be astonished to find among idiots the following signs of degeneracy: dulled senses, obtuse perceptions, a poor condition of sensibility and consequently of mobility, and anomalies or perversions of the instincts, sentiments, etc. But that which makes of them a group apart, is the constitution of the perfect type from infancy, while among the degenerates properly so-called, the perversions, the manias, etc. present, are the episodical concurrences of a morbid evolution which unrolls itself capriciously in the course of a whole life.

M. Sollier has interesting remarks nearly everywhere in his book. We may refer, for example, to what he says concerning pity, courage; of writing; of hereditary organic memory; of ideas, etc. It is curious, certainly, to see idiots suddenly show themselves skilful in playing an instrument which was that of their father and of their grandfather. A passing observation on impressionability, greater for color in girls and for form in boys, deserves to be developed: I regret that the author should have been sparing of details on this point as on some others. M. Sollier appears, we may say, to have aimed not so much at giving new explanations in psychology, as at verifying those which have been proposed by good authors. He is precise, positive; from the medico-legal point of view, he presents practical conclusions, and does not embarrass himself in sentimentalism, from which the _Philosophie pénale_[88] of M. TARDE, let it be said parenthetically, is not always sufficiently free.

[88] First volume of the _Bibliothèque de Criminologie_.
Masson, publisher.

A word more with reference to the "great suggestibility" of imbeciles, on which M. Sollier reasonably insists. Since I spoke in this place, three months ago, of the work of M. Bonjean, the awkward intervention of M. Liégeois in the Eyraud-Gabrielle Bompard case has contributed to compromise the Nancy school, much more than to serve it. M. Brouardel is able to object with ingenuity that certain persons, supposed to be victims of hypnotism, unfortunately obey suggestions "which are the most agreeable to them." It is good advice to be cautious. Still it is necessary to take into account (it is what I had omitted to say) the character of the subjects, in order to be able to judge of the possible accomplishment of acts suggested in sleep. For, it is not doubtful that among the abnormal, the imbecile, the mentally feeble, one could not count much on the revolt of a moral personality which is not constituted, on the efficiency of a power of inhibition which is almost null, and that generally criminal suggestion can become formidable when it is attended by bad instincts.

It remains to speak of a work by M. A. RICARDOU, _De l'Idéal, Etude philosophique_.[89] I avow without any disguise that I have not taken any interest in it. M. Ricardou declares himself a deist, spiritualist; the misfortune is that he follows so much the vague and wavering manner of his school. A fine rhetoric, elevated aspirations; but few facts, not sufficient realities freely seen. What end is served by rebelling against physiological psychology, and by laying claim to the rights of the method of introspection? In truth, no one denies its right; it is suspected only when it affects supremacy, and rejects all control.

[89] Alcan, publisher.

I simply mention, in conclusion, the interesting work, which appeared last year, of M. L. LEVY-BRUHL: _L'Allemagne depuis Leibniz, Essai sur le developpement de la conscience nationale en Allemagne_.[90] It belongs, in great part, to the history of philosophy, and furnishes to it a valuable contribution.

[90] Hachette, publisher.

Paris, March, 1891. LUCIEN ARRÉAT.

II.

THE MODERN LITERATURE OF ITALY SINCE THE YEAR 1870.

Not being a man of letters, but an alienist, I will give you a psychological rather than a literary description of the condition of literature in Italy. My presentation will undoubtedly have many defects and deficiencies in details, but it will perhaps thereby gain in originality of treatment.

It is one of the characteristics of European writers, and especially of Italians, to isolate themselves completely from scientific research. Beauty for itself, the imitation of the ancients—this is the defect, or the strength, of our poets. ALEARDI, it is true, put some years ago a little botany and geology into his poetry, as did, nearly a century ago, Mascheroni, in his celebrated epistle _Invito a Lesbia Sidonia_. ZANELLA, a true priest, has sung in a celebrated ode the _Coquille Fossile_, which portrays in colors truly poetical the last discoveries of paleontology. But this naturalism was only a light varnish, like the golden powder that coquettes sprinkle on their hair, and which falls at the first movement. It is nevertheless true that some poets, not appreciated yet as they deserve, draw their inspiration from nature or from history.

Such is ARTUR GRAF, who in my opinion owes his genius to an intermixture of race, Italian, Greek, and German, and also to a climatic graft, as he comes from Roumania; which shows the favorable influence of the double race-infusion. (See my work on "Genius.") In his poem _Medusa_, Graf has mingled naturalism and Schopenhauerianism with a poetical spirit which is highly original. He has also written _Il Diabolo_ and the _Legend of Rome among the Nations of the Middle Ages_; a work which has philological and historical merit, especially in connection with the Folk-lore of past centuries. These books are in prose; but their form is wholly poetical.

RAPISARDI is truly the Juvenal, and we may also say the Lucretius, of contemporaneous Italy. He began by giving us the best translation of the great Roman poet, and he has absorbed much of his spirit, and perhaps also of the asperity of his verses, and of his contempt for form. His great original poem is the _Giobbe_ (Catania), in which he has given a bitter satire of modern society and of contemporary literary men; however, he would seem to be sometimes too personal; so much so that many persons have not forgiven him. Lately he has published a collection of _Religious Poems_ (Catania, 1888), in which, despite its title, there is much less religion than naturalism. It is a hymn, worthy of its master, to the religion of nature and to the beauty of truth, without forgetting the grand social ideas of justice which our poets so often forget.

PRAGA may be described as the Baudelaire of Italy. He too, like the latter, lived and died an alcoholist and paralytic. He was the first to break with the Græco-Latin traditions; and has drawn his inspiration from the caprices of his disease, which has given him a powerful and original stamp. His best works are _Penombre_ and _Tavolozza_. The same lot, induced by the same disease, has befallen ROVANI, who in his historical novels (_Giulio Cesare_ and _la Storia di centi anni_) has performed good work in history and psychology.

Among writers truly original, MANTEGAZZA excels in prose. His is one of those many-sided, versatile minds that are met with in the Latin races; such as Cardano, Leonardo da Vinci, L. B. Alberti, Voltaire, Taine, Richet. He is by turns pathologist, physiologist, chemist, anthropologist, geographer, traveller, and novelist. His novel _Dio Ignoto_ is semi-naturalistic. In his _Fisiologia del piacere_ he has attempted a new kind of personal observations, although it is met with in the novels of Balzac, of Flaubert, and of Gonoret. In his _Physiology of pain_ he has again become pathological, serious; this book has, accordingly, not obtained the success that it merited. In the _Feste ed Ebbrezze_ he describes the pleasures of the people. But Mantegazza, who has the originality of genius, has also its evil and treacherous volubility; and we cannot say what is his patriotic and philosophic faith. He has written pages that seem dictated by a catholic priest, by the side of others worthy of Aretino (_Amore degli uomini_), and still other pages which could be signed by Victor Hugo.

Less original perhaps, but much more consistent with himself, is M. TREZZA, another versatile writer, a theologist, poet, historian, critic, philosopher, philologist, but who has not changed the facets of his genius, or the conscience of his faith. At one time a priest, he was one of the most ardent preachers; but the study of natural science and of philosophy drew him away from his faith and plunged him in naturalism. He has preserved all the apostolic warmth of the ardent and honest priest of his youth. Thus he has emerged from it a new being immovable in his faith:

"_Come torre che non crolla
Giammai la cima per soffiar dei venti._"[91]

[91]
Like a tower that shakes not
In the blasts of the storm.

His works in religious criticism _La Religione e le Religioni_, and also in history and philosophy (_Lucrezio_, _Epicuro e l'Epicurismo_, _La Critica Moderna_) have received from it a peculiar impress, in which the enthusiasm of the apostle is mingled with the calm observation of science, and history confounds metaphysics. He is the first and the only one perhaps, who has attempted criticism in Italy while preserving a literary brilliancy which reminds us of Carlyle.

But according to universal opinion, among all these stars, the star of first magnitude is GIOSUE CARDUCCI. He is the true representative of the Italians, a graft of antiquity on the moderns, but in which antiquity predominates. His poems (_Le Nuove Poesie_, _Le Odi barbare_, _Le Nuove Odi barbare_, _Le Terze Odi barbare_, _Le Nuove Rime_) have attracted the greatest attention. He has introduced and revived a new metre, many times tried, but never with success, by Trissino, Campanella, Chiabrera, and others; a new metre which reproduces the ancient rhythm of Greek and Roman poetry, especially the elegy and the Alcaic ode. His is a new pagan Renaissance with a certain gloss of modernness but with outbursts sometimes patriotic and even revolutionary which the Renaissance lacked. His prose works also consist of archaic reconstructions of Italian literary history and of vigorous polemics, sometimes too personal, but always with a refinement of critique.

By the side of these productions which are known everywhere, and which can be truly called national, there is a substratum, of considerable extent, of literary works that have a local character. Such is the poetry of dialect which has however a great weight with us; for the best satirical poems and the best comedies are almost always written in dialect (_Pascarella_ in the Roman dialect, _Fucini_ in the Tuscan dialect, _Di Giacomo_ in Neapolitan, _Bersezio_ in Piedmontese, _Rizzotto_ in Sicilian). It must be remarked also that this local division is still maintained in the rolls of the great army of literature, although this does not prevent such works passing beyond the geographical limits of their territory and becoming known throughout the whole of Italy.

We have a Ligurian-Piedmontese school with DE AMICIS at the head,—De Amicis, who now however often attempts social studies with much intrepidity,—and BARILI, FARINA, BERSEZIO, GIACOSA, and FALDELLA, who possess the common characteristic of a sentimentality almost feminine, altogether opposed to the rugged country of which they constitute the glory.

There is the Tuscan-Bolognese school of which CARDUUI is the chief pontiff and which hovers about the old school. M. PANZACCHI, RICCI, MARRADI, and STECCHETTI belong to it; there was an epoch in the life of the last named in which he launched into a style which seemed naturalistic, but which was at bottom only pornographic; but he immediately compensated for his escapade by a great number of philological memoirs of an erudition truly oppressive, ultra-academical.

There is the Abruzzian school, of which D'ANNUNZIO is the head. Its characteristics are variegated tropical coloring, and a certain studied ornamentation sometimes burdened with similes and metaphors, and an exaggerated objectivity; it lays hold of the outside of things, but does not reach to and grasp the soul of the inner life of nature.

The Neapolitan school is made up of compilers and ingenious critics, who will make you an elegant embroidery with gossamer threads on the point of a needle. The most celebrated names of this school are SETTEMBRINI, DESANCTIS, BONGHI, and VITTORIO IMBRIANI.

The Sicilian is the rudest, but it is the most powerful and most original. We could name the great historians CEMARI, LA LUMIA, LAFARINA; and PITTRE, who created Italian Folklore, and who has maintained it with a special journal. Sicily has also given us two great novelists, VERGA and CAPUANA, who are improved Zolas. The _Malavoglia_ and _Don Gesualdo_ of M. Verga give us the home life of the Sicilian people. In the _Giacinta_ of Capuana we have the life of the citizens and of the Italian nobility photographed.

Women always preserve the local type; but with special features. Hardly any write in verse; they compose novels and light productions rather than romances, sketches rather than true portraits. They choose the young girl and the unfortunate married woman; very often they write autobiographies, or the biography of their friends or their husbands. The land-question has nevertheless been dealt with very well by the Marchioness COLOMBI, (pseudonym of Madame Torelli Viollet) and the woman's question has been treated of with great vigor and statistically by KULISCHIOFF; I have not spoken of ANNIE VIVANTI, another proof of the advantages of crossing, for she is Anglo-American and Anglo-Italian, and a Jewess to boot; she writes in verses which have nothing of the classical element in them—an extraordinary thing in Italy. Her works possess originality, which goes as far as the most extreme naturalism. (_Lirica di Annie Vivanti_, 1890.)

In fine, modern Italy has not many literary masterpieces to show. And this is due to a number of causes. In romances and comedies, dash and spirit demand a certain stock of observations that can be found only in great cities (capitals), and in Italy, Rome and Milan are only beginning to be such.

Originality, multiplicity, and energy of types are very scarce in Italy, for everywhere the conventional lie dominates; it is much more difficult to choose models here than it is in certain other countries, for example in Russia; for genius alone can draw inspiration from inferior and ordinary material.

The classical system of education has prevented us from going to the source of social anomalies, mattoids, madmen, etc.

Besides, classicism, which has dominated us for so many centuries, and which has inspired us with its marvellous beauties, has, like the old, (and it is very old,) lost all its vital force. People have made believe to warm themselves by it; but they have not succeeded; they remain cold; and they admire its adepts only in deference to the conventional lie. Yet the entire education of our youth consists of that. It is the same as in religion. People have made Madonnas and Jesuses of it to such an extent that now there is no longer any means of contriving anything new. Naturalism without being the natural foundation of the people is nevertheless sufficiently advanced not to allow of serious inspiration in religion.

Many authors who have sought new paths have been led out of their way by journalism and politics, which always end in exhausting people, even geniuses. SCARFOGLIO, BONGHI, TORELLI, DEZERBI, and FERRI are among the number.

The difficulty of securing a place in the literary world also very quickly exhausts many. Thus many men, especially of Southern Italy, produce a very good work; but they have become fathers too late in life, and have only a single son; such are BERSEZIO, with his _Travet_, BOITO with his _Ballate_, VALCARENGHI with his _Confessioni d'Andrea_.

Political liberty, if it has given an impulse to social and political studies, has prejudiced great literary production, perhaps because under the incitement of foreign domination and of rebellion, the heart draws from a grand source of inspiration, and the pen finds powerful excitation, more powerful perhaps, than liberty gives it.

Art finds more numerous elements of success in minds highly excited. It is the property of great revolutions to elevate the souls of all contemporaries, to impart to them a peculiar disposition unknown before, and which is not slow to disappear. The most humble, the most obscure, those even who have not taken any part in the events and who have hardly studied them, express, a long time afterwards even, sentiments much superior to those which their ordinary condition allows. It is sufficient to have lived during some passionate epoch to issue from it better, purer, and stronger. The new ideas, the generous impulses which then carry away nations, penetrate into all classes and ennoble a whole generation. We had in our revolutionary epoch, Manzoni, Massimo d'Azeglio, Guerazzi, Giusti, Porta, Miceli, Brofferio, Berchet, Mameli, Boerio, Laquacci, Aleardi, Grassi, Prati. Who have we now to compare with them?

Turin, March, 1891. CESARE LOMBROSO.

BOOK REVIEWS.

THE ORIGIN OF THE ARYANS. An Account of the Prehistoric Ethnology and
Civilisation of Europe. By _Isaac Taylor_, M. A., L. L. D. New
York: Scribner & Welford.

The author of this extremely interesting work states in the preface that it does not aim at setting forth new views or speculations. His opinions on its main thesis, that is, as to the place of origin of the primitive Aryans, are those of Spiegel and Schrader, except where he prefers the conclusions of Cuno. These writers, with the majority of the latest investigators of the subject, accept the view originated[92] by the English philologist Dr. R. G. Latham in 1851, that the original home of the primitive Aryans was on the great plain of Central Europe. Cuno insisted also on what Dr. Taylor affirms is now an axiom in ethnology, that race is not coextensive with language. This is a most important principle, as it completely changes the aspects of the problem by making it more complex. It introduces, in fact, a fresh element; as it requires the Aryan to be identified before his primitive habitat can be sought for.

[92] Dr. Daniel G. Brinton in his _Races and Peoples_ points
out that the view referred to in the text was first stated by
the Belgian naturalist M. D'Halloy; but it has always been
accredited to Dr. Latham by German writers and, as mentioned
by Dr. Taylor, was regarded by them as an English "fad."

The difficulties attending this identification are clearly pointed out in the present work. During the neolithic period, Europe was inhabited by four distinct races, all of which are represented among the present Aryan-speaking peoples of the continent. If the primitive Aryans are to be identified with one of those races it must have imposed its speech on the other three. Moreover, of those four races, two are decidedly dolichocephalic, or long-headed, the other two being as decidedly brachycephalic, or broad-headed. The latter are now represented by the Slavo-Celtic, and the Ligurian, or Swiss and Savoyard, peoples; while the present representatives of one primitive long-headed race are the Swedes, the North Germans and the Friesians, and of the other, the Corsicans, the Spanish Basques, and some of the Welsh and Irish. There are grounds for believing, however, that the two dolichocephalic races were derived from a single root, and that the two brachycephalic races will ultimately be identified as one. There would thus be left only two primitive stocks, one long-headed and the other short-headed, and Dr. Taylor concludes, not only that the primitive Aryans belonged to the latter, but that they were racially connected with the Finno-Ugric tribes of Eastern Europe and Central Asia. He shows that the culture of the Slavo-Celtic race, as exhibited in the round barrows of Britain and the pile-dwellings of Central Europe, comes nearest to that of the primitive Aryans, as disclosed by linguistic palæontology. Further, that anthropologically this belongs to the same type as that of the tall, fair, broad-headed Finno-Ugrian tribes; agreeably to which, the grammatical resemblances between the Aryan languages and those of the Ural-Altaic stock point to a primitive unity of speech.

There would seem to be no doubt that the greater part of Europe was originally occupied by peoples of the long-headed type, and Dr. Taylor conjectures "that at the close of the reindeer age a Finnic people appeared in Western Europe, whose speech remaining stationary, is represented by the agglutinative Basque, and that much later, at the beginning of the pastoral age, when the ox had been tamed, a taller and more powerful Finno-Ugrian people developed in Central Europe the inflective Aryan speech." This theory requires that the non-Aryan long-headed race should have acquired in some way the Aryan speech, and it is not surprising that the North Germans reject the "Turanian" theory accepted by the French and espoused by our author, and maintain that the physical type of the primitive Aryans was that of their own tall, fair, dolichocephalous race. On this view, the ancestors of the brachycephalic Lithuanians, whose language best represents among those of Europe the primitive Aryan speech, must have been Aryanised by the ancestors of the Teutons, whose language approaches nearest to the Lithuanian. Dr. Taylor points out, however, that this would leave unexplained "how the speech of the brachycephalic Celts and Umbrians, to say nothing of the Greeks, the Armenians, and the Indo-Iranians, was obtained from that of the dolichocephalic Teutons; how a people which in neolithic times was few in numbers, and in a low state of culture, succeeded in Aryanising so many tribes more numerous and more civilised."

The question arises as to how far this "Aryanising" process extended. Was it limited to language or did it include certain physical characters as well? As a fact the superficial characters of the tall dolichocephalic type which, according to Nilsson and Von Düben, has prevailed in Sweden continuously from the earliest times to the present day, make an approach to the florid complexion, light eyes, and reddish hair of the tall brachycephalic race. The former have lighter hair, a whiter skin, and eyes of blue instead of gray, but these are just the differences that might be expected, as the result of the admixture of the Slavo-Celtic stock with that to which the famous Neanderthal skull belongs, and which is now known as the Canstadt type. At the same time it is possible that the difference in color as well as in stature which distinguishes the tall from the short races belonging to both the long-headed and the broad-headed stocks may be the result of external influences, such as climate, food, and clothing, and the general conditions of life in a mountainous or northern region. This would apply at all events to the Teutonic or Scandinavian type, and also to the Celto-Slavic which represents the primitive Aryan type, or rather their Ugro-Finnic predecessors, if it is true, as Dr. Schrader concludes, that the undivided Aryans had only two seasons, winter and spring, or at most three. This fact does not necessarily imply that they lived in a northern region; for the same climatic conditions could be met with in a mountainous district. Dr. Schrader thinks, however, that the precise region can be approximately indicated by reference to the beech tree. We are told that this tree does not now grow east of a line drawn from Königsberg to the Crimea, and its northern limit must formerly have been still more restricted. Hence the cradle of the Latin, Hellenic, and Teutonic races, which have the same name for this tree, must have been to the west of the ancient beech-line. But since the Slavo-Lithuanian name is a Teutonic loan-word, we must place the cradle of the Lithuanians and the Slaves to the east of this line. But since there are philological reasons for believing in the unbroken geographical continuity of the European Aryans previous to the linguistic separation, they must be placed in northern Europe astride of the beech line; the Slavo-Lithuanian in European Russia; and the Celts, Latins, Hellenes, and Teutons farther to the West. It may be doubted, however, whether this necessarily indicates northern Europe as the primitive Aryan home. Dr. Latham in his "Native Races of the Russian Empire" insisted on Podolia being the region where Sanskrit and Zend developed themselves, the Slavo-Lithuanic region lying to the north and west of it. Curiously enough the beech-line passes directly through Podolia, which might therefore claim to be the classic Aryan abode. Too much stress should not be laid, however, on such an incident as the occurrence of a particular name for a tree. It is quite possible that the beech may not have been known to the brachycephalic Aryans until after they came in contact with the dolichocephalic Teutons. This would seem, indeed, to be required if the Ugro-Finnic origin of the Aryans is well founded. At the same time it should be pointed out that while, according to Keith Johnston's "Physical Atlas," the region of deciduous trees extends as far east as the Aral Sea, Latham refers the beech to the Caucasus as its special habitat; and the mountain slopes of the Caucasus are shown by Peschel to be the best fitted geographically for the original home of the Indo-European race.