The consciousness tells me that I am _one_, and Gall insists that I am _multiple_; the consciousness tells me I am _free_, and Gall avers that there is no _moral liberty_; the consciousness endows me with the continuity of my understanding, but Cabanis and Broussais tell me that my understanding is nothing but an _act_. Philosophers will talk. VII. BROUSSAIS’S PHYSIOLOGY. The whole of Broussais’s physiology is founded upon _irritation_. He says, “Irritation constitutes the basis of the physiological doctrine.”[181] But what is irritation? Broussais replies: “It is the exaggeration of contractility.”[182] But then, what is _contractility_? In Haller, the term _irritability_ (for that is his term for _contractility_) possesses a precise meaning and import. _Irritability_ is a property of muscular fibre, by which it shortens or contracts itself when touched. Haller demonstrated, and it is his glory, that the muscle alone _moves_ when it is touched. What is that to Broussais? He goes back again to the vague irritability of Glisson and de Gorter: like those authors, he assigns it to every tissue, and, like them, he explains every thing by means of it. Broussais’s _irritation_ is merely Haller’s _irritability_ exaggerated and deformed. The genius of Broussais was too impatient to allow him to proceed step by step up to the idea—too impassioned to hinder him from being satisfied with the name—and for that very reason he appears to have been by nature fitted for success in a school where the name is every thing. But here is the great difference. Gall and Broussais laboured for the School: Descartes toiled for the human mind. VIII. I return to Gall. Those who wish to learn Gall’s doctrine, will always go up to Gall himself. Spurzheim already alters the spirit of that doctrine, and Gall complains of it. “M. Spurzheim,” says he, “knows my discoveries better than any body else, but he tries to introduce among them a spirit quite foreign to that in which they were begun, continued and perfected.”[183] Gall, moreover, was a great anatomist. His idea of tracing the fibres of the brain is, as to the anatomy of that organ, the fundamental idea. The idea is not his own: two French anatomists, Vieussens and Pourfour du Petit, had admirably understood it long before his time; but at the period of his appearance it had been long forgotten. The brain was not then dissected by any one: it was cut in slices. It was a great merit in Gall to have recalled the true method of dissecting the brain; and there was still greater address on his part, in connecting with his labours in positive anatomy, his doctrine of independent faculties and multiple brain. This strange doctrine has had a fortune still more strange. Gall and Spurzheim forgot to place _curiosity_ among their primary faculties. They were wrong. But for the credulous curiosity of mankind, how could they have explained the success of their doctrine?