Presenting Organologie

Abstract

In his Sur les Fonctions du Cerveau, Gall dispensed with his extensive neuroanatomy and focused exclusively on his organologie. He began with a discussion about the brain becoming more complex as one ascended the ladder to humans, showing where we fit into the animal kingdom. He then turned to the faculties being innate, while recognizing that learning might teach us how to control some inborn propensities. He also explained why he dismissed metaphysics from his formulation, yet why his doctrine should not be regarded as materialist, fatalistic, or destructive of free will. In his second volume, he made the case for multiple organs of mind and dispensed with earlier notions. His next volume presented his various methods, showed his awareness of the power of converging operations, and laid out his reasons for making cranioscopy his primary method for determining the faculties of mind and the parts of the brain associated with them. The importance of dealing with exceptional people and animals is also made clear here. At the end of his third volume, he presented his evidence for the most primitive of his 27 faculties, continuing on to his eight distinctly human faculties in his fifth volume. New works on the brain by other authors are covered in his sixth volume, with commentary about each.