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Updated: June 1, 2025
Cabanis, Rapports du Physique et du Moral, édition Peisse, pp. 248-249, an anecdote that he relates after Buffon. Analogous, but less clear, facts may also be found in Moreau de Tours' Psychologie morbide. The psychological nature of the imagination would be very imperfectly known were we limited to the foregoing analytical study.
For a season he sought to contend against the malady which was lurking in his body; but one day, in the midst of a speech which he was making in behalf of the queen, he sank in a fainting-fit, and was carried unconsciously to his dwelling. After long efforts on the part of his physician, the celebrated Cabanis, Mirabeau opened his eyes.
Cabanis with his tangible, if crudely phrased, doctrine that the brain digests impressions and secretes thought as the stomach digests food and the liver secretes bile. Moreover, Herbert Spencer's Principles of Psychology, with its avowed co-ordination of mind and body and its vitalizing theory of evolution, appeared in 1855, half a decade before the work of Fechner.
Such are the opinions of the Americans; and if any hold that the religious spirit which I admire is the very thing most amiss in America, and that the only element wanting to the freedom and happiness of the human race is to believe in some blind cosmogony, or to assert with Cabanis the secretion of thought by the brain, I can only reply, that those who hold this language have never been in America, and that they have never seen a religious or a free nation.
Sieges, Cabanis, Garron Coulon, Lecouteul, Canteleu, Lenoin Laroche, Volney, Gregoire, Emmery, Joucourt, Boissy d'Anglas, Fouche, and Roederer form another class, some of them regicides, others assassins and plunderers, but all intriguers whose machinations date from the beginning of the Revolution. They are all men of parts, of more or less knowledge, and of great presumption.
At first the physician and his friends hoped that it might be possible to overcome his malady, but Mirabeau was not flattered by any such hope; he felt that the pains which were racking his body would end only with death. After one especially painful and distressing night, Mirabeau had his physician Cabanis and his friend Count de la Marck summoned to his bed, and extended to them both his hands.
Cabanis may have made use of crude and misleading phraseology when he said that the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile; but the conception which that much-abused phrase embodies is, nevertheless, far more consistent with fact than the popular notion that the mind is a metaphysical entity seated in the head, but as independent of the brain as a telegraph operator is of his instrument.
Mirabeau, a short time before his death, having heard this projected flight spoken of, said to Cabanis: "I have defended monarchy to the last; I defend it still, although I think it lost.... But, if the king departs, I will mount the tribune, have the throne declared vacant, and proclaim a Republic." But it was chiefly in the clubs that the idea of such a radical change had struck root.
Sieges, Cabanis, Garron Coulon, Lecouteul, Canteleu, Lenoin Laroche, Volney, Gregoire, Emmery, Joucourt, Boissy d'Anglas, Fouche, and Roederer form another class, some of them regicides, others assassins and plunderers, but all intriguers whose machinations date from the beginning of the Revolution. They are all men of parts, of more or less knowledge, and of great presumption.
The best advice that I know on this subject is given by Cabanis in his Rapports du physique et du moral de l'homme. Through neglect of this rule, many men of genius and great scholars have become weak-minded and childish, or even gone quite mad, as they grew old.
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