Fullinwider. Darwin Faces Kant - A Study in Nineteenth-Century Physiology (Article)

The British Society for the History of Science
Darwin Faces Kant: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Physiology

Author(s): S. P. Fullinwider
Source: The British Journal for the History of Science, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Mar., 1991), pp. 21-44
Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of The British Society for the History of
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BJHS, 1991, 24, 21-44
Darwin faces Kant: a study in nineteenth-
century physiology
S. P. FULLINWIDER'*
Recent explorations into Sigmund Freud's intellectual development by Frank Sulloway and
Lucille Ritvo have directed attention to the significance of evolutionary theory for psycho-
analysis.1 In this paper I shall pursue the exploration by showing how Darwin was received
by members of the so-called Helmholtz circle (Hermann von Helmholtz, Emil du Bois-
Reymond, Ernst Brucke) and certain of Freud's teachers in the University of Vienna
medical school. I will make the point that the Leibniz-Kant background of these several
scientists was important for this reception. I will argue that the Leibniz-Kant tradition
came forward to Freud by two roads, Helmholtz's unconscious inference as foundation for
a physiology of the senses, and Arthur Schopenhauer's not unrelated uses of the principle
of sufficient reason to explain the possibility of lawlikeness in a universe of lawless
energies. Finally, I will suggest ways in which Freud received and used the tradition.
Freud's colleague Sigmund Exner used what he considered to be Darwin's theories both
to aid in creating a synthesis of the two Leibniz-Kant trends and to save their Kantian
elements for science. In so doing he fleshed out an alternative brain model to the one Freud
used in his 1895 'Project for a Scientific Psychology'. Arguably, Freud made increased use
of the alternative brain model in his later writings, and in so doing fell back in significant
ways upon the Leibniz-Kant tradition.
1
Johannes Muller (1801-58) physiologist and anatomist at the University of Berlin was not
only a leading light in the physiology of his day, he was the master under whom Brucke,
du Bois-Reymond and Helmholtz learned their physiology. It is with their rebellion against
his vitalism that historians often begin their studies of Freud's education.2 It is sometimes
overlooked that their rebellion took place within the context of the physiology of the senses
*
Department of History, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85281, USA.
1 Frank Sulloway, Freud, Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend, London, 1979, pp. 238-76,
361-92; Lucille Ritvo, 'Carl Claus as Freud's Professor of the New Darwinian Biology', International Journal of
Psychoanalysis, (1972), 53, pp. 277-83, and 'The impact of Darwin on Freud', Psychoanalytic Quarterly, (1974),
43, pp. 177-92,; Darwin's Influence on Freud, New Haven, 1990.
2 See, e.g., Ernest Jones, Sigmund Freud: Life and Work, Vol. I, The Young Freud, 1856-1900, London, 1953,
pp. 45ff; Sigfried Bernfeld, 'Freud's earliest theories and the School of Helmholtz', Psychoanalytic Quarterly,
(1944), 13, pp. 341-62; Paul Cranefield, 'Freud and the "School of Helmholtz"', Gesnerus, (1966), 23, pp. 35-9;
Peter Amacher, Freud's Neurological Education and its Influence on Psychoanalytic Theory, Vol. IV,
Psychological Issues, New York, 1964-65.
22 S. P. Fullinwider
that grew out of the Leibniz-Kant tradition. The physiology of the senses they developed
from mid-century onwards was largely structured by their response to that tradition.
Muller advanced the proposition that became controlling: sensation is an attribute not
of some real object in the outer world but of the sensory nerves:
Sensation, therefore, consists in the communication to the sensorium, not of the quality or state
of the external body, but of the condition of the nerves themselves, excited by the external causes.
We do not feel the knife which gives us pain, but the painful state of our nerves produced by it.3
He was one with the Scot David Hume as to the subjectivity of our representations, but
he did not adopt the British naive realism (that Nietzsche was to call the dogma of
immaculate perception) which held that the sensory nerves are neutral conductors.
Muller's critique of the neutral conductor theory was straightforward. He pointed out
that all sensory nerves transmit certain sensory impressions, for example such impression
as might be given by electrical stimulation. But often the qualitative results differ depending
upon the nerve stimulated. To the nerves of sight the electrical stimulus might manifest
itself as a flash of light; not so to the nerves of touch. Again, some sensory nerves transmit
the sun's radiation as light, others as heat. And yet again, some sensory nerves will transmit
sound, or etc., some will not. From these facts of everyday life Muller concluded that the
sensory quality experienced is specific to the nerve stimulated. He spoke of 'specific nerve
energies': '...each peculiar nerve of sense has special powers or qualities which the
exciting causes merely render manifest'.' Thus, sounds, colours, light itself, are not merely
subjective, they are innate.
Though influenced by Kant, Muller tended at times to push back to Leibniz. In asserting
that each species is innately endowed with a unique 'organizing principle' or 'ruling idea'
and in rejecting Kant's transcendental forms ('I do not adopt the opinion that the mind is
originally occupied by the primitive ideas of Kant, or the categories of Aristotle; these
appear to be the fruit of experience and of the power of abstraction.')5 he was close to
advocating a Leibnizian-like pre-established harmony between the experienced world of
subjective sensations and events in the 'outer world' which the subjective sensations are
thought somehow to accompany.
Muller's notion of a ruling idea (which, though he used it in the context of fixed biological
species, in some ways anticipated today's notions about genetic programming)6 carried
within it a principle destined to shape the German response to Darwin, the principle that
it is the unconscious formative action of such a ruling idea that structures man's relation
to his world:
A piece of mechanism is formed in accordance with the idea held by the artificer, this idea being
the purpose for which it was intended. An 'idea' also regulates
the structure of every organism,
and each of its component organs. In the former case, however, the ruling idea exists external to
the artificial mechanism, namely, in the mind of the artificer; while the idea, which is the cause
of harmony of organic bodies, is in action in the organism itself, exerting in it a formative power
unconsciously, and in obedience to determinate laws.7
Muller suggested the action of a 'vital principle' here, by which he meant the operation
3 Johannes Muller, Elements of Physiology, Vol. I, 2nd edn (tr. William Baly), London, 1840, p. 819.
4 Ibid. 5 Ibid., II, p. 1348.
6 Ibid., II, p. 1334. 7 Ibid., II, p. 1333.
Darwin faces Kant 23
of the organizing principle or ruling idea: he defined the vital principle as the fact that an
organizing idea is at work in the organism.8
The friends - du Bois-Reymond, Brucke and Helmholtz - who early-on joined hands in
opposition to Muller's vital principle or, as they called it, 'life force', set themselves the
group goal of creating a physiology defined by the laws of physics and chemistry.9
By the German reading, an important part of David Hume's 1730-40 critique of
rationalism turned on the notion that since our ideas (the German Vorstellungen or
representations) are subjective and learned, so must be the connections between them. Since
those connections are not known a priori they lack the element of necessity. Muller agreed
whole-heartedly. He added, however, that an animal might be expected to learn that
certain events follow upon certain others but that it could never develop the abstract notion
of necessary cause. Thus in his view the human mind has a unique power inexplicable by
the laws of physics and chemistry. He turned to the organizing principle notion to explain
why man alone has the power of abstracting and generalizing from his experience.10
Muller's students set about confronting his legacy: because of the subjectivity of specific
nerve energies they had to find an explanation for the apparent harmony between that
subjectivity and the world it represents, yet they were sworn to work within the context
of their reductionism. How do the laws of physics and chemistry make possible the sensory
events that give us a working picture of the world?
Du Bois-Reymond, the most dogmatically reductionist of the friends, liked to point out
that when taken within the context of Helmholtz's 1847 classic, Ueber die Erhaltung der
Kraft (On the Conservation of Force), the notion of pre-established harmony, which du
Bois-Reymond saw coming down from Leibniz and Kant, as their solution to the riddle,
involves an impossible miracle in that it requires (divine) creative
act[s] contrary to the
Erhaltung's showing that creating something out of nothing is impossible. Du Bois-
Reymond implicated both the Leibniz version which featured the principle of sufficient
reason and 'the inborn Kantian categories'. Yet having himself adopted Muller's notion
of specific nerve energies he had little choice but to recognize a subject-object harmony of
some sort. From this unenviable position du Bois-Reymond issued his famous lament that
neither the human mind nor what he called the Laplacian Geist (i.e. Laplace's demon) are
capable of solving the riddle of harmony."
Du Bois-Reymond, who was instrumental in getting Helmholtz's Erhaltung published in
the first place, saw that work as a final nail in the coffin of the miraculous 'vital principle'
because that principle imagines a (vital) force spontaneously springing out of nothing at the
organism's birth and just as spontaneously passing back into nothing at the organism's
demise.'2 It is possible that in his enthusiasm for the Erhaltung he overlooked the
8 Ibid., II, p. 1334.
9 See, e.g., Charles Culotta, 'German biophysics, objective knowledge, and romanticism', Hist. Studies in the
Physical Sciences, (1975), 4, pp. 3-38; Karl Rothschuh, History of Physiology (tr. Guenter Risse), Huntington,
New York, 1972, pp. 152, 205; June Goodfield, The Growth of Scientific Physiology: Physiological Method and
the Mechanistic Vitalistic Controversy, New York, 1975. 10 Muller, op. cit. (5), p. 1334.
11 Emil du Bois-Reymond, 'Leibnizische Gedanken in der neueren Naturwissenschaft' (1870), Vortrage ueber
Philosophie und Gessellschaft (ed. Sigfried Wollgast) Hamburg, 1974, pp. 38ff; 'Uber die Grenzen des
Naturerkennens', ibid., pp. 54-6.
12 Emil du Bois-Reymond, Untersuchungen ueber thierische Elektricitat, Vol. I, Berlin, 1848, xxxv-xlv.
significance of the fact that in it Helmholtz enshrined Leibniz's non-Cartesian definition of
force (F = MV2). Helmholtz had situated himself on the Leibnizian side of the historic
debate over the true definition of force.13
Leibniz argued in 1686 and thereafter that the Cartesian definition of force as F = MV
(mass times velocity) was merely the correlate of Descartes's reduction of the world to mere
extension, figure, and motion. The specific problem he found with the F = MV formulation
was that it did not describe the force attained by a falling body; it left gravity out of the
world. When we consider that it is gravity that pulls the pendulum down we are permitted
to visualize the pendulum as acquiring within it the force necessary to carry it back up
again against gravity's pull. The force that it has acquired in its downward swing is what
Leibniz called vis viva (F = MV2). The point is that vis viva (living force) can be visualized
as a substantial thing within the object as opposed to a force exerted on the object from
outside. It anticipates the notion of energy. Such a force can be seen as both cause and
substance. As substance it is conserved, meaning that nothing can be lost between cause
and effect. 'It is enough', he wrote in 1690, 'if I am conceded that which is a fact in my
opinion, namely, that what I call force is conserved and not that which others have called
by that name. Because nature would not otherwise observe the law of equality between
effect and cause...'.
14
In short, we are brought to the assertion of necessary cause.
Necessary cause, a notion drawn from logic, was thereby tied to activity in the phenomenal
realm: metaphysics was linked to physics.
Leibniz believed that were it true that extension, figure and motion alone describe reality
we would be left with a world that is merely random and less than real. MV2, he believed,
speaks to us of a latent or potential force (vis mortua) which transforms itself into an active
one (vis viva), thus in a vaguely Aristotelian sense when responding to forces an object is
obeying its own form or idea (Leibniz's 'substantial form'). The force transformation from
latent to vis viva comes from within. Every object follows its own idea or nature, but this
is done in harmony (thus in relation) with all other objects. This is what Leibniz meant by
the principle of sufficient reason (Satz des zureichenden Grund). The principle of sufficient
reason met with the MV2 definition of force in Leibniz's notion of substantial form. As the
substance of reality substantial form (as opposed to the Cartesian inactive 'matter') was
13 The vis viva controversy, pitting followers of Leibniz against the Newtonians and Cartesians, has been
addressed by a number of historians in the recent past. Thomas Hankins, 'Eighteenth century attempts to resolve
the vis viva controversy', Isis, (1965), 56, pp. 281-97, holds that Leibniz wanted a conservation principle to keep
the world from 'winding down'; Wilson Scott, The Conflict between Atomism and Conservation Theory,
1644-1860, London, 1970, p. 25, sees the controversy as part of the larger 'hard body' atom debate; Erwin
Hiebert, Historical Roots of the Principle of the Conversation of Energy, Madison, 1962, traces the notion of
energy back to Leibniz's vis viva; but Yehuda Elkana, The Discovery of the Conversation of Energy, London,
1974, p. 27, disagrees, seeing vis viva as fore-runner of Naturphilosophie's concept of force, this in spite of
Helmholtz's express use of the vis viv4 F = MV2; Richard Westfall, Force in Newton's Physics: The Science of
Dynamics in the Seventeenth Century, London, 1971, p. 322, sees Leibniz's vis viva as the breakthrough into
dynamics but argues that Leibniz was never able to free himself from the impact of theory of force. It was Gerd
Buchdahl, Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science: The Classical Origins, Descartes to Kant, Oxford, 1969,
pp. 417ff, who expanded the inquiry into an exploration of the relationship between Leibniz's physics and
metaphysics.
14 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics (tr. Peter Lucas and Leslie Grint), Manchester, [1686]
1953, pp. 28-33; quoted in Pierre Costabel, Leibniz and Dynamics: The Texts of 1692 (tr. R. E. W. Maddisen),
London, 1973, p. 49. I have leaned heavily on Gerd Buchdahl, op. cit. (13), discussion of Leibniz's use of F =
MV2
and the principle of sufficient reason.
to be seen as dynamic, an entelechy, unfolding its predicates from its subject. This process
of unfolding presumably obeys the principle of sufficient reason (God chooses the best of
the possible) in the realm of real substance, and obeying the constraints of MV2 in the
realm of observable phenomena.15
Devoted as he was to the reductionist programme, du Bois-Reymond nevertheless could
not blind himself to the fact of organization. He could do no better than to make its
presence in the world one of his insoluble world riddles.
By adopting F = MV2 Helmholtz served notice of his intention to halt his reductionism
somewhere short of the world-randomness du Bois-Reymond believed it necessary to
confront. In the Erhaltung Helmholtz defined the principle of sufficient reason as
' comprehensibility' (Begrieflichkeit). He then added a statement not calculated to enhance
du Bois-Reymond's easy repose: comprehending nature, he said, is the goal of science.16
Helmholtz went further. He said that science's goal would be achieved when all
proximate causes are traced back to 'ultimate invariable causes of natural phenomena'.
When, that is, all natural processes are traced back to 'such causes, in which nature is
completely comprehensible' we will know that all changes lie inside the 'law of causal
necessity'.17 He was in effect announcing his intent to find a way of equating the principle
of sufficient reason with necessary cause. In this he was prepared to go further than Leibniz,
for whom necessity was inextricably bound with analytic logic (the principle of
contradiction). In seeking a less than heavenly source for the application of logical necessity
to the world beyond one's subjectivity, Helmholtz decided to look at how events present
themselves to the human cognition system. He thought he found the answer in the
formulation: 'like effects imply like causes'. The next step was to formulate a theory of
the unconscious inference of lawlikeness.
Developing such a theory took Helmholtz into path-breaking studies of optics and
hearing, e.g. Handbook of Physiological Optics (1856-66) and The Theory of the Sensation
of Tone as Foundation for the Theory of Music (1863). Muller's theory of specific nerve
energies provided his point of departure. He argued, for example, that the colour red is not
just a physiological event, it is a logical event also, in that it is a sign of its cause operating
from the outside (trans-subjective) world. But where a single sign merely indicates the
existence of something beyond itself, like signs do more. In a talk of 1868 he said that they
give us an 'image' of lawlikeness:
The nerve excitations in our brain and the ideas in our consciousness can be images of the
processes of the outer world, in so far as the former through their time sequence copy the time
sequence of the latter, [or] in so far as they describe likeness of the objects through likeness of
signs, and thus also lawful order through lawful order."8
15 Leibniz, op. cit. (14), pp. 28-33.
16 Hermann von Helmholtz, 'The Conservation of Force' (1847), Selected Writings of Hermann von
Helmholtz (ed. Russell Kahl), Middletown, Conn., 1971, p. 6.
17 Helmholtz, op. cit. (16), p. 4. For a more complete account of Helmholtz, see my 'Hermann von Helmholtz:
The problem of Kantian influence', Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, (1990), 21, pp. 41-55; and
R. Steven Turner's excellent 'Helmholtz, sensory physiology, and the disciplinary development of German
psychology', in The Problematic Science: Psychology in Nineteenth-Century Thought (ed. William Woodward
and Mitchell Ash), New York, 1982, pp. 147-66.
18 Hermann von Helmholtz, 'Die neuren Fortschritte in der Theorie des Sehens' (1868), Vortrage und Reden,
Vol. I, Braunschweig, 1896, p. 319. 'Die Nervenerrungen in unserem Hirn und die Vorstellungen in unserem
Bewusstsein konnen Bilder der Vorgange in der Aussenwelt sein, insofern erstere durch ihre Zietfolge die Zeitfolge
In a talk of 1878, 'The Facts in Perception', he summarized and expanded upon the
epistemology outlined in the earlier Handbook of Optics. He said that in the way just
described signs 'can form an image of the law of this thing which is happening'. He
pictured the process by which the human cognitive system comes to experience lawlikeness
in the following way: because of the physiological fact of specific nerve energies a
particular sensation that a nerve renders functions not as a mirror image but as a sign of
that which stimulated the nerve. The likeness of two or more signs gives us an 'image', an
image not of some thing in the world out there but of its lawlikeness. The lawlikeness is
experienced at first as 'substantiality'. The cognitive system to this point has registered a
'relationship which remains alike between altering magnitudes'. This relationship is
expressed as the experience of an enduring object beyond our subjectivity. Thus the
'object' is lawlikeness: 'What we perceive directly is only this law.' Up to this point
experience is still private; it has not achieved the dimension of intersubjectivity, the
dimension Kant attributed to the operation of the category necessary cause.'9
In the 1868 talk cited above, Helmholtz described two ways of achieving intersubjectivity,
the first through measurement,20 the second through what he called the 'unconscious
inference'. He introduced the notion of the unconscious inference in his 1863 work on
sound to explain the appearance of the mind-body harmony he discovered in the ear's
reception of musical melody. In a talk of 1892 ('Goethe's Anticipation of Subsequent
Scientific Ideas') he further developed the arguments he had made in 1863 and in various
places and times since (e.g. the 1878 'Facts in Perception'), at the same time taking the
opportunity to make amends for an earlier attack on the poet (1853, 'The Scientific
Researches of Goethe').
Helmholtz had long liked to speak of the 'actual' world and to say that it consists of
energy
transformations.21 The conservation of
energy,
he
said, presumes
that all these
energy transformations are without exception completely lawful. When we become aware
of them, he explained in 1892, it is because they have come to us as sensory events. But we
are not at the outset conscious of their lawlikeness because the regular, the enduring, is
clothed in the particular, the accidental. Unless it clothes the lawlike the particular will
spark momentary consciousness and be forgotten.22
As sign the Helmholtzian sensation pointed to its cause. As image it went beyond that,
It implied that the cause it pointed to was (logically) necessary: like effects (or sensations)
implying like causes or lawlikeness. For the moment, though one has already become
aware of substantiality, the logical inference of lawlikeness will remain unconscious.
der letztern nachahmen, insofern sie Gleichheit der Zeichen, under daher auch gesetzliche Ordnung durch
gesetzliche Ordnung darstellen'.
19 Hermann von Helmholtz, 'The facts in perception' (1878), in Hermann von Helmholtz: Epistemological
Writings (ed. P. Hertz and M. Schlick, tr. M. Lowe), Dordrecht, 1977, pp. 143, 139.
20 Hermann von Helmholtz, 'Recent progress in the theory of vision', Helmholtz on Perception (ed. R. and
R. Warren), New York, 1968, p. 135.
21 Hermann von Helmholtz, 'Ueber der Erhaltung der Kraft' (1862/1863), op. cit. (18), 198, 226; 'Ueber die
Wechselwirkung der Naturkrafte und die derauf bezeuglichen neuesten Ermittelungen der Physik' (1854), ibid.,
pp. 57, 75.
22 Hermann von Helmholtz, 'Goethe's Anticipation of Subsequent Scientific Ideas' (1892), op. cit. (16), p.
484ff.
Helmholtz illustrated the process by which it reaches consciousness by portraying the artist
at his canvas. The artist becomes aware of the lawlikeness as it appears before him on his
canvas. It is the inspiration of harmony and universality, which if it finds its way into the
painting will have brought the lawlikeness into the public (intersubjective) realm and at the
same time will have been made public by the projection of lawlikeness.
Helmholtz was striving to achieve a union between Newton and Goethe, Enlightenment
mechanism and Romantic form.
But the inner thrust of Helmholtz's theorizing was deliberately Kantian. In 1881 he
admitted to the strong Kantian influence on his 1847 Erhaltung.23 Two years before his
death he said that 'physiological investigations of the sense organs and of their activities
have at last produced results which agree in essential points ... with Kant '.24 Helmholtz had
consciously tried to capture in physiological events that which was valid in Kant's notions
of a priori forms imposed upon experience by the cognitive constitution.
Leibniz had long before suggested the principle of sufficient reason as a principle of
selection. Out of the infinitude of logical possibilities God selects only those that will make
for an orderly world. Leibniz characterized the world of mere possibility (which is prior
to the selection process) as one of randomness; sufficient reason brings organization.
Helmholtz's sensory physiology achieved much the same result. Those sensory events that
occur randomly are forgotten, those that symbolize order remain in memory to become the
basis for the unconscious inference. We begin with the randomly mechanistic and end with
organized form.
For Muller matter in motion without more could not explain life forms. For Helmholtz
it could not without more explain the world of our experience. For du Bois-Reymond we
have no license to entertain any other principle than matter in motion. He then gained fame
by denying the possibility of ever explaining organization.
When he was twenty-four du Bois-Reymond wrote to a friend that 'Brucke and I have
sworn to advance the truth that no other force is acting in the organism than the merely
physical-chemical.'25 He had not changed his mind in 1848 when he brought out his
Investigations of Animal Electricity and devoted the introduction to an attack on vitalism.
Nor had he changed his mind twenty-four years later when he announced that physiology
consists in the 'analysis of the processes of nature into the mechanics of the atom '.26 But
his was a dogmatism rooted in humility. Ever hostile towards Kant he refused always the
use of the term 'things in themselves' preferring instead 'things as they are'. But it came
out the same: things as they are are unknowable. Du Bois-Reymond was a Kantian despite
himself.
And he was a hesitant mechanist at best. In his 1848 introduction he wrote that 'matter'
and 'force' are abstractions. It is absurd,
he
said, to think of force as pushing matter into
motion, 'matter is not a wagon with force as horses .... '27 Du Bois-Reymond believed that
scientists, as such, are limited to dealing with matter in motion. Scientists can aspire only
to the 'astronomical knowledge' he ascribed to the Laplacian Geist. The fact that such
knowledge is forever beyond our grasp was not the source of du Bois-Reymond's humility
23 Helmholtz, op. cit. (16), p. 49. 24 Helmholtz, op. cit. (22), p. 495.
25 Quoted in Jones, op. cit. (2), p. 45. 26 du Bois-Reymond, op. cit. (11), p. 55.
27 du Bois-Reymond, op. cit. (12), p. xliii.
before nature. In his famous 1872 'On the Limits of the Knowledge of Nature' he shocked
the scientific world by denying the Laplacian Geist access to things as they are.28
Du Bois-Reymond contended that so long as science is satisfied with prediction the
fiction of matter in motion is a supremely workable one. In so far as we insist upon
questioning our basic premises we fall foul of logic. For instance, following Helmholtz and
Kant we must adopt the central forces theory of matter (there exist forces of attraction and
repulsion between material points), but logic baulks at the notion of action at a distance.
Yet unless we adopt the central forces theory we have no explanation for the atom's
impenetrability nor of the fact that it has effects.29
Thus, as du Bois-Reymond believed, the Laplacian world differential equation requires
that we adopt an incomprehensible fiction. What hope is there in our crossing the divide
separating us from 'things as they are'? None, he answered. 'Ignorabimus' was his
plaintive
cry.
To make matters even worse, du Bois-Reymond argued that neither we nor the
Laplacian Geist are in the position of ever solving the problem of consciousness.
'Astronomical knowledge', which he limited to the fiction of matter in motion, will some
day describe the brain. But the lesson of the Erhaltung is that motion can cause only
motion, that mechanical cause is limited to mechanical effect. If, he said, we follow Leibniz
and believe we are dealing with two substances - conscious mind and unconscious
matter - we have no explanation other than his miraculous one as to how the two find
themselves in harmony. Here again the Erhaltung sets absolute limits.30
From time to time du Bois-Reymond turned to Darwin in hopes of finding in natural
selection some surcease from nature's forbidding riddles. Along with Helmholtz and
Briicke, he had discovered Darwin's natural selection at an early date. By 1869 Helmholtz
was hailing Darwin as a major ally in the fight against vitalism: the 'transmission of
individual characteristics from parents to offspring' as evidenced in animal breeding
revealed to Helmholtz a law of nature according to which 'adaptation in the structure of
organisms' takes place 'blindly' without the intervention of intelligence.31
In 1883, calling Darwin the 'Copernicus of the organic world', du Bois-Reymond agreed
with his friend: because of Darwin we can now talk about the stages of organic evolution
in terms of 'moving matter' (bewegte Materie); natural selection gives us a new kind of
mechanics with which to deal with organic appropriateness.32 But du Bois-Reymond's deep
scepticism stepped in to weaken his confidence. Addressing the riddle of organic nature's
seeming pre-arranged harmony with the inorganic world and the inability of the Laplacian
' astronomical knowledge' to deal with that harmony, du Bois-Reymond turned to his own
hope that the theory of natural selection had introduced a 'new kind of mechanics' with
the power to settle the issue and suggested that we adopt the hope as a drowning man
might grab a plank.33
But du Bois-Reymond saw the possibility of even further uses for natural selection. In
28 du Bois-Reymond,
op.
cit. (11), pp. 54-76.
29 Ibid., pp. 61-2. 30 Ibid., pp. 65-73.
31 Hermann von Helmholtz, 'The aim and progress of physical science' (1869), op. cit. (16), p. 237.
32 Emil du Bois-Reymond, 'Darwin und Copernicus: Ein Nachruf' (1883), op. cit. (11), p. 206.
33 Emil du Bois-Reymond, 'Die sieben Weltratsel' (1880), in ibid., p. 169.
a talk of 1870 centred on Leibniz, he suggested that the apparent pre-established
mind-body harmony demonstrated by Helmholtz's work on sound might be explained by
natural selection in such a way as to establish common ground between what, following
Helmholtz, he was pleased to call the empiricists (time and space representations and the
categories of the understanding are acquired) and the nativists (for whom they were
'inborn'). Specifically, the ability through use of the unconscious inference to complete the
melodic effect of a musical composition where certain overtones are missing would be seen
as inborn but only latent in the nervous system until a certain maturation has taken place.34
Thus, by turning to Darwin, du Bois-Reymond was able, at least between bouts of
scepticism, to bring himself to adopt Helmholtz's means of carrying forward the
Leibniz-Kant tradition, the notion of the unconscious inference.
If it can be said that he and Helmholtz merely toyed with natural selection in their
ruminations about its relevance for their science it should not be thought that they did not
take Darwin seriously. Nor should the fact that they tended to take Darwin in a
Lamarckian way distract us. This was, after all, the way Darwin was taken by those who
followed in their footsteps, men like Sigmund Exner and Sigmund Freud.35 The difference
between the generation of Helmholtz and the generation of Exner and Freud in the way
they approached Darwin was not one of esteem but a reflection of the fact that the ideas
of Helmholtz's generation were formed before the 1859 publication of the Origin of
Species. Exner's and Freud's ideas were importantly formed by the notions set forth in that
book.
We have seen that du Bois-Reymond suggested natural selection as a way of mediating
between 'nativism' (the Kant tradition) and empiricism. His lifelong friend Ernest Wilhelm
von Brucke took up the task of making that mediation effective.
2
Brucke passed most of his professional life at the University of Vienna, a significant part
of it devoted to exploring what he called the Young-Helmholtz theory of colour and what
he considered its consequences for the science of physiology.
He described the Young-Helmholtz theory of colour in the following way. Until the
turn-of-the-century advent of Thomas Young's theory it was generally believed both that
the nuances of colour are caused by interference between rays of three fundamental colours
and that the eye has receptors for every nuance between red and violet. Young argued that,
on the contrary, the eye has receptors that show three colour qualities only: red, green and
violet. He held that the mixing of colours is done physiologically. If, for example, the left
eye is exposed to red and the right to green the person will 'see' gold. This fact can not
be explained by the interference theory because no interference has occurred, nor have any
34 du Bois-Reymond, op. cit. (11), pp. 40-2.
35 See Sulloway, op. cit. (1); Lucille Ritvo, 'Darwin as the source of Freud's neo-Lamarckianism', Journal of
the American Psychoanalytic Association, (1965), 13, pp. 499-517 and 'The impact of Darwin on Freud',
Psychoanalytic Quarterly, (1973), 43, pp. 177-92, for assessments of the importance and nature of Darwin's
influence on Freud, especially as it came to him through his friend Wilhelm Fliess and his professor of biology,
Carl Claus.
'gold receptors' been involved. The Young-Helmholtz theory,36 at least as Brucke
interpreted it, held that the red rays excited red and green receptors in the left eye rendering
a gold dominated by red, that the green rays excited green and red receptors in the right eye
rendering a gold dominated by green, so that the brain's unconscious processes pulled the
alike from each side, yielding pure gold.37
Brucke considered this pure gold a deception. He had spent hours in his laboratory
working on the illusions of the senses, asking himself, for example, why parallel lines at
times appear to diverge and why at times lines of equal length seem unequal.38 He learned
to describe these sensory deceptions as unconscious processes, in fact the unconscious
inferences of Helmholtz. But Brucke carried this line of reasoning much further than did
his friend. In Brucke's hands the perception of colour and sound turned out to be the results
of the same processes that generated the illusions he had discovered. In a sense they were
illusions also.
As with Helmholtz and du Bois-Reymond, Brucke's starting point was Muller's specific
nerve energies, somewhat altered. Defining sight as the 'coming to consciousness
[Zumbewusstsein]
of the condition of excitation of the
N[ervus] opticus',
he noted that
all optical nerve conditions of sensation, whether the pressure of one's finger on the sclera,
a sudden cough in the darkness, or perhaps an electrical shock delivered to the retina, come
to consciousness as light. He noted further that should the stimulus originate from the
'central organ' because of fever or mental illness the result is called an hallucination.
Brucke described experiments of his own and of Helmholtz wherein colours were made
to seem other than they were, and experiments in which the same degree of brightness was
at different times judged bright and dark. He pointed out deceptions involving judgments
of time and space and motion. In his hands the distinction between valid and invalid
perception dissolved. Valid or invalid, the experienced sensation was to be seen as a
construct of the cognitive constitution. 'The brain', he wrote in an anticipation of Gestalt
psychology, 'undertakes to complete the inadequacy of the immediate sense perception
39
Brucke appropriated Helmholtz's unconscious inference to explain his results. But he
broadened and also adulterated the theory. In Helmholtz's hands the unconscious inference
involved the projection of a very real lawlikeness. Brucke broadened it to the projection of
all the details of perception, for example to the perception of gold. Helmholtz's
unconscious inference turned on the logic that like effects imply like causes. Brucke altered
the logic to the identification and abstracting-out of alikeness; in short to the process of
generalization. Thus the 'N. opticus' separates out the gold response in the left eye of the
above example, adds that to the gold responses in the right eye. The gold alikeness
dominates and in so doing inhibits the red and the green, and because of the domination
and the inhibition the gold rises to consciousness.
36 Paul Sherman, Colour Vision in the Nineteenth Century: The Young-Helmholtz-Maxwell Theory, Bristol,
1981,
p.
90, holds that Helmholtz's rejection of the equivalence of mixing light with mixing colours was a
revolution in the area of colour theory on a par with the rejection of the fixed earth theory in astronomy. Sherman,
who points out that Helmholtz found five fundamental colours, does not discuss Helmholtz's physiological theory
regarding colour reception.
37 Ernst Brucke, Vorlesungen ueber Physiologie, Vol. II, Vienna, 1885, pp. 167-71.
38 Ibid., p. 156.
39 Ibid., pp. 155-6, 224. 'Das Gehirn ubernimmt es, das, was an dem unmittelbaren Sinneseindruck mangelhaft
ist, zu erganzen.'
Here, at least in rudimentary form, were the notions of inhibition and facilitation
working in harness to form at least a quasi-logical (and unconscious) inference.
We build our own worlds, but we do it unconsciously: 'We draw unconscious inferences
from all our possible impressions and the whole world of our representations organizes
itself out of such inferences.'40 And as Brucke drew sensory impressions into the domain
of the unconscious inference he blurred the distinction Helmholtz had made between the
(private) experience of substantiality and the (public) experience of lawlikeness in the form
of harmony and wholeness.
Helmholtz had transformed Kant's category of causality from a transcendental form of
the understanding into a physiological process by which the world's real lawlikeness
reveals itself through the unconscious inference. In Brucke's hands the unconscious
inference became a series of self-deceptions that together form the totality of an
individual's experience and that at the same time lost the ingredient of necessity (necessary
cause) which to Kant and Helmholtz had made for trans-subjective or public experience.
It was left to Sigmund Exner to attempt to rescue experience from the idiosyncratic and
get it safely back into the public domain. How is it that two people share the same
experience of a thing in roughly the same way? We are brought back to the problem
Leibniz tried to solve with his notion of pre-established harmony. Exner turned to Darwin.
In 1891 Sigmund Exner von Ewarten (1846-1926) succeeded Ernst Brucke as the
University of Vienna's professor of physiology, the station in life that represented Sigmund
Freud's loftiest dreams. Exner had risen under Brucke's sheltering wing. Brucke sent him
as an undergraduate to study under Helmholtz. After graduation Brucke made him a
lecturer and an assistant in his laboratory. Exner followed Brucke (and Helmholtz) in
making the physiology of the senses his specialty. In quick succession he wrote treatises on
the regeneration of the retina, the effects of excitation on the optic nerves, the influence of
fatigue on the retina, and finally in 1891 a study of faceted eyes. Meanwhile he became a
master of the subject of cerebral localization, an area opened in 1869 by Hitzig and Fritsch
in Berlin. In 1879 he wrote a classic chapter on the subject of Ludimar Hermann's
Handbuch der Physiologie, and followed in 1891 with a treatise, Untersuchungen ueber die
Localisation der Functionen in der Grosshirnrinde des Menschen. This interest and
expertise brought him into the sphere of the University's world-renowned psychiatrist and
brain-anatomist Theodor Meynert. In attaching himself to Brucke and Meynert he made
the same career choices as Freud. Besides working side by side with Exner in Bruicke's
laboratory, Freud took three university courses from Exner.
In 1894 Exner published his major theoretical work, Outline to a Physiological
Explanation of Psychical Phenomena. A year later Freud wrote but did not publish his
'Project for a Scientific Psychology'. Exner's work has been forgotten by history; Freud's
has become famous. Both works set out to do the same thing, and it has not gone unnoticed
that the two share many assumptions and many conclusions.4'
In effect Exner's Outline was an attempt to complete Brucke's work on the physiology
of the senses. He built on Muller's specific nerve energy theory and on Helmholtz's
40 Ibid., p. 226. 'Wir gehen eben unbewusste Schlusse aus allen Sinneseindrucken, aus welchen sie gezogen
werden konnen, and die ganz Welt unserer Vorstellungen setz sich aus solchen Schlussen zusammen.'
41 Amacher, op. cit. (2).
unconscious inference theory, both as modified by Brucke. And he used Darwin to solve
the problem we have seen set forth by du Bois-Reymond, that of pre-established harmony.
In his notion of primary and secondary sensations Exner thought he had discovered the
key to the workings of the unconscious inference. As he described it, the primary sensation
is the sensation while it is still unconscious. The sensory nerve, he said, ends in a
subcortical ganglion; it is there, at a point short of the 'organ of consciousness', that the
primary sensation finds its unconscious expression. The unconscious process that generates
the experienced (or 'secondary') sensation takes place between the subcortical centre and
that organ of consciousness, the cortex.
Exner took his secondary sensation to be an unconscious inference, but followed Brucke
in his description of the logic involved. In the unconscious inference the alike aspects of the
primary sensations are recognized and made manifest as secondary sensations. This is done
by the physiological processes of facilitation of the alike and inhibition of the disparate.
The facilitation follows from the addition of the alike excitations. The inhibition is then
the negative of that same process. Exner called the primary sensations premises of the
logical inferences. He called this process analytic logic, a logic in which the conclusion is
embodied in the premise.42
Exner's description of the unconscious inference of space followed Brucke's and left no
doubt that it was to be considered a learned response. Brucke found from stereoscopic
evidence that under normal conditions each eye records a flat image. Here the process of
abstracting out alikeness would not account for the experience of depth and distance we
have when both eyes are trained on an object, so Brucke, following Helmholtz, turned for
help to the shifting tensions of the eye muscles.43 In so doing both men skated on thin ice
over empiricist waters. But the long arm of Kant reached out across the years and pulled
their disciple Exner back to safety. The unconscious inference is learned, but he found the
tendency to make that inference to be innate. It is innate because it is a transmitted
characteristic acquired in the struggle for existence. Perhaps unwittingly, Exner grabbed
the plank du Bois-Reymond said might save a drowning man.
As two instances of the working of the transmission of acquired characteristics Exner
pointed to the disposition to form connections between certain ideas and certain feelings.
Fear of wild animals was an example he liked. He pointed also to the disposition to infer
a relation of necessity between cause and effect (particularly when wild animals are about)
or, as he put it, the 'firmness' (Festigkeit) of the association between change and changer.
That firmness, he argued, can not have been grounded in the experience of the individual.44
Referring to that which has been found to be useful in the struggle for existence he said:
I see no obstacle against the assumption that the association between the sensation of change and
its cause rests on essentially the same conditions. It is thus understandable that the described
relationships of cortical paths in the animal kingdom which have proven useful going back to the
struggle for existence pass over into inherited cortical nervous system structure.45
42 Sigmund Exner, Entwurf zu einer physiologischen Erklarung der psychischen Erscheinungen, Vienna, 1894,
p. 322.
43 Brucke, op. cit. (37),
pp.
225-6. 44 Exner, op. cit. (42), pp. 334-5, 367.
45 Ibid., p. 368. 'Ich sehe kein Hinherniss fur die Annahme, das auch beim Menschen die Association swischen
der Empfindung der Veranderung und deren Ursache auf wissentlich denzelben Verhaltnissen beruht: es wird so
erklarlich, dass die geschilderten Verwandtschaften der Rinderbahnen, da sie bis in das Thierreich zurriickgreifen,
sich auch im Kampfe ums Dassien stets als nutzlich erwiesen haben...'
Thus, he said, 'the law of causality as an a priori law of thought' is a probable fact of
our cognitive constitution, not as an impulsion to an association but as an 'inborn
inclination
46
Thus was Darwin used in the effort to save Kant for physiology.47
3
To this point my aim has been to suggest that in German physiological thought the Kantian
tradition was made to survive with the help of what was considered to be Darwin's theory
of evolution. It remains to show that the Kantian tradition in its turn shaped Darwinian
evolution as it was received by German physiology and to indicate where this process may
have influenced Sigmund Freud.
Kant held that each person's experience is structured by his cognitive constitution. He
held that the cognitive constitution imposes the intuitions of time and space and the
categories of the understanding, most centrally necessary cause, to make experience
possible. Natural selection imposed something like the following difficulty for Kant's
successors: if the world as we experience it is shaped by the cognitive constitution is it this
experienced world that is the selecting agent ? This is the issue of conflation raised in its
biological form. Is the lawlikeness envisioned by evolutionary theory the same as that
imposed by the cognitive constitution to make experience possible? A second strand of the
Kantian tradition, originating with Arthur Schopenhauer, supplied the answer.
In On the Fourfold Roots of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (1813), and again in The
World as Will and Idea (1819), Schopenhauer argued that Kant's transcendental category
of necessary cause, placed where it belongs in the sensibility, embodies the principle of
sufficient reason..48 Leibniz believed the hand of God guided by the principle of sufficient
reason was the selecting agency. Pre-established harmony kept the individual's
representations in correspondence with the external events thus selected. Kant's subsequent
location of sufficient reason in the transcendental category of necessary cause again raised
the problem that du Bois-Reymond called the miracle of pre-established harmony but
which is better defined as the question of conflation: is transcendental lawlikeness
conflated with the lawlikeness science presupposes in nature
?49
Schopenhauer restructured
46 Ibid., p. 370.
47 Ibid., p. 347; he cited Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and Theodor Ziegler.
48 For Leibniz's use of the principle of sufficient reason see C. D. Broad, Leibniz: An Introduction (ed. C.
Lewy), London, 1975, pp. 10-12. Broad quoted Leibniz on his principle as 'Nothing happens without it being
possible to have a reason why it happened as it did and not in another way.' For Leibniz's use of the principle
as the agent of selection, pp. 31-5, though this is not the point Broad was trying to make. For Schopenhauer's
use of the principle see his On the Fourfold Roots of the Principle of
Sufficient
Reason (tr. E. F. J. Payne), LaSalle,
Ill.: [1813, 2nd rev. edn 1847], 1974. Though Schopenhauer gave Leibniz little credit for the development of the
principle, his definition was the same: 'Nothing is without a ground or reason why it is' (p. 6). According to
Schopenhauer (pp. 30-45) the first great advance in understanding the principle was taken by Kant in his Uber
eine Entdeckung, nach der alle neue Kritik der reinen Vernuft durch eine altere entberlich gemacht werden soll
(1790), when he differentiated between the principle as used in formal logic as the necessity of having sufficient
ground for a conclusion and its use as necessary cause.
49 For the question of conflation, see in general P. M. Heimann, 'Helmholtz and Kant: The Metaphysical
Foundations of Ueber die Erhaltung der Kraft', Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, (1974), 5, pp. 221-3,
and for the question whether Kant himself conflated the order that we suppose to exist in nature with that
imposed by our cognitive constitution see the debate between Gerd Buchdahl ('The Conception of Lawlikeness
2 BHS 24
the situation by holding that the cognitive apparatus (operating according to transcendental
forms and categories of the sensibility) translates the Will's blind strivings into the several
levels of organization, from the relatively low level of organization of matter to the higher
levels of organic forms.
In his Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1786), Kant introduced his central
forces theory that Schopenhauer was to adopt: a central force of attraction acting in a
straight line between two points of matter holds them together (otherwise all material
points would be randomly distributed throughout the universe); but to keep all points of
matter from being drawn together into a single point an opposing force of repulsion (also
acting in a straight line between points) is to be presumed. Repulsion accounts for the
extension and impenetrability of matter. Schopenhauer argued that central forces
constitute a first step in the Will's 'blind striving'."5 Though Kant was furnishing grounds
for the apparent stability of the material world Schopenhauer believed the central forces
to be entirely unstable: just as the Will is constantly struggling for organization through
self-objectification there is the equally powerful tendency towards disorganization.5'
The blind striving Schopenhauer envisioned was not unlike the unlimited variations
Darwin described as the stage preliminary to natural selection. Nature selects from the
near-infinity of possibilities the variations provide.52 Nor are the blind strivings and the
variations of those respective theories very different from the realm of infinite possibility
Leibniz described as the range of potential events from which the divine selects out worldly
order. In fact, Leibniz's principle of sufficient reason had approximately the same selecting
function as Darwin's principle of natural selection. In Schopenhauer's hands sufficient
reason provided the logic by which the Will is objectified. The Will's blind strivings are
outside human experience. They become manifest in objective form only because the
cognitive constitution imposes time, space, and necessary cause; that is, organization.
These a priori forms and categories taken together can be described as sufficient reason
because their objects are necessarily what they are. No other objects are thinkable, for the
reason that the existent objects are the objects of thought.
Schopenhauer held that the Will (the thing in itself) finds various levels of objectification,
from the lowest (e.g. chemical and physical laws and forces) to higher (e.g. life forces and
laws). These several levels are so to speak in perpetual struggle with each other, the higher
expending its energies battling the lower only, finally, to succumb to the lower and fall to
it in death:
The permanent matter must constantly change its form; for under the guidance of causality,
mechanical, physical, chemical, and organic phenomena, eagerly striving to appear, wrest the
matter from each other, and each desires to reveal its own idea.53
in Kant's Philosophy of Science', Synthese, (1971), 23, pp. 24-6, and 'The Kantian "Dynamic of Reason," with
Special Reference to the Place of Causality in Kant's System', Kant Studies Today (ed. Lewis Beck), LaSalle, Ill.,
1969, p. 355) and P. F. Strawson, The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, London,
1966.
50 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, Vol. I (tr. R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp), London, 1883,
p. 195. 51 Ibid., kpp. 190-2.
52 Ernst Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought, Cambridge, Mass., 1982, pp. 681ff.
53 Schopenhauer, op. cit. (50), p. 191.
Thus, nature is in continuous strife, with every form of life and each level of organization
preying on the others.54 We might say, in anticipation, that in Schopenhauer's thought
nature is in pursuit of its own goals.
Schopenhauer's notion of struggle did not, however, lead him beyond the idea of
struggle for existence to that of the evolution of species. He described species as the
objectified forms through which the Will advances on its way towards self-knowledge.
Individuals come into existence and die, leaving their corpses behind in lower levels of
organization, but species are eternal: the individual struggles that they may remain that
way.55
On its positive side, as Schopenhauer defined it, the struggle for existence is a struggle
to preserve the species; on its negative side it is a battle against decay. This definition
became important to German physiology when the pathological anatomist Carl Rokitansky
succumbed to Schopenhauer's philosophy.
Rokitansky (1804-79),56 founder of the Second Vienna Medical School, president of
Vienna's Academy of Sciences (1869-78), and the first freely elected president of the
University of Vienna (1852-53), developed Schopenhauer's philosophy and its implications
in talks in 1867 and 1869 to the Academy of Sciences. In the first, 'The Independent Value
of Knowledge', he suggested that had Kant followed through with his own arguments he
would have arrived at Schopenhauer's epistemology. Our experience, he said, is the
consequence of the projection of subjective representations, '... die Verlegung der Dinge in
der Raum, demgemass wir sie ausser Dinge vorstellen'.
57
In his 1869 'Solidarity of All Animal Life' Rokitansky tackled the struggle for existence
and developed a Kant-Schopenhauer stand-in for social Darwinism. He presented his
notion of 'protoplasmic hunger' as the physiological embodiment of Schopenhauer's
notion of the struggle between different stages of the will. Rokitansky found the tendency
in all 'organized matter' (organic) to decay back into the unorganized. The will to resist
decay is expressed as hunger, 'protoplasmic hunger'. The actual struggle against decay is
expressed as the aggression that is at the core of the struggle for existence. All animal
activity is aggression because it is rooted in resistance to decay.58
The next logical step, that of putting Rokitansky's two notions together to make the
projection of Kant's transcendental forms an act of aggression in the struggle for existence
was undertaken by Rokitansky's disciple Theodor Meynert (1833-92). Following
Meynert's 1865 Structure and Function of the Brain and Spinal Cord with Regard to
Diseases of these Organs, Rokitansky took the young brain-anatomist under his wing to
conduct him up the ladder of success in Viennese psychiatry. Meynert reciprocated
handsomely by calling his mentor a 'colossus' of medicine and 'giant of science'59 and by
adopting his ideas as the foundations of his own work.
54 Ibid., pp. 191-2. 55 Ibid., p. 356.
56 See, Erma Lesky, The Vienna Medical School of the 19th Century (tr. L. Williams and I. S. Levij),
Baltimore, 1956,
p.
115; W. Leibbrand, 'K.v.R. und Schopenhauer', Schopenhauer-Jahrb. (1953, 1954), 35, pp.
75ff.
57 Carl Rokitansky, 'Der selbstandige Werth des Wissens', Vienna, 1867, p. 22.
58 Carl Rokitansky, 'Die solidaritat alles Thierlebens', Vienna, 1869, pp. 4, 6, 8.
59 Theodor Meynert, 'Carl Rokitansky' (1878), Sammiung von popular-wissenschaften Vortragen, Vienna,
1892, p. 71.
2-2
Meynert's first principle was that cognition is aggression. He portrayed the cognitive
apparatus in that light: the cortical mantle was a great 'mollusc' that sends its sensory
nerves out as feelers (Fulfaden) and its motor nerves as tentacles (Fangarmen) to seize its
prey, the sensory impressions from the outside world.60 Once the prey or 'booty' is 'seized'
(bemachtigt) and 'devoured' (verschlingt) it is dealt with in the way described by
Helmholtz, that is by way of the unconscious inference and projection of representations
structured by time, space, and causal relations.6'
Meynert also built on Rokitansky in an effort to develop a sort of social Darwinism
without Darwin. Rokitansky had not turned to evolutionary theory in his talks; Meynert
did but in a way that made Darwin irrelevant. In his 1888 lecture on 'Brain and
Civilization' he said that Darwin teaches that the struggle for existence arises unavoidably
out of the inclination of all organisms to multiply.62 But this insight into evolutionary
theory played no part in the subsequent discussion of the struggle for existence and its
putative relation to civilization. Darwin used the term struggle in an extremely loose, even
metaphorical sense. Locusts 'struggle' against cattle by eating their grass.63 The notion
that aggression is the dynamic behind evolution was not Darwin's.
Rokitansky had held that it is the repression of aggression that makes civilization
possible. But beyond that, in 'The Solidarity of All Animal Life' he transformed group
aggression against the world beyond the group into a social instinct. Meynert adopted this
idea and used it to build a notion that anticipated Freud's idea of sublimation. Meynert
pictured the cortex as a 'colony' or even a 'republic of living cells' cooperating together
in their aggressions on the outside world: 'The nerve fibres, which are excited in this sense
from the cortex ... are comparable to tentacles which the brain cells send out as if in
aggression against the outside world. '64 Thus aggression becomes the driving dynamic in
the formation of civilization, the highest form of organization.
This sort of thinking fed back into Meynert's description of the cognitive structure. He
depicted what might be called a hunger-projection-incorporation brain model. All people
except the retarded and the insane, Meynert said, have two selves or 'I's'. One I intends
only the maximization of sensual pleasure. This I is narrow and animal and resides in the
subcortical brain centres. The other I, the 'secondary I', is expansive and 'associates itself
with the idea of mutuality, reciprocity, brotherhood. Just as we strive to nourish the body,
so there lies in the secondary I a lasting tendency to grow. It annexes, holds fast, defends
as its possession everything that is part of the feeling of aggression that we also can name
the feeling of luck'65
60 Theodor Meynert, 'Das Zusammenwirken der Gehirntheile' (1890), ibid., p. 204; Psychiatry: A Clinical
Treatise on Diseases of the Fore-Brain (tr. B. Sachs), New York, 1885, p. 189.
61 Theodor Meynert, 'Die Bedeutung des Gehirnes fur das Vorstellungsleben' (1868), op. cit. (59), p. 12;
'Sur Mechanik des Gehirnbaues', (1972), ibid., pp. 27-8; 'Des Zusammenwirken der Gehirntheile', (1890), ibid.,
p. 216.
62 Theodor Meynert, 'Gehirn und Gesittung' (1888), ibid., p. 141.
63 Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species: a Facsimile of the First Edition, New York, 1967, pp. 60ff.
64 Theodor Meynert, 'Ueber die Gefuhle' (1880), op. cit. (59), pp. 45-6. 'Die Nervenfasern, welche in diesem
Sinne von der Hirnrinde erregt werden, lassen sich nicht gut mit dem Bilde der Strahlungen vereinigen, sondern
sind Fangarmen vergleichbar, welch die Hirnzellen gleichsam zur Aggression gegen die Aussenwelt absenden.'
65 Meynert, op. cit. (62), p. 171. 'associirt sich mit der Idee des Mutualismus, der Wechselseitigkeit, der
Bruderlichkeit. So wie wir den Korper zur ernahren streben, so liegt auch im secundaren Ich ein fortwahrende
Meynert called man's hemispheres the 'mechanisms of civilization'. They are, he said,
the 'place of formation of mutuality'.66 Thus his argument was that the struggle for
existence renders ever higher forms of organization, completing itself in society (social
organization); it does this under compulsion of the force of aggression operating through
the cognitive processes. As the individual loses his individuality (primary I) in the group
he incorporates the group in his higher self (secondary I).
We find here an evolutionary theory of sorts. It owed little to Darwin, much to
Schopenhauer.
It was Sigmund Exner in an 1892 essay on 'Morality as a Weapon in the Struggle for
Existence' (later incorporated into his Entwurf as its culminating section) who tried to
weave the Schopenhauer-Rokitansky-Meynert tradition together with his understanding
of Darwin to produce a German language social Darwinism. From the former side he took
the notion of innate aggression as expression of Kant's thing-in-itself. From Helmholtz,
Briicke, and his own work on cognition, he drew on the idea of the unconscious inference.
From his understanding of Darwin (a neo-Lamarckian approach shared by his colleagues
and masters) he took the theory of the transmission of acquired characteristics. The result
was to put the finishing touches to the hunger-projection-incorporation theory.
Quoting Meynert to the effect that the 'pleasurable coloured affect is associated with
aggressiveness, the unpleasurable with defensiveness',67 adding his own opinion that the
'pleasure centre' is a motor attack centre, the 'unpleasure centre' a motor defence centre
and that the sensation of pleasure appears as the impulse to 'seize' (ergreifen), to 'capture'
(festzuhalten) and take possession,68 Exner proved himself ready to accept his friend's
picture of aggression as the expansive impulse upon which mutuality is built, defensiveness
as being individualistic and anti-social.
But, Exner explained, to become these things those inclinations to seize, capture and take
possession must be associated with particular representations (Vorstellungen). So Exner
turned to the transmission of acquired characteristics to support an assertion that we have
inborn faculties (Fdhigkeiten) that integrate particular representations (e.g. heroic actions)
with particular 'intense sensations' (e.g. pride). And although these inborn faculties were
to be seen as mere abilities or perhaps tendencies which must be reinforced and made
specific by education, still in his mind they were powerful. They were powerful to the
extent of deserving the term 'social instincts', or even 'fixed ideas': 'The concepts of good
and bad', he wrote, 'of virtue and vice rest on sensations belonging to human social
instincts
69
Exner found he had discovered a potent brew in the combined notions of transmitted
acquired characteristics and unconscious inferences. He turned to Gustav Theodor Fechner
to find the right language: thoughts (Gedanken) for which one can give no account,
Wachstumtendenz, Alles, was sich unter Gefuhlen der Aggression, die wir auch Glicksgefuhle nennen konnen,
ihm angliedert, halt es fest, vertheidigt seinen Besitz...'
66 Ibid., p. 178.
67 Sigmund Exner, 'Die Moral as Waffe in Kampf ums Dasien,' Vienna, 1892, p. 248. "' Der lustvoll gefarbte
Affect ist mit Ausgriffsbewegungen, der unlustvolle mit Abwehrbewegungen associirt", sagt Meynert.'
68 Exner, op. cit. (42), pp. 333, 205.
69 Exner, op. cit. (67), p. 252.
thoughts with no conscious ground, thoughts that 'invade'
(einfallt)
and 'seize'
(anwandeln). 70
This group of fixed ideas, this voice of the race is, he held, cherished in our breasts as
that which can be summed up in the word 'duty'. And:
Man must always answer Kant's 'from where do you [duty] come?' through that Fechnerian
Spirit that in him thinks 'from another centre than his own,' i.e., never on the basis of the
experience of the person, always on the basis of the experience of the whole.71
Exner's formulation was this: particular moral commandments are inculcated by
education, but the general injunction 'thou shalt' is a natural law of our being as social
creatures. In so asserting he was but restating in evolutionary form the point Rokitansky
made in his 'Solidarity of All Animal Life'.
These considerations led Exner to articulate an ethic. The 'moral' is that which is useful
to society. He liked to illustrate his point with Sophocles' Oedipus Rex. Without
knowledge of what he was doing, said Exner, Oedipus killed his own father and 'married'
his own mother. The ancients knew that he was rightly punished. No matter that he did
not consciously sin; no matter that his motives were pure; he nevertheless acted against the
group interest. We moderns have lost that realization. In violation of nature's demands on
us we have begun to judge individuals on the basis of their private motives.72
Thus (to summarize) Exner's synthesis of the two Kantian strands elevated the
Schopenhauer-based hunger-projection-incorporation notion of cognitive processes (and
with it Meynert's aggressive mollusc brain) to the position of nature's instrument in the
achievement of ever-higher orders of organization. Exner epitomized his vision in the
statement that duty is a weapon
(Waffe)
in the struggle for existence and by reproducing
his essay on ethics as the final section of his treatise on the cognitive processes. Those
processes culminate in the ethics of duty because they act in the service of aggression, the
force that both preserves the species and drives nature on to higher stages of organization.
Perhaps most importantly, just as the notion of sufficient reason as a physical process
(necessary cause) enabled Helmholtz, via his notions of conflation, to visualize integration
of the cognitive processes into the laws of physics and chemistry and at the same time not
only to assert the comprehensibility of those laws but to hold that same comprehensibility
to be some sort of self-manifestation of lawlikeness, so Exner believed his version of
evolutionary theory enabled him not only to make ethics (as part of the cognitive process)
a law of nature but to make each of us one of nature's unwitting instruments in the 'pursuit
of its own goals'. In the pursuit of our 'duty' he said, quite cryptically, nature 'deceives'
us into acting to achieve its goals.73
70 Ibid.
71 Ibid., p. 253. 'die Pflicht. Die Frage Kant's "woher stammst Du?" wird der Mensch stets beantworten
mussen durch jene Fechner'schen Geister, die in ihm hineindenke, "von einem anderen Mittelpunkte aus als
seinem eigenen ", d.h. niemals auf Grund von Erfahrungen der Person, immer auf Grund von Erfahrungen der
Gesammtheit.'
72 Ibid., pp. 265ff; also, Exner, op. cit. (42), pp. 357ff.
73 Ibid., p. 335.
4
Exner's Entwurf appeared in 1894. In 1895 Sigmund Freud worked up his extended essay
on the same subject, the physiology of cognition, in what has become known in English as
the 'Project for a Scientific Psychology'. Important differences of approach distinguish the
two works. Freud's undergraduate rejection of Kantian epistemology74 accounts for some
of the differences. Again, Freud was coming at the physiology of cognition from the
direction of his clinical work in psychopathology and certain important discoveries he had
recorded in his (with Josef Breuer) Studies on Hysteria (1895). Finally, and perhaps as
important, in his 1891 On Aphasia Freud abandoned the Meynert mollusc brain model in
favour of one developed by the British neurologist, John Hughlings Jackson.7"
In On Aphasia Freud argued that recent histological evidence disproved Meynert's
contention that the cortex sends its nervous fibres outwards to all points on the periphery
and that consequently all sensory events go unmodified to the cortex. Freud argued also
that the Jackson 'integrative level' theory better explained the facts of word deafness.
Jackson's brain-model was built to the specifications of Herbert Spencer's theory that the
human nervous system has retained, in the form of lower integrative levels, 'primitive'
man's mental functioning. Accordingly the primitive lower levels continue to function
unconsciously even while, at least in the brains of advanced civilized man, the highest
('propositional') level is conscious and functioning.76
Jackson argued that the brain-damaged (and by extension, the mentally ill) function
normally but on a lower functional level. By adopting the Jackson model Freud was able
to hold that all sorts of things
-
the exclamations of the brain-damaged, the hallucinations
of the psychotic, the dreams of the normal
-
are not the disorganized confusion demanded
by the Meynert model77 but lawlike and thoroughly intelligible mentation operating on a
different level of analysis from that of waking consciousness. Thus his oft-repeated
assertion that every element of a dream is determined.78 Thus the possibility of analysing
dreams. So the Jackson model served Freud well in the 1895 Project when he turned the
discussion to 'Irma's Injection', the dream that convinced him that dreaming is wish-
fulfilment,79 and when he turned to writing the seminal Interpretation of Dreams (1900).
Did Freud thus forever discard the Meynert-Exner hunger-projection-incorporation
model? Arguably not. Peter Amacher, for one, has stressed the importance of Freud's
74 William McGrath, Freud's Discovery of Psychoanalysis, Ithica, New York, 1986, pp. 126-7.
75 See my 'Sigmund Freud, John Hughlings Jackson, and speech', Journal of the History of Ideas, (1983), 44,
pp. 151-8.
76 John Hughlings Jackson, 'On affections of speech for diseases of the brain' (1878-1880), Selected Writings
of John Hughlings Jackson, Vol. II, New York: 1958, pp. 155-204.
77 See Theodor Meynert's 'Uber der Wahn' (1885), op. cit. (60), 93-4, where he tells us that in madness
accident controls associations, and his Klinische Vorlesungen ueber Psychiatrie, Vienna, 1890, p. 11. 'Wenn die
Association intensive absinkt, wie in Wannsinnzustande mit Verworrenheit, die gleichsam ein Nachlass der
Associationsbande ist, so schildern Kranke ein Gefuhl des Auseinanderfliessen ihres Korpers'.
78 See, for example, Sigmund Freud, Interpretation of Dreams (1990), Vol. 5, The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (ed. James Strachey), London, 1953, p. 514.
79 Sigmund Freud, 'Project for a scientific psychology' (1895), The Origins of Psychoanalysis: Letters to
Wilheilm Fliess, Drafts and Notes, 1887-1902 (ed Marie Bonaparte, et al., tr. Eric Mosbacher and James
Strachey), London, 1954, pp. 400-4.
teachers. Frank Sulloway has demonstrated the inadequacy of Freud's
'evolutionary/
involutional model of the libido' (approximately equivalent to what I have been calling the
Jackson model of the brain) to deal with his developing theory of erotogenesis, for
example, the notion of 'aim-regression'."8 In so far as space allows, I will suggest that as
the Jackson model became inadequate to his theory of erotogenesis in general, and to his
instinct drive theory in particular,8' Freud fell back upon the model of his teachers even to
the point where he found use for Kantian epistemology.
A significant part of the Project that did not easily fit into the Jackson model was the
'primary process', the notion that the primary function of the nervous system is tension
reduction.82 Hunger, respiration and sex were given there as the sources of endogenous
tension. In the identification of tension reduction and pleasure we find Freud turning to
assumptions made by the Meynert-Exner model.
But the Project was silent on the notion of union between tension reduction (pleasure)
and aggression that Meynert adopted from Rokitansky, made central to his system, and
then passed along to Exner. Freud developed his thoughts on that union only later within
the context of his theory of erotogenesis, given form subsequent to the Project.
Sulloway traced Freud's ideas about erotogenesis back to their beginnings in letters of
December 1895 and November 1897. Full development awaited the much later (1905)
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.83
In Three Essays hunger became the model for the libido:
The fact of the existence of sexual needs in human beings and animals is expressed in biology by
the assumption of a 'sexual instinct', on the analogy of the instinct of nutrition, that is of hunger.
Everyday language possesses no counterpart to the word 'hunger', but science makes use of the
word 'libido' for that purpose.84
And again:
The normal sexual aim is regarded as being the union of the genitals in the act known as
copulation, which leads to a release of the sexual tension and a temporary extinction of the sexual
instinct
-
a satisfaction analogous to the sating of hunger.85
In 1915 Freud added to his Three Essays the statement that the infant's satisfaction at the
mother's breast is a 'prototype of the expression of sexual satisfaction in later life '.86
As he got into the question of sadism in that work he made a close link between sexual
gratification and aggressiveness. Sadism, he said, arises 'from the instinct for mastery', and
the 'sexuality of most male human beings contains an element of aggressiveness
- a desire
to subjugate..
' 87
The element of 'incorporation' was also very much present in Three Essays. Freud
described the oral stage of erotogenesis as 'cannibalistic'. The sexual activity at that stage
80 Sulloway, op. cit. (1), pp. 198-200, 398, 401ff.
81 John Chynoweth Burnham 'The medical origins and cultural use of Freud's instinctual drive theory',
Psychoanalytical Quarterly, (1924), 43, pp. 193-217.
82 See Amacher, op. cit. (2), pp. 55-72, according to whom Meynert and Exner were the sources for this
notion.
83 Sulloway, op. cit. (1), pp. 197-200.
84 Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), Vol. 7, S.E., p. 135.
85 Ibid., p. 149. 86 Ibid., p. 182. 87 Ibid., pp. 153-7.
is not yet separated from the ingestion of food, 'the sexual aim consists in the
incorporation of the object...'. He made the oral stage incorporation the 'prototype' of
the process of 'identification ',88 the process by which the ego ideal (later the 'super ego')
is developed, or, in short, the process by which we are socialized.
Arguably the development of erotogenic theory and the pleasure-aggression nexus as we
see them in Three Essays exerted a steady if gradual tug away from the Jackson model
towards the Meynert-Exner hunger-projection-incorporation framework. An equally
gradual and very tentative flirtation with Kantian epistemology can be detected as part of
that movement, in so far as Kant's explanations could be made compatible with theories
of
projection.
There was nothing of Kant in the 'Project'. Exner's use of the Helmholtzian unconscious
inference involved the coming into consciousness of 'secondary sensations' via the logical
process of abstraction and generalization (summation of the excitations of like sensory
impressions) and the psychological process of projection. The cognitive apparatus
constructs the object that it experiences in the Kantian manner. Freud made use of Exner's
facilitations and inhibitions and excitation summations in the 'Project', but he did not
permit these things, in themselves, to define his objects, much less bring them into
consciousness. In the tradition of naive realism he held the object to be directly and
immediately perceived. Something directly perceived is already in waking consciousness,
otherwise to become conscious it needs to be associated with a word: 'One shuts one's eyes
and hallucinates; one opens them and thinks in words.'89
It was not until he turned to the discussion of paranoia in his 1911 commentary on the
Schreber case90 that Freud made any significant use of the concept of projection.91 And like
most notions he touched it came from his pen in radically altered form. Redefinition of the
Kantian transcendental processes into the concepts of psychology and physiology had
almost inevitably led to the proposition that subjective processes are projected outwardly
as the object is formed in experience. Projection was an unstated part of Helmholtz's
concept of the unconscious inference. Rokitansky carried it a step along in his assertion
that the imposition of the Kantian forms and categories involves the projection also of
one's personality. Rokitansky was very close to holding that the act of cognition is
anthropomorphic: we project the 'quality, form, size and power' of the perceived world.92
Exner, building on Brucke, added the point that there is a basic self-deception involved in
perceiving colour, sound, taste and form in a universe composed of atomic events.
Projection became nature's way of deceiving us into doing its work of organization.
The projection Freud made famous in the Schreber case consisted in transposing one's
own disguised emotions onto the object in order to avoid feeling the guilt involved in
having those particular emotions. Self-deception had here become an ego defence
mechanism on the order of, for example, the obsession. One disguises one's homosexual
88 Ibid., p. 198.
89 Freud, op. cit. (78),
p.
339.
90 Sigmund Freud, 'Psycho-analytic notes on an autobiographical account of a case of paranoia (Dementia
paranoidas)'; (1911), Vol. 12, S.E., pp. 3-82.
91 However, note Freud's earlier mentions of 'projection' to Fliess, 'Draft H', 24 January 1895, and 'Draft
K', 1 January 1896, op. cit. (78), pp. 111-12, 114-15, 152-3.
92 Rokitansky, op. cit. (57), p. 9.
love in the following manner: 'I do not love him - I hate him because he persecutes me.'
The hate disguises the love but even that can not be permitted into consciousness, so it is
externalized into the environment as the other's hatred and persecution of me.93 Two years
later, in the 1913 Totem and Taboo Freud radically generalized the notion of projection.
He made it the explanation of primitive 'animism', which he took to be pre-literate man's
Weltanschauung. As such it was to be considered a key to what he and his contemporaries
called the 'primitive mind '.94 Taken within the context of the Jacksonian model,
projection might be seen as important to the functioning of the lower integrative level, the
level of dreams. And it began to emerge in Freud's mind, by extension, as a key to the
operation of the neuroses. He began, also, to argue that its prototype is the 'secondary
revision' by which we try to make waking sense out of our dreams.95 I will return to this
shortly.
A second way Freud used projection in Totem and Taboo suggests that he was being
drawn, however hesitantly, into the Kantian epistemology of the Meynert-Exner model.
Projection, he said, is common in normal as well as pathological cognition. It is, he wrote:
not created for the purpose of defence; it also occurs where there is conflict. The projection
outwards of internal perceptions is a primitive mechanism, to which, for instance, our sense
perceptions are subject, and which therefore normally plays a very large part in determining the
form taken by our external world.96
Not in itself a repudiation of British empiricism, that statement does suggest a backing
away from the 'Project's' naive realism. But in the same passage Freud implied something
more:
Under conditions whose nature has not yet been sufficiently established, internal perceptions of
emotional and thought processes can be projected outward in the same way as sense perceptions;
they are employed for building up the external world.97
It may be that under certain circumstances we act like Kantians. We project more than
sensation, we project thought processes. Under what circumstances do we project thought
processes, and what is the nature of the processes we project?
In Totem and Taboo Freud held that before the language of abstract thought was
created men did not have the wherewithal to define their internal processes and isolate
them from the external world. Men were unable to distinguish those processes from
external events. Thus projection.98 The result was animism, the prototype of which is
secondary revision.
Freud dealt at length with secondary revision in the 1900 Interpretation of Dreams. He
described how our 'waking thinking' or 'normal thinking' approaches the content of
dreams with the demand that it be 'intelligible': 'It is in the nature of our waking thought
to establish order in material of that kind, to set up relations in it and to make it conform
to our expectations of an intelligible whole.' He added that like the dream itself the
secondary revision is in the service of the 'censor'.99 That is, it manifests our resistance to
93 Freud, op. cit. (90),
p.
63.
94 Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo (1913), Vol. 13, S.E., p. 64. 95 Ibid., p. 65.
96 Ibid., p. 64; Freud also mentioned this usage in the 1911 Schreber case, op. cit. (90), p. 66.
97 Freud, op. cit. (94), p. 64. 98 Ibid., p. 65.
99 Freud, op. cit. (78), p. 499.
the true meaning of the dream (to the wishes it is fulfilling). Thus our demand for
intelligibility (a demand emanating from the preconscious) results in even further self-
deception.
Implicit in the discussion of secondary revision is the assumption of an identity between
the demand for intelligibility and a need for self-deception: that is, intelligibility emerges
as an ego-defence. The assumption became explicit in Totem and Taboo. Primitive man,
unable to abstract and generalize, projects the primitive processes of his mind (processes
limited to the mechanisms - contiguity, simultaneity, etc. - of the association of ideas)
onto the external world. The result was a magical or animistic world view that externalizes
the Oedipal-derived guilt. The external world becomes thereby intelligible, but a wish-
fulfilling dream for all that.
Prior to Totem and Taboo Freud seldom relied on the notion of projection, least of all
in his theories of the neuroses. By the time of the 1920 Beyond the Pleasure Principle he had
changed his mind as to its importance. And the-more he changed his mind on projection
the more he turned to Kantian epistemology. 'Projection', he said in the 1920 work,
'play[s] such a large part in the causation of pathological processes'. He added that 'as a
result of certain psycho-analytic discoveries, we are today in a position to embark on a
discussion of the Kantian theorem that time and space are "necessary forms of
thought"'.'. He proceeded to hint (his term) at the possibility that time (and presumably
space) is derived from the 'method of working of the system Pcpt.-Cs' (the perceptual
apparatus) and that they are imposed upon the incoming stimuli as a shield.101 Presumably
the uncontrolled inrush of stimuli would be a disorganized and disorganizing chaos, a
notion not radically distinguishable from Schopenhauer's belief that the cognitive
apparatus imposes form on the uncontrolled energies that constitute reality.
In Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud had the defensive apparatus (the censor)
externalizing (projecting) an instinctual drive which then became part of the incoming
stimuli to be shielded against by the Kantian forms. He speculated that the skin serves as
a physical shield against incoming stimuli (e.g. light) which if not thus restrained would
register on the sensory nerves not as warmth but as pain. The instinctual drive that Freud
described as being externalized by the censor was the newly-conceptualized 'death
instinct'. Apparently (Freud is less than explicit on this) the energies of the death wish are
disorganizing ones, and the shielding done by the Kantian forms is in defence of
organization (the 'coherent
ego')."'
The death wish emerged in Freud's mind as the association between pleasure and
aggression broke down following his realization that in many cases of neurosis the
individual seeks to relive a painful experience ('repetition compulsion'). Freud thus
visualized an instinct prior to tension-reduction, this is the instinct to return to earlier
evolutionary stages:
we cannot escape a suspicion that we may have come upon the track of a universal attribute of
instincts and perhaps of organic life in general ... It seems, then, that an instinct is an urge inherent
in organic life to restore an earlier state of things which the living entity has been obliged to
abandon under the pressure of external disturbing forces...103
100 Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Vol 18, S.E., pp. 29, 28.
101 Ibid., p. 28. 102 Ibid., p. 29. 103 Ibid., p. 36.
In so saying, Freud cited both Ewald Hering (Professor of Physiology, University of Vienna,
1865-70) and Schopenhauer. He had been drawn back towards the Rokitansky-Meynert
hunger-projection-incorporation model. But he added his own unique twist, based on his
long-held belief that much about our cognitive functionings is explained when we view
them as ego defences. The point in Beyond the Pleasure Principle was that the death wish
is experienced as danger coming from the environment. Projection was made a defensive
operation: by projecting the death wish outward the Kantian forms can be used as shields.
The forms thus act in the service of -organization against the threat of disorganization, the
falling back to inorganic matter in death. We are thus able to say that the Kant-Darwin
synthesis developed within nineteenth-century German physiology did have a (somewhat
belated) influence upon one of the creators of the twentieth century, Sigmund Freud.

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