ABSTRACT
The portion of biological philosophy is that which relates to the study of the affective and intellectual faculties, which leads political theorists over from individual physiology to social physics, as vegetative physiology does from the inorganic to the organic philosophy. The positive theory of the affective and intellectual functions is therefore settled, irreversibly, to be this: it consists in the experimental and rational study of the phenomena of interior sensibility proper to the cerebral ganglions, apart from all immediate external apparatus. Gall has fully and clearly exposed the powerlessness of metaphysical methods for the study of intellectual and moral phenomena; and in the present state of the human mind, all discussion on this subject is superfluous. As to the doctrine, the first glance shows a radical fault in it, common to all sects—a false estimate of the general relations between the affective and the intellectual faculties.
