Cabanis

Cabanis, PIERRE JEAN GEORGES, a French physician and philosophical writer, born at Cosnac, Charente-Inférieure, in 1757. He commenced life as secretary to a Polish magnate at Warsaw, but soon returned to Paris to study medicine. At the outbreak of the Revolution he attached himself to the popular side; he furnished Mirabeau with material for his speeches on public education; and Mirabeau died in his arms. During the Terror he lived in retirement, and was afterwards a teacher in the medical school at Paris, a member of the Council of Five Hundred, then of the senate. He died near Meulan, May 5, 1808. His chief work is his once-famous Rapports du Physique et du Moral de l'Homme (1802). The book is clever, and its absolute sensationalism was so far before its time that its author might well have been suspected to be but burlesquing with grave irony the doctrines of his brother-materialists. The soul is not an entity, but merely a faculty; the brain a particular organ specially fitted to produce thought, as the stomach and the intestines perform the function of digestion. The conclusion is that the brain digests impressions and organically secretes thought.